The Awkward Pose

A few years ago William LeMessurier died.  That may not mean much to many, but he was a mighty structural engineer.  Among the construction world he was a magician; the man who developed the tuned mass damper that stopped
Boston’s John Hancock Tower from swaying so much its windows kept popping out, the genius who supported New York’s Citicorp Building on four legs, none located at a corner of the building.  To me, he was a teacher of renown.  He taught an advanced structural engineering course at MIT, the ultimate structural design course I attempted, during which I admitted the limits of my mathematical ability.  He also taught a watered down, but far more useful, class in structural design for architects, in which I learned everything I need to know to ask the right questions when the engineers start drifting into arcane lingo.

For years he lived at 157 Brattle Street in Cambridge, a forbidding dark brown heap of shingles and tiny paned windows hiding behind evergreen shrubs the size of elephants.  I never knew he lived there,
I never even noticed the house, until he died; his address was in the Obit and within a few months a for sale sign went up on the corner of Brattle and Appleton.

Brattle Street is Cambridge’s local Park Avenue, the toniest address in town.  It used to be called Tory Row, in reference to the many British loyalists who lived in the stately mansions along the street.  Some date back to the 1600’s.  George Washington used one abandoned by Tories as his headquarters during the siege of Boston, that same house later became the home of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and his family.

157 Brattle was built in 1897, the same year as my own house, but it has a different scale – eight bedrooms, ten fireplaces, a 35 foot long living room.  The estate sold the house for $3.6 million in 2008, at which time the new owners gutted it.  Gutting million dollar houses is a Brattle Street tradition.  The mansions change hands; the new owners retain the shell and transform the interior to their particular tastes.  In the case of 157 Brattle the transformation
was complete.  Out went the evergreens, the cupped shingles, the wobbly paned glass, in went a geothermal heating system, a new roof, new shingles, glistening glass, a new carriage house, granite and teak fence, etched house numbers, a fresh lawn and a seasonally spectacular landscape.  The new house is taupe instead of dark brown, in three subtle shades; the carved gable boards have
been sharpened, the immense Tudor front door refinished and shellacked to new life.  What had been a dark hole of spindly needles and shakes is now the showpiece of the street.  A more beautiful house would be tough to find.

People pause at 157 Brattle; it is not uncommon to see groups standing outside the low slung hundred thousand dollar fence pointing out features of particular interest.  The house is gorgeous yet accessible beyond compare, for the new owners did not hide their treasure behind tall walls or dense plantings, as many Brattle Street residents do, they opened their house and invited anyone walking along the street to enjoy.  For some time the buzz was that Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner live there, but alas they have renovated another equally impressive house in town, with a good deal more privacy in mind.  I do not know who the owners are – I have never seen them, even though I ride by the house almost every day and have seen the dining room, the upstairs gallery, and many other rooms that are open for the world to see.

The unique thing about 157 Brattle is how it displays the owner’s wealth without being ostentatious.  Many people in town talk about the house, yet never once have I heard a disparaging remark.  It is simply too elegant, too well done, too much a gift to the people to be considered crass.  In this period of the Occupy movement,
someone firmly entrenched in the 1% we are supposed to despise has charmed us with his good taste; we are putty in his hands.

The truth is that humans like wealth, even vicariously.  We like to envision ourselves sitting at that mahogany table in the dining room, snipping the peonies outside the kitchen window.  For all I know the owner is a fat cat banker, a mortgage magnate.  Then
again, he could be a brilliant structural engineer who bought the house and refurbished it with such love in memory of Bill LeMessurier.  I will probably never know. But that doesn’t stop me from enjoying his gift to the public.

I see them every day when I cycle to work, the squad of tents nested snug to the
ventilation shaft that exhausts the highway buried beneath the city.  The round canvas domes with tarped doors faced off against the Federal Reserve Building, that towering aluminum behemoth with
two clunky legs that might have been the original inspiration for Transformers. The tents are dense packed; the city keeps the squatters’ stake small.  Police loiter about in clumps chatting with one another, paid special duty time to keep the 99% who are by now overtired and smelly from tent living from the other 99% of us, fresh showered office workers scurrying to their cubicles.

The Occupy Boston camp is littered with signs.  Thumbs up to peace, justice, and cooperatives, vets, teachers and workers; thumbs down to war, corruption and capitalism; generals, tycoons and banks.  The graphic designer in me is appalled; the signs are jagged, soggy, too small to read from the street.  But they are urgent, as if the issues scrawled on them might be eclipsed by some greater tragedy during the time it takes to craft careful block letters.

There are few people out and about the campground at 8:00 am.  I imagine they are all still in their tents; unlike me they don’t have to go to work. Then again, they are already at work, full time witnesses to the chaos of our financial system. A system that is
supposed to help people achieve their aspirations but has been coopted into a self-serving profit center that rakes in income like dry leaves in autumn but when winter comes and the trees go bare and overextended loans collapse they clamor for handouts with more audacity than any Pine Street Inn beggar would dare muster.  Men in suits are self-confident and entitled.

What do these people want? That is the question on the face of the workers heeling their way from South Station to the Financial District.  Their demands are not clear, their message is not clear.  Actually, they don’t even have demands, at least ones we can grasp.
We can envision “Free Attica Seven’ and maybe even ‘Out of Iran’, but none of us can imagine what ‘End the Fed’ would look like.

I think Occupy Boston wants two things.

First, they want to make us think. I like that they do not have a pat list of demands.  They are coughing up complicated problems that we created over decades and will not resolve easily.  By being non-hierarchical Occupy Boston avoids being simplistic.  If you want simple answers, watch a Republican presidential debate.  If you want a complex picture of the mess we are in, settle down at the camp shadowed by the Fed.

Second they want to make us uncomfortable.  Every morning when I ride by I think, why I am here, on the employee side of the police line instead of on the camp side?  I will not cross over, I don’t have that much activism in my blood, but I appreciate that they make me confront that slack in my character.  When the morning is dry and warm I think they have it all over me, when it rained in sheets overnight, I feel sorry for their wet bodies.  It is impossible to pass Occupy Boston without acknowledging it, without considering problems we are inclined to ignore.

What is the future of Occupy Boston? Winter is coming and the cold will force its death.  Does it have the persistence of a perennial to pop up again next spring or are the cluster of tents just fall mums?  We don’t know, and that uncertainly it part of the camp’s vitality.  Two months ago no one could have foreseen how Occupy Wall Street would spread, would thrive, would capture the media interest it has garnered.  It is like we have been hungry for a good old fashioned protest and so have heaped attention on this action.

I have no idea how Occupy Boston will affect change, and neither do the folks in the tents.  But I do know that the camp is a living, breathing, public testament to the reality that things are rotten
in the State of the United States for too many people and that we have to change course.  The how and when will happen later, by others, but for now Occupy Boston and Denver and LA and Wall
Street and even Akron are infecting our consciousness and even if there is not yet a tent city in every town across America, they are sowing seeds in our minds from coast to coast.

I was in the DC airport this week; airports always remind everyone of 911.  The weather was terrible, the flights delayed.  I was fortunate to nab a carrel with an outlet and a usable if slightly broken chair to work on my laptop.  A big man slouched against the workspace next to mine, chairless; a Hassidic Jew with a big beard and wide rim hat. Announcements of my flight stirred.  I powered down my computer.  The man looked at me.  “Would you watch this for a moment?” He asked quickly.  I barely heard what he said; nodded, assuming he wanted my seat.  But no, he walked away, leaving an iPhone recharging next to me.  I stared at it, watching the battery light dance.

I packed up my system and kept an eye on his phone.  I wondered how long he had observed me before deciding to trust me with this chore.  I wondered if the phone would explode.  I thought that if I died at the hands of an iPhone Hassidic terrorist that would be an all right way to exit life, quick at least.  I would rather die trusting someone than
being suspicious of them.  Suspicion is not in my nature.  Maybe that is why he trusted me with his iPhone. Maybe he is a master terrorist.  Maybe he pinned me for a sucker.  Then again, maybe he is just a Hassidic man with an iPhone out of power who needs to take a leak.  I didn’t like thinking these things, but I couldn’t help it. We all think this way now.  This is the legacy of 911.

The man came back. I nodded in recognition that his iPhone was safe, collected my things and walked to my gate.  A small
victory of humanity over terrorism.

________________________________________________________

My first piece of published writing was the article I wrote after my 911 experience at Yale New-Haven Hospital. I am including it in this post to add my voice to the millions today who are remembering.

WHERE WERE YOU ON 911? 

Paul E. Fallon  9/12/01

People have already begun to ask the question.  Where were you on the day the planes toppled the Towers?  Everyone will remember.  We’ll embellish our stories over time until the minutes surrounding 9:00 am on 9/11/01 become branded to our souls.  To remind ourselves that we are the lucky ones, still here to tell our tales.

I was at a meeting at Yale-NewHaven Hospital.  Every Tuesday I drive from Boston to New Haven to
review an ongoing project.  The first of four Intensive Care Units being renovated was slated to open in a week, and we
were haggling over details.   Trying to locate the slides for suction containers, adding a receptacle for the specimen
refrigerator, arguing why the signs were late.  A cellular beeper interrupted the meeting; we learned that a plane
crashed into one of the Twin Towers.  We took an appropriate pause, then quibbled over some TV brackets.  A second call revealed that the other tower was hit.  This bit of information caused an awkward gap, but we moved on to discuss the project schedule.  It was difficult to worry about a week gained or lost in construction while an icon of corporate America
was in flames.  The third call brought news that the towers had collapsed.  Instantly, the sixty miles between New Haven
and New York became mighty small.

We went to review the construction. The television in every patient room displayed the smoking remains of lower Manhattan while twenty construction workers adjusted faucets, hung robe hooks, and tested circuits.  There was dust everywhere, buckets of paint, and dangling wires; the sweet scent of citrus cleaner tinged with carpet adhesive.  But I know how much can be done during a final sprint of construction.  I thought we were in fair shape, until the
hospital’s project manager arrived and announced that they were going to open the unit that day in order to accept patients from New York.

Within an hour fifty or sixty people filled the space. Construction equipment went into non-essential rooms, union workers took up brooms and mops, an army in scrubs began wiping down every surface, and the parade of stuff started rolling in.  There were beds, tables, supply carts, paper towels, sterile gowns, latex gloves, bed pans, specimen cups, bandages, splints, and tape.  That was the easy stuff.  Next came the syringes, lotions, shelf medications, prescription drugs, and burn supplies.  Any burn supplies available.  A carpenter installed the suction slides we thought lost that morning, an orderly made up a bed, an electrician screwed on
the final cover plates, and a guy on a ladder hung the privacy curtain.

Then there was the technology.  A cart load of monitors, dozens of computers, a conference table piled with phones, and a band of computer geeks thrilled by the challenge of getting the unit up and running in a few hours.  A group on ladders tested the intercom.  A third team booted the
air handling system and tested the pressure within the unit to isolate patients with contagious disease.

By two o’clock, evidence of building construction had disappeared from the ICU as completely as the Twin Towers had vanished from the world’s most famous skyline.  By evening all the supplies would be organized and the electronics working; the ICU would be ready for business.

I visited the World Trade Center once with my children, on a sunny day not unlike 911 of 2001.  We could have been crushed.  A friend of mine flew from Boston to LA on the tenth , missing by one calendar digit an early death.  Fortunately for me, on the day of terror I was not in New York, but in New Haven,  playing a small part in a transformation born of crisis; where the hourly employee and the salaried manager, the scrub tech and the Head Nurse, the hard hat and the high-tech all came together to complete in a few hours a feat that would have been laudable in a week.

There is much about America that is imperfect.  Our political system is impure, yet it is more democratic than most.  Our economic system is unfair, yet it offers more opportunity than any other.  We have shameful racism and bigotry, yet immigrants from all over the world pour onto our shores.  We have myriad problems, yet we have the luxury of debating them openly.  Some say we are overly content, untested, and no match for The Greatest Generation, yet it is only under fire that we can truly be tested.

We are under fire now, by terrorists who harbor hatred beyond comprehension, and our actions will reveal if we can prove ourselves.  Not for the sake of history or for the sake of revenge, but to ensure the freedoms we enjoy and the communities we cherish.  On 911 of 2001 I witnessed a community come together and perform extraordinarily well under fire.  It was a good place to be on a very bad day.