At 10 a.m. that day, attack plus one hour, there was an exodus of ashen New Yorkers on the bridges to Brooklyn, girls in suit-pants and heels, and men half-naked in tennis shoes, an orderly flight all in all, but there was fear and awe and silence. I was riding in on a bicycle over the Brooklyn Bridge, against the wave, and cops were saying “Turn back, they might blow the bridge too” — a false rumor, the day was full of them — and F-15 fighter jets pulled long pounding low-altitude arcs over Manhattan. The fallen towers spread soot over the sun, which went out blood-orange and then shone in very blue sky, and the day turned hot. Flurries fell, the sun silvered the flakes: ash on every shoulder and every head, whole ash men; men with bloody eyes bandaged; wet towels over mouths; much thirst, and already the asbestos-filled air making throats hurt and skin heat up, and who knew if there wasn’t something else in the air, anthrax, radioactivity.

When the towers burned in the moments after the collision and before they fell so impossibly and unthinkably, there were people jumping from 70 and 90 stories up, terrified of the fire, which burnt, the firemen say, at 6,000 degrees. A man and woman held hands and leapt. You could watch the heavy ants falling, and many children stood at the windows of schools nearby. Their teachers, too shocked, did not pull them away.

Trucks full of masked volunteers, a dozen ambulances howling, racing south, and in the plaza of the federal courts, scores of men and women frantically nailing plywood planks over long two-by-fours lined parallel 2 feet apart.

“They’ll need a lot more stretchers than this,” a dusty man said walking up. He tells me there are gangs stealing bicycles in Zone 1, busting open Fed Ex trucks, taking advantage of the chaos. Another man saw what was being built. “Oh, God!” he cried and put his hands to his head and leapt backwards.

Rumors of 20,000 dead.

At 7:45 p.m. Tuesday, all power gone from lower Manhattan, 20 blocks of darkness and men running, and the fires stirred winds through the canyons of the buildings, kicking up poisonous dust storms of glass and lime and concrete; 4 inches of ash on cars abandoned with doors open. We wore goggles and facemasks and everyone was in shadow, with flashlights, watching the ground, and the streets looked white as deserts; “the longest night,” the firefighters had said, and we had no idea what they meant or how many they’d lost until the first ruins of the towers rose before us like bombed churches in mist, little red fires at its heart, and we could hear the cries for surgeons among the rubble, someone needed an amputation. And all around were burnt hulks of ambulances, cars, dump trucks, fire trucks — crushed when the towers fell.

“Eyewashes! Eyewashes!” the medics cried out, fanning in teams of two, and the firemen thanked them. And then, into a wall of smoke and out, we entered the very bottom of Ground Zero, and for a moment the medics did not cry “Eyewashes!” This was Hiroshima in miniature: rubble and girders and twisted metal stretching into haze and dust, framed in Roman ruins of delicate charred lattice walls six and 10 stories high, white-pale in arc lights or disappearing in purple plumes — and over the rubble of 200,000 tons of steel and 425,000 cubic yards of concrete and 43,000 windows and 23,000 fluorescent light bulbs, the firemen trawling, stumbling, digging, blasting water, thousands of men among the sharpened steaming warped metal that flipped up underfoot, like bear-traps, tore at legs and popped into chests.

And you knew then that this dig would take weeks, and you’d mention this to a fireman sweating in ash, and he’d say, “Weeks? Fuckin’ months. Fucking forever.”

Within hours, cigarettes taste like burnt plaster and asbestos and sometimes, oddly, human flesh; “real flavor,” someone joked. The hounds and German shepherds are loosed, slipping over the dust on girders, sniffing. You watched the fleet-footed dogs nearly lose their balance over voids 20 feet deep in the rubble; they descended into holes, and then you watched the slimmer of the men do the same thing, hole-crawls with a flashlight and a crowbar.

Volunteer Vinnie Dolan, a young father from Brooklyn, did this again and again, raw and dazed and blank-eyed, spitting green and black phlegm. He brought up three police officers, and at the end of it, the muscles in his cheeks were slackening and tightening involuntarily, his voice was mucusey. At any time the rubble could come down, the smoke kill you in there. A dog came out asphyxiated, and died.

Relief at the smashed-open supermarkets where the meat was already rotting. In these early hours when the volunteers were few, the food supplies random, cops and firemen and EMTs looted cigarettes, candy, water, chips, big boxes of aspirin — terrible headaches that night, it was the asbestos — and Albuterol and inhalers for the asthma attacks. You took what you needed: It was a zone of mud and rubble and men in fatigues and gas masks, and no refrigeration or electricity or running water; you thought to yourself that much of the planet lives like this, and you had no idea what city or country this was. Then you saw cops in the abandoned Starbucks trying to make frappuccinos.

I was given black body bags and Civil Defense body tags and was told to hand them out to the firemen as the dead were brought out, but the bodies were a long time coming. The men dug in groups of two and three, throwing up dust and investment receipts and printer paper and pieces of pipe and wire, and the bucket brigades were just forming. The diggers find flesh; they finger it, hold it up to flashlights; it looks like shredded rope, but “That’s skin,” they say matter-of-factly, then louder, “Think we got a body!” and a dozen men converge. New clues unearthed with hands and shovels: A white knit sweater shredded on tin shrapnel, and a pair of glasses, fully intact — incredible in this mess — and a Nike shoe. “Got a shoe, Chief. Whaddaya think?”

“People get blasted right outta their shoes in shit like this,” replies Chief. “Body could be here. Body could be a hundred feet away.”

A hundred feet where? When the dogs roamed the rubble, they nosed and loitered every three or four feet — everywhere the sick smell of it, parts of bodies, parts of parts, entrails in dust — even the men began to hunt by scent. “I can smell it,” said a fireman, wrinkling his nose. “Right here.” But he found no body. And when the bags went out, they were slumping at the middle, sloshing like water balloons. By the end of the day on Sept. 18, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani announced that only 218 remains had been removed.

A fireman in a Brooklyn bar shook his head at the news. He had done a 24-hour shift. “You have 10-story buildings that leave more debris than these two 100-story towers,” he said. He was awed. “Where the fuck is everything? A serious week-long search and we’ve found 200 in a pile of 5,000? What’s going on? Where is everyone? Why aren’t we finding more bodies? Cause it’s all vaporized — turned to dust. We’re breathing people in that dust.”

Brian McGuire of Rescue 5 from Staten Island told me 300 of his brothers died on Tuesday morning, the worst disaster ever for the firemen of New York City. McGuire hunkered thin-lipped in the bed of a truck tumbled with supplies, the truck was pulling out, fleeing the shadow of a building that was ready to collapse. Vinnie Dolan and I had just been up in that building, ran 20 stories to get the last unwilling residents out; an old woman hunting her parakeet, she wouldn’t leave without the bird.

So I was trembling when I climbed in the truck with McGuire, and he was looking away. “I lost 10 buddies tonight,” he said at last.

There would be firemen marching in the darkness in single file, looking like medieval warriors, carrying awls, pikes, shovels, hoes, and you looked at them differently now, their processions almost holy, because you saw how big their grief was. They’d worked 10 and 20 and 40 hours in the rubble to forget it, to make something good of it, to find a man, a whole man, give him a decent burial, and perhaps find a survivor. You saw them planted in sleep on brown couches pulled from the smashed windows of ground-floor offices, with signs saying “Dave’s Café. Le Menu: 1) water 2) water 3) cold water.” You saw them sitting on curbs, in rows of stunned silence, soot-faced, white-eyed, or on benches in ash-scummed restaurants alone in front of candles, and when you saw them you gave them water. And some wept quietly, then quit it suddenly, like hanging up a phone.

And some, just a very few, were saying evil things, crying vengeance, “Nuke ‘em”; “Kill Allah” written in ash on walls. Stories, seeping in from outside, of jingoist reaction, feral and blind, pig’s blood thrown on mosques, veiled women cursed in supermarkets — war on the Middle East, world war.

There were signs on the inside of madness too: Midday on Sept. 14, a woman arrived screeching, her husband was alive in a void, he had just called on a cellphone from beneath, and the world of the rubble stopped, turned, wrapped itself around her; they dug faster now, doubling their forces. And then it turned out she was a cruel fraud, the story a hoax, and the woman was arrested and was said to be insane.

At the candlelit vigils in the days afterward, there were little cities of lights on the streets. Vinnie Dolan and I watched them in exhaustion.

A candle flared, I nearly jumped; bad nerves. “Can’t sleep,” said Vinnie. “Three hours last night. Hard to sleep.”

The candle had been glued in a Styrofoam cup and the cup had caught fire, hissing. Finally, the candle toppled over in the blaze.

Trying to convince dad @JonHuntsman to run for mayor of NYC. Thoughts? #whynot?

— Abby Huntsman (@HuntsmanAbby) May 17, 2012

Why not? I mean sure he has never lived in New York and has no connection to the city, but why not?

Of course, now that this idea is floating around, very rich and well-connected morons just might set about trying very hard to make it a reality. Jon Huntsman is a creature of the sort of oblivious center-right rich folk who bankrolled the hilarious failed New York campaigns of Harold Ford Jr. and Reshma Saujani. They would like very much to see another one of their class be the mayor of their city, after Bloomberg ends his term (if he ends his term). The Republicans have essentially no candidate. (I still wouldn’t put it past Police Commissioner and professional harasser-of-minorities Ray Kelly to mount a run, but at the moment he’s sounding disinclined to.) And Jon Huntsman is the sort of nationally prominent “independent” candidate all three major New York newspapers would love (the Daily News would love him the most, obviously, but the Post would love him because he is secretly not actually that moderate).

Jon Huntsman — whose tax plan called for the complete elimination of taxes on capital gains and dividends, as well as the elimination of the Earned Income Tax Credit, the Reagan-era tax benefit for poor people that used to be the sole form of welfare that conservatives supported, and who also wholeheartedly supported the Paul Ryan plan to fix the deficit by eliminating Medicare and not making rich people pay taxes — was of course beloved by the press and labeled a reasonable moderate when he ran for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. He was mistaken for a political moderate primarily because he does not believe that God created cavemen and dinosaurs at the same time, roughly 4,000 years ago. Huntsman, who supports the complete repeal of Dodd-Frank and is strictly antiabortion and anti-gay marriage and anti-healthcare reform and pro-gun, is now essentially a symbol of the dignity and sagacity of the “radical center,” even though he is a conservative Republican.

So obviously New Yorkers would be thrilled to vote for this guy. I endorse this.

The Obama administration would also like the Bloomberg endorsement, and both campaigns are trying very hard to win the mayor’s support, as Michael Barbaro writes in the New York Times today.

But as his mayoral term winds down, he has told advisers that he is willing to back a candidate this time around, touching off an intense competition for his support in the general election.

“I’ll see down the road,” the mayor said coyly on Tuesday when asked about an endorsement. Describing his impressions of Mr. Romney and Mr. Obama, he made clear that he sees a wide gap between them. “They’re very different, and they give the public a real choice,” he said. “It’s hard to argue that you can’t tell the difference, if you will. They run the spectrum on lots of different issues.”

I would be surprised if Bloomberg ended up endorsing anyone. He loves the attention he receives as a potential endorser, but he cherishes his “non-partisan independent” label much more, and an endorsement of a major-party presidential candidate would sully his carefully maintained brand. He is leading both campaigns on, just as he did in 2008.

In 2007 and 2008, Obama tirelessly wooed Mayor Bloomberg, meeting with him multiple times and showering him with public praise, and he never received an endorsement. McCain also tried to win the mayor’s support to no avail. There was even (dumb) speculation about each campaign considering offering Bloomberg the running mate gig. Since Obama took office, he has continued attempting to win the mayor over, inviting him to golf and lunch at the White House and so on. When Bloomberg was running for his third term, in 2009, Obama did no campaigning for his Democratic opponent, Bill Thompson. (Though then-press secretary Robert Gibbs did allow, in a cagy response to a direct question, that the president “would support the Democratic nominee” in his position as “leader of the Democratic party.”) The mayor has returned the favor by repeatedly, quietly undermining Obama, dismissing him as arrogant to his good pal Rupert Murdoch and trashing Obama’s deficit reduction proposals as, you guessed it, class warfare.

The absurd thing is that there is, policy-wise, practically no daylight between Obama and Bloomberg. The president is a moderate Democrat who believes in the importance of deficit reduction and comprehensive tax reform. The mayor is a liberal Republican who believes the exact same thing. Both of them are “education reformers,” both want immigration reform, both support carbon emissions reduction, both are pro-choice, and the list goes on. They don’t agree on everything, of course. Bloomberg is more strictly anti-gun than the president, and openly supports gay marriage. You know, just like Mitt Romney.

The only reason Bloomberg would have, from a policy perspective, to back Romney over Obama would be over Dodd-Frank, which Bloomberg opposed, and Obama’s plan for a millionaire’s tax bracket, which Bloomberg thinks is a “silly” idea. But the mayor’s stated position is that all the Bush tax cuts should be allowed to expire, which is the opposite of the Republican position. His other disagreements with the president are solely about rhetoric — the mayor finds any whiff of economic populism or Democratic partisanship distasteful — and personality. Not that Mayor Bloomberg, the wise technocrat who always carefully weighs the evidence before making his rational decisions, would support a candidate whose entire platform is wildly at odds with Bloomberg’s stated positions, simply because the candidate is nicer to billionaires like Mayor Bloomberg. That would be absurd!

The White House’s attempts to win Bloomberg over seem to me perpetually doomed to failure, though I imagine they’ll continue to embarrass themselves seeking his support, as he continues flirting with Romney.

I asked her a few questions about “endangered local signage.”

How are you defining “Vernacular Typography”?

I guess it should technically be Vernacular “Lettering,” but I define Vernacular Typography as the found lettering that exists in the built environment and surrounds us everyday. It doesn’t have to be pretty or use an existing typeface, it’s just any visual representation of language.

How do you think New York City’s vernacular typography differs from other cities around the country and the world?

New York’s vernacular typography is unmatched in terms of intensity and variety of signage. On any given block, you can see the city’s forgotten history through the layers of still-visible signage in basically any medium. The typescape is also much denser than in other places because the city evolves so rapidly and retail turnover is so high.

Which New York City typefaces are your current favorites?

I’m partial to the type and signs I grew up seeing every day, most of which have disappeared (Gertel’s Bakery) or whose surfaces seem to be slowly melting away (Ideal Hosiery).

I love any type that somehow still clings to life or relates directly to a time and place (Horn & Hardart Automat).

And of course, you can never go wrong with beautiful neon (Montero’s).

What do we lose when the vernacular typography of the city streets vanishes from sight?

A sense of the city’s history, and also a precious visual resource. Typography can you tell you a lot about local culture and urban communication and when we don’t see it, our sense of the city is diminished.

What do you think might be the psychological impact of living in a city where the native typography is replaced by homogeneous corporate signage?

I think there’s less of a personal connection to a specific place. With standardized corporate advertising, signs are no longer representative of a group of people or a neighborhood, just a business that could be anywhere in the world.

For natives, connections to the past are lost, so a sense of home or a memory of a place is devalued. And for visitors, there’s less of the unique experience you get from traveling someplace new.

Vernacular typography is such an incredible marker of regional identity, spatial orientation and even personal history. If we lose it altogether, we not only lose that individual and cultural connection, but also a physical map of the city, which is why documentation and preservation are so important.

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But the NYPD’s “covertly follow every single Muslim in the tri-state area” approach to counter-terrorism has its defenders. Like Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who believes Americans Muslims have the right to worship wherever they see fit so long as they don’t pay any attention to the unmarked vans parked across the street.

And the department argues that it is allowed to carry out surveillance wherever it chooses, because there’s no law against just going around looking at things and taking some pictures, right? No, of course not, unless you look sort of Middle Eastern.

The NYPD earlier this week announced that they had totally caught some people who were almost definitely probably Iranian spies. These spies were caught red-handed spying all over the place!

Authorities have interviewed at least 13 people since 2005 with ties to Iran’s government who were seen taking pictures of New York City landmarks, a senior New York Police Department official said Wednesday.

The NYPD’s Mitchell Silber told Congress that Hezbollah and Iran definitely want to blow up New York, and the proof is three incidents of people “associated with the Iranian government” getting caught photographing things, in New York. (I am not much of a terrorist, but if you want pictures of New York City landmarks in order to figure out how best to blow them up why not try Flickr? There are hundreds of thousands of photos of every landmark in the city already online!)

While other so-called intelligence experts say ” there are no known or specific threats indicating Iranian plans to attack inside the U.S.,” Long Island-based Islamaphobe Republican Congressman Peter King and documented supporter of terrorism wants us all to be on high alert, because Hezbollah is everywhere:

Opening the hearing, King said, “We have a duty to prepare for the worst,” warning there may be hundreds of Hezbollah operatives in the United States, including 84 Iranian diplomats at the United Nations and in Washington who, “it must be presumed, are intelligence officers.”

Stop telling the NYPD not to spy on all the Muslims, everywhere! If they don’t keep tabs on all of them, the Iranians will get us!