Post by pieter on Sept 9, 2006 11:32:17 GMT -7
Pilgrims or tourists, millions come to Ground Zero
Sat Sep 9, 2006 10:05am ET
By Claudia Parsons
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Tour guide Ann Van Hine is rewarded with tears, not tips, and frequently reduces visitors to an awed silence when she tells them how her husband, a firefighter, died at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.
"Sometimes I feel bad because I look at people's faces as I'm telling my story and it's like I've just blown them away," Van Hine said after leading 25 tourists from as far afield as Italy and Australia on a tour around the perimeter of the gaping hole known as Ground Zero.
She says younger visitors often chat freely with her before the tour, but afterwards, "They don't know what to say to me."
As she is about to climb a steep flight of stairs to a walkway over the highway west of the site, Van Hine asks visitors to imagine climbing stairs loaded up with firefighting equipment. "The firefighters got up to about the 70th floor, so it would have been like doing what we're doing 35 times."
She and her husband, Richard Bruce Van Hine, had two daughters aged 14 and 17 at the time of the attacks that killed 2,992 people in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.
"Ten days after, I asked my girls where they thought Daddy was and they said they thought Daddy was in heaven," she said, adding that she visited Ground Zero on September 28, 2001.
"It looked like war," she said, standing with her back to the 16-acre site. "There were still fires burning, there was this gray dust everywhere. Some part of me I think expected to see a computer monitor or a desk or something. There was nothing."
Source: today.reuters.com/news/home.aspx
Sat Sep 9, 2006 10:05am ET
By Claudia Parsons
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Tour guide Ann Van Hine is rewarded with tears, not tips, and frequently reduces visitors to an awed silence when she tells them how her husband, a firefighter, died at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.
"Sometimes I feel bad because I look at people's faces as I'm telling my story and it's like I've just blown them away," Van Hine said after leading 25 tourists from as far afield as Italy and Australia on a tour around the perimeter of the gaping hole known as Ground Zero.
She says younger visitors often chat freely with her before the tour, but afterwards, "They don't know what to say to me."
As she is about to climb a steep flight of stairs to a walkway over the highway west of the site, Van Hine asks visitors to imagine climbing stairs loaded up with firefighting equipment. "The firefighters got up to about the 70th floor, so it would have been like doing what we're doing 35 times."
She and her husband, Richard Bruce Van Hine, had two daughters aged 14 and 17 at the time of the attacks that killed 2,992 people in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.
"Ten days after, I asked my girls where they thought Daddy was and they said they thought Daddy was in heaven," she said, adding that she visited Ground Zero on September 28, 2001.
"It looked like war," she said, standing with her back to the 16-acre site. "There were still fires burning, there was this gray dust everywhere. Some part of me I think expected to see a computer monitor or a desk or something. There was nothing."
Source: today.reuters.com/news/home.aspx