Even before 9/11, New York was no stranger to tragedy

A walking tour of a great town's lesser tragedies begins on Liberty Street at Ground Zero, where a hobo in grease-stained jeans plays The Star-Spangled Banner on a flute for tourists' handouts, forgets the martial tune, and, like the city, starts anew.

Down here, where glinting new glass towers rise and two vast, mournful pits absorb the roaring cascades of New York's anguish, every T-shirt, placard, postcard and fireman's cover-all swears the same oath: We Will Always Remember. We Will Never Forget.

But Sept. 11, 2001, was not the only long, dark day in New York's history. Walk a mile or two on these frantic streets and horrors little known today come back to life, and death, their own vows of eternal remembrance a whisper amid the din.

First, two short blocks to Wall Street, where the fragile Dutch outpost of the 17th century braced itself with sharpened pickets against the natives of an island that the Lenape called Mana-Hatta. At the corner of Wall and Broad, a small photograph of upturned motor cars and shell-shocked witnesses invokes a terror attack in September 1920 that was a prequel to the plague of modern times: a mass of dynamite and iron weights hidden in a horse-drawn cart, primed to massacre the lunchtime crowd.

Thirty-eight people died. The setting - the plaza fronting the New York Stock Exchange, the palatial headquarters of the banking house of J.P. Morgan and the steps of Federal Hall, where George Washington was inaugurated as president in 1789 - has scarcely changed in 90 years. A civic signboard memorializes the carnage and notes that "it was simply assumed - though never proven - that an anarchist's bomb had been aimed at the bank."

On the north side of the Morgan building, there are dozens of small, round pits in the blocks of stone - the lingering evidence of a savage crime that was never solved. We touch them, and walk on.

Up to Fulton Street, next, where New York City waited to welcome the passengers from a fabled ship that never reached shore. A small, landlocked lighthouse, once proudly perched atop a seamen's church, is all that remains of the city's shrine to the RMS Titanic, "given in memory," said the fundraising flyer in 1912, "of the engineers who sent their stokers up while they went to certain death; the members of the heroic band who played while the water crept up to their instruments, and of the officers and crew who put duty ahead of personal safety. It will be given in memory of those in the steerage who perished without ever realizing their hopes of the new land, the America of endless possibilities."

Now the only people lingering by the shrine are waiting for the First Avenue bus.

We run now - no one walks on Mana-Hatta - up prosaic Allen Street, through a Chinatown that seems to double in size and sizzle every year, past storefronts screaming FOOT RUB NECK RUB - no time for that - to the tenement at Number 105, a sevenstorey brickwork at the corner of Delancey where, in March 1905, a fire killed 30 residents, which was a lot for those days.

Ten minutes further north, down finally quiet, tree-lined streets of fey boutiques and small cafes, is Tompkins Square Park, infamous in the 1970s as a drug pushers' haven, and latterly as the birthplace of Hare Krishna in the New World and the venue where, in 1989, a madman served soup to vagrants brewed from the brain of a topless dancer.

Near the restrooms stands a humble pillar of Tennessee marble into which have been carved the figures of a boy and a girl looking out to a foggy sea. This is the monument to the manifold dead of the General Slocum, a sidewheeler that took 1,342 German immigrants on a summer excursion in 1904 and caught fire in the East River, killing more than a thousand of them when the ship's fire hoses disintegrated and its life rings proved to be filled with powdered cork and strands of iron to give false weight. It was, a sign informs the few who seek it, New York's worst disaster until 9/11.

In the marble shaft, these words are carved: They were Earth's dearest children, young and fair.

One more stop: the Brown Building off leafy, jazzy, Washington Square in Greenwich Village, now a tower of chemistry labs for New York University, but in 1911, a squalid pile of sweatshops where 146 seamstresses, most of them teenage girls, were incinerated - trapped in the inferno behind doors locked from the outside to prevent the workers from stealing - in the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire.

"Out of their martyrdom," reads a plaque high on the outside wall, "came new concepts of social responsibility and labour legislation that have helped make America's working conditions the finest in the world."

This is New York's immemorial equation: terrible hours of communal grief balanced by millions of honest lives lived, careers launched, children fathered and dreams fulfilled.

Allen Abel's weekly Postcard from Washington column explores American culture, politics and current events for Canadian readers.