In terror's wake, a new civic unity comes to town

Last week, the Century 21 real estate office here took its turn cooking dinner for the Giammona family.

In a burst of compassion and civic-mindedness, groups in Valley Stream, N.Y. - a town of 38,000 within commuting distance of New York - have set up a schedule for delivering home-cooked meals to local families who lost someone in the Sept. 11 attacks.

The outpouring of neighborliness, which this time took the form of turkey, Polish dumplings, and apple pie, is just one way the town has reinvented civic unity in the nine weeks since people here learned that 15 of their own - more than it lost during the Vietnam War - would not be coming home.

Similar scenes, of course, have played out in many US cities and towns, even in places not so directly hit by the tragedy. A newfound longing for a sense of community - the antidote, perhaps, to a new vulnerability - appears to be reviving Americans' slackened interest in volunteerism, public affairs, and civic life in general.

"There's definitely an uptick," says Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam, who has commissioned a survey to document what could be the greatest increase in civic engagement since the attack on Pearl Harbor six decades ago. If so, it would reverse his finding that Americans no longer bother signing up for the PTA and now opt to bowl alone instead of in leagues.

Already, there's some hard evidence that community involvement is up. A 4-H survey, for example, found 90 percent of American youths say they are more likely to volunteer since the attacks. Likewise, a Harvard University survey of US undergraduates shows a rise in community service over last year, as well as a higher number who now see politics as relevant to their lives.

The key question is whether this civic revival is temporary - a momentary embrace of victims of Sept. 11 - or whether it will endure and seep into the fabric of the larger community, affecting everything from sports leagues to voter turnout to staffing of volunteer fire departments.

In many ways, Valley Stream is a good laboratory for assessing the change. The attacks on the World Trade Center hit people here like a sucker punch. From the vantage point of the high-school's third-floor classrooms, students could see the burning towers on the horizon - and their awful collapse. That first night, local residents waited at the commuter-train station to learn whose cars didn't get picked up.

Among the 15 residents lost Sept. 11 were firefighters, police officers, a Cantor Fitzgerald bond trader, and a millwork foreman who happened to have a meeting on the 107th floor. The town paid homage to them all at memorial services. It draped itself in stars and stripes. Collectively, it raised tens of thousands of dollars to benefit local victims' families.

But after the initial surge of mourning and bonding, this middle-class suburb of single-family homes and strip malls has found itself transformed in ways both subtle and profound. Existing community groups, including churches, schools, and Boy Scout troops, have redirected their energies, finding new ways to be of service to their town.

"This is the greatest I've ever seen people getting together," says Mayor Edward Cahill, who has lived in Village Stream for 36 years.

While Valley Stream has many long-time residents like Mayor Cahill, the Long Island suburb also has seen a surge of newcomers in the past decade - especially African-Americans, Asian-Americans, and Latinos moving up from New York's outer boroughs. Indeed, one Paraguayan immigrant was killed a week before he was supposed to move from Queens into a new house here.

If people needed any admonishment to pull together, houses of worship here have certainly supplied it. At a Sunday mass last month at the Holy Name of Mary Roman Catholic Church, the Rev. Thomas Harold urged parishioners to "find new ways of expressing community." Sixteen children in the parish lost a relative on Sept. 11, and the congregation had already donated $17,000 for local victims.

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