cover image OUT OF THE RUINS: A New York Record: Lower Manhattan, Autumn 2001

OUT OF THE RUINS: A New York Record: Lower Manhattan, Autumn 2001

Jean Holabird, . . Gingko, $19.95 (128pp) ISBN 978-1-58423-114-1

Painter Holabird, a TriBeCa resident since 1975, has long painted downtown scenes: traffic on Church Street, office buildings rising up before a blue sky. After the Twin Towers collapsed, she took sketches of Ground Zero's twisted metal, cranes and American flags, turning them into delicate watercolors almost childlike in their rendering of the new and devastated landscape. Poems by Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, T.S. Eliot ("Dust in the air suspended/ Marks the place where a story ended") and others are interspersed with Holabird's paintings, emphasizing the human emotion evoked in her studies of wrecked architecture as well as her own "odyssey toward acceptance." (Sept. 6)