2.22/The Historical Frame/The Decade in Events and Forces

The Pre-9/11 Mood: What 2000–2001 Actually Felt Like

The Peak and the Fall

That certainty had a closing value. It was 5,048.62, the NASDAQ Composite Index at the close of trading on Friday, March 10, 2000, built from the combined worth of companies that had mostly existed for fewer years than the number itself contained digits; the people who had spent the preceding half-decade filling loft floors between 14th and 41st Streets with foosball tables and stock-option paperwork treated the day it posted less as a milestone than as confirmation of what they had believed all along.² A stretch of the city — the lofts of the Flatiron district, Chelsea, and lower SoHo, spilling south toward the Financial District — had organized itself in barely five years around a single premise: that an audience measured in page views was worth more than any audience had ever been worth before, worth more than the magazines and newspapers whose staff it had spent the second half of the 1990s recruiting away with doubled salaries and stock grants that had, on paper, already made junior editors into millionaires.

The buildings themselves made the case for the difference before anyone spoke a word of it. A Silicon Alley loft ran open floor plans, exposed brick and ductwork, a foosball table by the kitchen, a dog asleep under someone’s desk; a Midtown magazine floor ran carpet, a closed office door, an assistant screening the phone. The founders were mostly in their late twenties and early thirties, more often out of a Wall Street analyst program or a business school than out of a garage, dressed by 1999 in fleece vests and cargo pants where three years earlier they had worn a blazer over an oxford shirt.

The reversal, when it came, arrived as a sequence rather than a single event. On March 13, news that Japan had slipped into a fresh recession triggered a global sell-off in technology stocks; the index fell 2.6 percent that single session, and did not recover. By January 2001 it stood near 2,300, a decline of some 54 percent from the March peak; by April it had fallen under 2,000.² The geography of the collapse could be dated almost building by building. Pseudo.com, the SoHo streaming-media outfit whose founder Josh Harris had staged an elaborate performance-art installation in its own loft through the last weeks of 1999, laid off all 175 of its remaining employees on September 18, 2000, its chief executive, David Bohrman, delivering the news in person.³ Kozmo.com, whose bicycle messengers in orange nylon jackets had made same-hour delivery a familiar sight on the avenues, shut down without notice on April 11, 2001, laying off its entire staff of eleven hundred after burning through some $280 million in financing, sixty million of it supplied by Amazon.⁴ The trade press that had chronicled the boom folded inside the bust it was covering: the Industry Standard, on pace by mid-2000 to carry more advertising pages that year than any other American magazine,⁵ announced it would cease publication on August 17, 2001, and filed for bankruptcy soon after.⁶

For the editors and writers who had left print mastheads in 1998 and 1999 for the promise of equity, the sequence that followed ran in something close to a fixed order: a hiring freeze, then a private anxiety about a vesting schedule that no longer mattered because the stock underneath it did not either, then a layoff notice delivered by electronic mail, then a walk to the elevator with a cardboard box, then a telephone call to an old assigning editor, asking, in a register that had not been necessary two years before, whether anything was open. Real magazine houses felt the collapse from the other direction, through the advertising ledger: Time Inc., the industry’s largest publisher, entered a cycle of layoffs that year that its own executives linked to advertising’s migration toward the internet and to the strains of a corporate merger, six months old, that had joined its parent company to a technology conglomerate many times its market value.⁷

The collapse can be read company by company.

The Millennium That Didn’t Happen

The federal government alone spent an estimated $8.5 billion hunting a single software defect, and American businesses and governments together spent something closer to $100 billion pursuing the same repair: the two-digit year field, standard since the 1960s, that misread the year 2000 as 1900 in any system left unpatched.¹⁷ On the night of December 31, 1999, the ball descended over Times Square on schedule. The lights in every surrounding building stayed on. Banks that had built contingency plans for a run on cash opened for ordinary business on January 3, and the ordinary business was, in fact, ordinary.

The alarm had been genuine and the money had mostly worked — the code was patched or replaced, system by system, by people whose names appeared nowhere in the coverage that followed. What the public retained instead was the shape of the warning without the labor that discharged it: the bottled water, the home generators, the sober magazine features on supply-chain and grid failure, set against a January morning on which none of it had turned out to be visibly necessary. The residue was a specific kind of embarrassment, durable enough to outlast the year that produced it — the suspicion, available to anyone who wanted it, that an expert warning delivered in full sincerity could still describe a catastrophe already prevented before it arrived, and that successful prevention looked, from the outside, exactly like nothing having been wrong to begin with.

Thirty-Six Days in Florida

New York backed Al Gore for president by a lopsided twenty-five points — Gore took 60.2 percent of the vote to George W. Bush’s 35.2 percent.¹⁸ The rest of the country was not so settled. The evening of November 7, 2000, closed with Florida’s twenty-five electoral votes undetermined and the national result hanging on them; officials in Miami-Dade, Palm Beach, and Broward Counties spent the following weeks examining ballots by hand and by fluorescent light, while lawyers for both campaigns argued, in state and then federal court, over what a punch card with an incompletely detached chad was supposed to mean.¹⁹

At approximately ten o’clock on the night of December 12, the Supreme Court released its decision. Seven justices agreed that the varying recount standards applied across Florida’s counties violated the Constitution’s equal protection guarantee; five of the seven, dividing along the same line that had decided most of the court’s contested cases that decade, held that no constitutionally uniform recount could be completed before the federal deadline for certifying electors. Florida’s electoral votes went to Bush. Al Gore conceded the following evening, in a televised address watched in newsrooms up and down Manhattan: “While I strongly disagree with the court’s decision, I accept it.”¹⁹

A city and state that had backed Gore by that same lopsided margin absorbed the outcome with a specific, quiet disorientation — not the ordinary disappointment of an election lost, but the more particular experience of watching a result installed by the branch of government furthest from a ballot box, on a legal rationale a substantial part of the professional and editorial class considered, privately and then in print, to have been written backward from its answer. Bush’s inauguration on January 20, 2001, was cold and wet in Washington; protesters lined the parade route, and some of them threw eggs. New York watched the address on television with the detachment of a city that had not chosen this particular outcome.

A Recession With No Name Yet

The National Bureau of Economic Research, months afterward, dated the peak of the business cycle to March 2001 — the technical beginning of a recession it did not announce until that November.²⁰ People living through the spring and summer of 2001 had no such official confirmation and did not need one to feel the contraction. Office space in the Flatiron and Chelsea loft districts, which had commanded steep premiums at the 1999–2000 peak, sat on the sublet market in growing quantity; hand-lettered FOR LEASE notices multiplied along Park Avenue South and lower Fifth. Young product managers and developers who had drawn comfortable salaries at companies with no working revenue model were unemployed in a market contracting from two directions at once — print retrenching from the loss of technology advertising, the digital jobs that had drawn them away from print already gone. Manhattan apartment prices, which had climbed steadily through the second half of the 1990s, plateaued in late 2000 and softened through the first half of 2001, ahead of most of the year’s other economic news.

Real institutions absorbed the reversal in ways that could be dated and priced rather than merely felt. Advertising pages industry-wide had peaked in 1999 and 2000; publishers cut staff, deferred travel budgets, and killed commissioned stories the following year for reasons that had nothing to do with a story’s merit and everything to do with an issue that no longer had enough paid pages to carry it. The magazine world’s anxiety was not abstract. It concerned a specific and answerable question — whether the advertisers leaving were leaving because of a cyclical downturn or because the internet had permanently taken over a function magazines had performed alone for most of the century — and in the summer of 2001 nobody on either side of the question could have said with confidence which answer was correct.

The industry’s confidence was not uniform, and the exceptions were conspicuous. Condé Nast, whose 1998 purchase of Wired from its financially exhausted founders for a reported $80 million had already signaled that establishment publishing would pay for the internet’s cultural capital even while distrusting its business model, moved its headquarters to 4 Times Square starting in June 1999 — an expensive, deliberate statement of confidence planted at the exact geographic seam where old media and new media had spent the decade eyeing one another.²¹²² Glossy prestige launches kept appearing through the downturn regardless — Talk, George, O, The Oprah Magazine — proof that a publisher with sufficient backing could still bet heavily on print at the same moment smaller, purely digital operations were folding by the week.

The Last Ordinary Summer

Rudolph Giuliani, term-limited and in his final year as mayor, was governing a city whose attention toward him had shifted partly to his personal life — his separation from Donna Hanover, made public the previous year, still supplying tabloid copy. By the summer of 2001, the murder count that had made New York a national byword for urban danger through the 1980s had fallen by roughly seventy percent from its 1990 peak of just over 2,200 homicides to 649 in 2001, a decline attributed by researchers to some combination of more aggressive policing, the ebbing of the crack epidemic, and demographic shifts that no single explanation accounted for completely.²³ The parks were usable in a way they had not reliably been a decade earlier. The restaurants, after ten years of steady expansion, were good. In Central Park, Mike Nichols directed a production of Chekhov’s The Seagull that opened at the Delacorte Theater on August 12 with Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline, Natalie Portman, John Goodman, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Christopher Walken in the cast, playing to lines that in some cases had formed a day in advance; the run closed on August 26.²⁴

Early that August, a heat wave settled over the city severe enough to be dangerous: temperatures in Central Park reached 103 degrees Fahrenheit, with more than a week above 95 degrees combined with heavy humidity, and at least four New Yorkers died of heat-related illness before the emergency-management system’s cooling centers and advisories brought the toll no higher.²⁵ What the heat wave interrupted was, by any measure available at the time, an ordinary run of a good summer — the Meatpacking District mid-transition from slaughterhouses to restaurants, SoHo increasingly given over to retail, galleries thick along the West 20s where light-industrial blocks had stood a decade before. The city had traded a version of itself that had been dangerous and, in places, cheap for a version that was safer, more expensive, and, in the accounts of people who remembered the earlier one, less peculiar — a trade few New Yorkers that August were prepared to call a bad one.

What the Culture Was Arguing About

The television being discussed in editorial offices that spring was The Sopranos, whose third season began a two-hour premiere on HBO on March 4, 2001, to reviews so uniformly admiring that critics who had spent three years arguing about the show’s merits had, by that point, largely stopped arguing. The record industry was in open litigation against its own customers: a federal appeals court upheld an injunction against Napster that February,²⁶ and on July 11 the file-sharing service went dark for good.²⁷ Outkast’s Stankonia, released the previous October, was still on every third car radio; the soundtrack to O Brother, Where Art Thou? was collecting Grammy nominations for music considerably older than the film built around it.

The book was Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, published September 1, 2001, by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.²⁸ The story that had held the country’s attention through the entire summer, ahead of anything from overseas, concerned a congressional intern named Chandra Levy, last seen at a Washington gym on April 30 and unaccounted for since, and a California congressman named Gary Condit, whose denials of any knowledge of her whereabouts, delivered on national television that August 23, had made him the summer’s most covered public figure; the story was still running, without resolution, in the first days of September.²⁹

What the Floor Could Not Yet Read

What was publicly known about al-Qaeda in the summer of 2001 was not nothing. Osama bin Laden had given on-camera interviews to American television — to CNN’s Peter Arnett in 1997, to ABC’s John Miller in 1998 — in which he called explicitly for attacks on American targets, and the bombings that followed had been covered as news, not rumor: the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, bombed within minutes of each other on August 7, 1998, killing 213 people in Kenya and 11 in Tanzania; the USS Cole, attacked in the harbor at Aden on October 12, 2000, killing seventeen American sailors.³⁰ Bin Laden’s name was known in every newsroom in the country. The threat he represented was understood, in general terms, to be real and ongoing.

What was not known, outside a small circle inside the government, was the density of the warning that had accumulated by that August. Richard Clarke, the National Security Council’s counterterrorism coordinator, had been pressing the new administration on the threat since its first weeks in office.³¹ The Central Intelligence Agency had produced dozens of reports on a possible al-Qaeda attack in the months before September, and on August 6 delivered a briefing to the president titled, without qualification, “Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US.”³² The Federal Aviation Administration had issued advisories to airlines and airports through the spring and summer warning of hijacking risk.³¹ None of this had reached the editorial floors of the city’s magazines, because none of it had been declassified, leaked, or briefed to a reporter in a form specific enough to print. What a foreign correspondent might have carried back from a source inside the counterterrorism world was, at most, a generalized sense of heightened concern — not an operational detail, not a date, nothing a fact-checker could confirm or an editor could defend committing to print against the competing, more immediately reportable claims on a September issue’s limited space. The gap between what was privately sensed and what was publicly printable was not a failure of anyone’s nerve. It was the ordinary operation of an institution that could act only on what it could source.