NEW YORK — In the days after 9/11, the fear of what might come next beset famously unflappable Gotham. Was another attack in the works? Would large city centers with now-vulnerable skyscrapers become obsolete?

The magnitude of the human carnage and physical destruction was overwhelming.

“It looked, immediately after 9/11, as if Lower Manhattan’s future, and indeed the entire city’s future, would be very much in doubt,” said Carl Weisbrod, a long-time fixture in city government and economic development circles, was heading up the Alliance for Downtown New York when Al Qaeda brought down the twin towers.

“There was a sense throughout the country that, well, maybe city centers were vulnerable,” he said. “That this might be the wave of the future, that businesses should think about not being in urban centers.”

But New York’s civic spirit bounced back just days after the attacks. Posters started showing up around town, distributed by graphic artist Milton Glaser‘s students at the School of Visual Arts.

Beneath his iconic “I (heart) NY” logo, Glaser had added the words “more than ever.”

A black spot on the heart represented heartbreak over thousands of New Yorkers who’d died.

At the bottom, a note: “Be generous. Your city needs you.”

It was a simple message, but one the city wanted to hear.

From the distance of a quarter-century, the much-vaunted legacy of “9/12,” shorthand for the days after the attack, is complicated by factors such as the surveillance of Muslim New Yorkers that followed and the ongoing death toll from 9/11-related illness. Uncertainty over whether businesses would come back to Gotham persisted for years after the attacks.

But the notion that the city was generous, and that New Yorkers of all stripes did what they could during the city’s hour of need — holds up under the weight of years.

On 14th St., the furthest south anyone but lower Manhattan residents could travel, teenagers volunteered to load trucks outside the Salvation Army, filling them with donated supplies bound for first responders and the isolated communities around Ground Zero.

As missing posters dominated the landscape, NYC taxi drivers volunteered to take distraught families seeking news on their loved ones home from the Family Assistance Center on Pier 94 and from area hospitals free of charge. The TLC estimates more than 1,000 drivers participated in the program in the weeks after the attacks.

Blood banks, both in New York and around the nation, went from a dangerous shortage on September 10 to more plasma and platelets than they could handle.

New Yorkers put their generosity and sense of community on display, helping fuel a long and difficult climb not just to rebuild, but to reckon with what had happened.

Play ball

New York’s baseball teams played a key role in helping lift the city’s spirits, proving there was still room for joy. Both the Mets and the Yankees made visits to Ground Zero in the days after the attacks.

“At first we thought we were being intrusive,” Jay Horwitz, longtime spokesman and team historian for the Mets told the Daily News.

“But these guys wanted to talk,” he said of the construction workers and first responders on the pile. “They wanted to talk baseball.”

The Mets would be the first team to play a home game after the attacks, with a matchup against the Atlanta Braves on Sept. 21.

“Nobody knew what the right thing to do was,” Horwitz said. “All these people died, all the kids without fathers, and we’re playing.”

“I was petrified of going,” Horwitz recalled. “Shea stadium was under armed guard. And I remember I told my friends not to come because Shea is right next to LaGuardia Airport — what better place you want to bomb than that?”

“The crowd was very quiet in the first part of the game. To me it perked up in the seventh inning when Liza Minnelli sang ‘New York, New York.'” Horwitz said.

Then came Mike Piazza’s famous homer, driving in two runs to wild applause, winning the game over the Braves, 3-2.

“I think the message was that, hey, life goes on,” Horwitz said. “Life goes on and you can get back to normal and you’re not going to let these terrorists disrupt our life and we can play ball again.”

When Saturday Night Live returned to the air on Sept. 29, Lorne Michaels famously asked Mayor Rudy Giuliani: “Can we be funny?”

Giuliani deadpanned, “Why start now?”

Lower Manhattan bounces back

The work was most difficult in the neighborhood surrounding the fallen towers. Many of the people who lived in Lower Manhattan’s residential communities — Battery Park City, TriBeCa, Chinatown, and the converted office buildings around Wall St. that would soon earn the moniker “FiDi” — had evacuated after the towers fell. In the days that followed many had to navigate how to return home, and then decide if they were going to stay.

“The moving trucks were lined up for people to move out right after 9/11,” said Bob Townley, a longtime member of Manhattan’s Community Board 1 and the head of the non-profit Manhattan Youth.

The neighborhood was far from hospitable. As the wreckage of the World Trade Center continued to burn, cell phone and land-line service was spotty for days and weeks. Radio and TV stations struggled to get back on the air. The fires persisted on the pile until December, and most everything was covered in a fine dust, only later revealed to be toxic.

“All the stores were closed, and people were locked in their lofts and apartments south of Canal St.,” recalled Townley. “You had what you had in your house, and you could travel out of the zone and back with proper ID — but most people had evacuated,” he said.

But on the first weekend after the attack, Townley organized a community meeting at the basketball court on the north side of Canal St. at Thompson St., just outside the restricted zone.

“We knew we had to bring the community together,” Townley told the Daily News. “It became like a street fair where people could go and get what they needed to get information on.”

“Elected officials came, some city agencies came, the policemen showed up,” he said. “There were about 2,000 people there each day, on Saturday and Sunday,” he said. “People just wanted to know when they were going to get back into their homes. That was the number one concern.”

City Council Speaker Julie Menin’s restaurant, Vine, located in the heart of the Financial District at Broad St. and Exchange Pl., was “decimated” by the attack. In the following weeks, Menin started Wall St. Rising, a non-profit meant to help bolster and rebuild the small businesses of the Financial District. In the year that followed, Menin’s group worked to put on public art shows and concerts in downtown neighborhoods, and offer discounts downtown businesses.

“All of these programs were aimed at keeping small businesses and people downtown,” she said.

Money counts too

But to rebuild a city center — and to look after the residents still trying to live there — would cost money.

Sen. Chuck Schumer, who had been in Washington D.C. on September 11, flew up to New York the next day with then-Sen. Hillary Clinton, on a government flight.

“When we got there, we arrived at the heliport and we went downtown,” he recalled. “You could smell the burnt flesh in the air.”

“One of the most touching things to me was the hundreds and hundreds of people lines up with pictures, saying, ‘Have you seen my wife Jean? Have you seen my brother Paul?'” Schumer said. “No one knew who was alive and who was dead.”

After he was shown the site, Schumer said, he was invited to meet with then-mayor Rudy Giuliani and then-governor George Pataki at One Police Plaza.

“I asked them, ‘how much damage?'” Schumer said. “They went through a list of things. I said, ‘Could you say $20 billion?’ They said, ‘at least.'”

The next day, September 13, the senator said he, Clinton, and the two senators from Virginia — where the Pentagon was attacked — were invited to the Oval Office.

Schumer said he decided to ask then-President George W. Bush directly for $20 billion at that meeting, so as not to give the president’s aides time to come up with a counter-offer.

“I told President Bush of the devastation, told him about the people with the signs, I told him you could smell death in the air,” Schumer said. “Then I said, ‘Mr. President, that’s why New York needs $20 billion right away to help us recover.'”

“He said, ‘You need $20 billion?’ I said, ‘At least that much,’ because they had told me more,” Schumer continued. “He said, ‘You got it.'”

“It says something good about Bush,” Schumer reflected. “I thought he’d say, ‘Well let me think about it, get me a memo.'”

Of that flood of federal money, more than $2.5 billion was earmarked for immediate debris removal, search and rescue operations, and repairs. Another $5.6 billion went toward restoring and improving utilities downtown. Roughly $5.5 billion was earmarked for economic revitalization. And $4.8 billion went toward rental assistance for local residents and businesses and making the city whole for its own recovery expenditures.

“One of the most important allocations of funds that the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation provided were grants to residents to return to their homes and help subsidize their rents for a very short period of time,” Weisbrod told the Daily News. He, along with Menin, served for a time on the board of the LMDC — the joint city-state agency tasked with helping distribute the federal aid money.

“Everyone predicted that anything below Canal St. would be a disaster zone, a dead zone,” Schumer recalled. “Everyone thought New York was gone, no one would come.”

Asked if there was ever a moment in those years when he worried the city might not come back, Schumer said, “Every day.”

“I love New York,” he said. “I’ve spent my whole life in New York. My family has. And every day I woke up and said, ‘If we don’t succeed, what is going to happen to this beautiful city?'”

Weisbrod, the Downtown Alliance head and LMDC board member, attributed much of the success of Lower Manhattan’s rebirth, and with it the renewed future of New York City, to the local community itself — its civic engagement and participation in the process of deciding how the land around Ground Zero would be rebuilt and what should be prioritized.

“Nothing’s perfect,” he said. “But I think if any of us on September 12th could have looked into a crystal ball 25 years in the future and said, ‘this is what it was going to be like,’ I think almost everyone, if not everyone, would’ve been quite encouraged, relieved and proud actually.”

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