Liberty Street: Encounters at Ground Zero [Hardcover]

Peter Josyph (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 31, 2006

Writer and feature filmmaker Peter Josyph spent a year and a half combing the streets and the debris-blasted buildings of Ground Zero, talking with workers and residents, and capturing its struggles and transformations. This book is a haunting record of the extraordinary world that was created on September 11 and has now vanished forever.

While much attention has been focused on the interior of Ground Zero, the surrounding neighborhood has been largely ignored. Loyal Downtowners who ran for their lives from the collapse of the Twin Towers returned with a resolve to restore their world to order. Exploring this "dust-driven world of collateral damage," Josyph documented their struggle at a time when the bans against photography made him "a spy in the house of destruction." Misinformed and marginalized by city and federal agencies, the neighborhood was on its own in coping with toxic infestation, landlords, insurers, and simple access to the place they were proud--and cursed--to call their home.

Josyph finds in every detail new ways to envision that morning, and challenges more simplistic, mainstream views of Ground Zero with vivid portraits of exceptional New Yorkers who made a place for themselves in that tragic and transitory neighborhood.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Although cameras were prohibited at Ground Zero during the cleanup, Josyph, maker of the documentary Liberty Street: Alive at Ground Zero, surreptitiously filmed workers and residents as they salvaged the ravaged Financial District. He defends his clandestine actions, reasoning, "If I was out of line in wanting the world to see this, the line itself was out of line, for it was a critical entitlement for anybody touched by the news of the 11th." Armed with his video camera, Josyph grew close to carpenters, shoeshiners, dockbuilders and other locals who were affected by the attack that "generated an urban black hole, a nexus of negative energy that would suck down and disappear everything in its vicinity." Josyph's vivid accounts of being near Ground Zero long after September 11 (the area was blanketed by a stagnant "odor that even attacked lamentation itself," and all of his video footage "was tracked with the harsh metallic turbulence of the work, and pierced by the ubiquitous backup beeps of grapplers and trucks") create a clear picture of a singular time in a unique neighborhood, and his decision to ignore regulations and film the neighborhood's reconstruction is one that will prove essential to historical record. 21 illustrations.
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Review

In Liberty Street: Encounters at Ground Zero, Peter Josyph, an author and filmmaker, transforms his documentary film about the attack and its aftermath into a personal, impressionistic, almost poetic account... He artfully weaves together transcripts of his interviews... to produce what he describes as 'eyewitness studies of how urban catastrophe impacts the population and transforms the psychic and physical form of the city.'"--New York Times, Neighborhood Report

"Josyph's vivid accounts of being near Ground Zero long after September 11... create a clear picture of a singular time in a unique neighborhood, and his decision to ignore regulations and film the neighborhood's reconstruction is one that will prove essential to historical record."--Publishers Weekly

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 308 pages
• Publisher: UPNE (May 31, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1584655518
• ISBN-13: 978-1584655510
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.3 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,830,720 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Amazingly Powerful and Beautiful Book, May 4, 2006

By 

Michele Brangwen (Houston, TX USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Liberty Street: Encounters at Ground Zero (Hardcover)

"Liberty Street: Encounters at ground Zero" is an amazingly powerful and beautiful book. In my opinion this book takes its place with great works that bring to life a place for the reader, like Hemingway's "A Movable Feast" does Paris, and Kerouac's "On the Road" does this great country of ours. Only this book gives you an unfictionalized account of a place that in some ways has vanished forever - the community of Lower Manhattan that worked to clean up, rebuild and relocate back into their beloved neighborhood. This book is a must read, not only for its profoundly elegant and engaging writing, but for its chronicling of a very significant time and place in the history of America.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beautifully Written, Poetic Meditation on Post-9/11 Lower Manhattan, March 30, 2006

By 

Rick Wallach (Miami, Florida) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Liberty Street: Encounters at Ground Zero (Hardcover)

I have just read an advance review copy of this remarkable book. You're sick of all the jingoism, political exploitation and demagoguery that the disaster of 9/11 entailed. You want an intelligent and poetic account of how lives were altered in the neighborhoods around Ground Zero - how, in fact, Ground Zero itself became a "neighborhood" with a two-plus-years-long half-life. In other words, you want to read this book. If you have shared in the national malaise that settled in after the disaster, and have been further depressed by the heavy-handed bungling of the response, you want to read this book. Ground Zero became populated by remarkable men and women, and in its surrounding neighborhoods residents who wouldn't be bullied, badgered or scared away by bureaucrats or terrorists alike strove indomitably to preserve and rebuild their lives. You knew nothing about any of this until this book. No one cared - least of all the politicians who were aggrandizing the spotlight with their hand-wringing and buffoon-like pronouncements about justice and patriotism - that miracles were being performed on a daily basis by lower Manhattan residents who wouldn't be broken. Few of us were ever informed that while our attention was being deliberately diverted by a bogus war, the real American spirit was being challenged by bureaucratic indifference and stupidity, yet triumphing in the mouth of hell in lower Manhattan regardless, as genuinely as on any fraudulently engendered battlefield among the oil derricks of the Middle East. You'll encounter all of this within the pages of Peter Josyph's stunning account of the transient world of Ground Zero. I grant that no one could blame you for being sick of this whole subject, but then, before this book was written I don't think many of us really had an opportunity to comprehend what the real subject was. Moreover, Josyph's sinuous prose ripples and roils with an angry poetic music that never succumbs to partisan political banality. It will captivate you on its own terms. This book is a knockout. Don't miss it.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating and engaging, April 10, 2011

By 

MMadsen - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Liberty Street: Encounters at Ground Zero (Hardcover)

Peter Josyph is an amazing writer and this book is another tour-de-force showcasing his thrilling style which, considering the subject of 9/11, makes for a truly haunting journey that is both horrifying and beautiful.
The sections where Josyph talks about the odor and dust of the 11th are examples of his best writing. More than anything, this book shows how one event became an integrated part of New York and New Yorkers - both mentally and, perhaps most interestingly, physically.
In other books, Josyph has proven to be a gifted interviewer and the last part of the book shows his skills as an interview yet again. His talk with Atlantic Monthly correspondent William Langwiesche (author of American Ground: Unbuilding the World Trade Center) is one of the highlights of this book. Josyph's chapter on the nausea he started to feel whenever and wherever he saw a construction sight is a fascinating piece. It's understandable why writing about this strange phenomenon would eventually steer Josyph towards writing an entire book, rather than just an essay on the nausea as first intended.
Writing as an artist, Josyph's view on things is unique. The juxtaposition of great beauty and immense destruction shows the commplexity of the 11th in every aspect of whatever "the 11th" means to different people. In the song "On that Day" about 9/11 Leonard Cohen sings "Did you go crazy / or did you report / on that day". Josyph reported. Maybe he went crazy as well, but it was a craze that drove him to find answers. The result is an important historical document that deserves to be on the shelf with any other great volume on 9/11.