Air Filters Still Gather Downtown Dust

 by Etta Sanders

"It's right here, under the sleeping bag and the violin and the dry cleaning," said Celia Hartmann.
 
Can you find Celia Hartmann's unused air purifier? It's the black object half hidden behind dry cleaning, a violin and assorted stored items. Photo: Carl Glassman

"It" is a squat black air purifier in the corner of Hartmann's Hudson Street apartment that was last turned on more than a year ago.

In the fall of 2001, HEPA was hip and air purifiers were the hottest things in Downtown home furnishings. (HEPA stands for high-efficiency particulate air filter.) Nearly 10,000 air purifiers were given away by the Red Cross in the months following Sept. 11. The American Lung Association distributed 400 of them. Hundreds of others, ranging in price from a couple hundred dollars to more than $700, were purchased with reimbursements from insurance companies.

"Everyone I know has a slew of them," said Pam Weadick of Warren Street, who continues to use a purifier in her six-year-old son's room, but gave two others away.


With fires still burning beneath the rubble and dust still visible on streets and buildings, air purifiers gave residents the feeling that there was something they could do to protect themselves as they moved back into their apartments. "They were very, very valuable. Your home could be a safe haven," said Kelly Adams, who lives on Reade Street with her husband, Cleveland, and their two children.

The air purifiers were not only a way to defend against unknown environmental risks, but also became a symbol of shared experience. "You'd go into someone's home and you'd know exactly what they went through," said Hartmann.

More than two years later, some air purifiers continue to hum away in Lower Manhattan apartments, but in many homes the appliances have become a relic. As worries about air quality eased, and the bother and expense of replacing filters set in, the machines were unplugged and wheeled into closets and corners, sold or given away. The once popular Care 2000 has become the Who Cares 2004. And a population that had become versed in the esoterica of particulate cleansing ("What percent of 0.2 micron particles does yours filter out?") has all but forgotten how important those numbers once seemed.

"I wonder if these will be the Lava lamps of our generation," said Bill Brand, of what he calls "the ubiquitous Tribeca air purifiers."

Nathan Weber, who lives on North Moore Street, said he still runs an air purifier in his daughter's room, but a second one "has become a kind of holder." Right now, he said, "there would probably be yesterday's newspapers piled on it." Hartmann's has also served other makeshift purposes. "It was a rolling coffee table for a while," she said.

Not all of those thousands of air purifiers are gathering more dust than they eliminate. Janet Kusmierski still runs two in her Murray Street living room-most of the time. "They make so much noise," she said, explaining why she sometimes turns them off. "It's hard to hear the television."

Brand also continues to find his air filter useful to guard against another neighborhood air pollutant, the exhaust from restaurants, in particular one near his Franklin Street home that serves garlicky tapas-"quite delicious to eat, but quite noxious to live above. The air filters," he said, "actually help."

Zoe, left, and Tess Adams still live with the hum of air purifiers in their Reade Street apartment, where three run at night and the other three during the day. Photo: Carl Glassman

Adams found that getting the right number and type of purifiers was an ongoing process. The one that her family got from the Red Cross was inadequate for their loft so they purchased two larger ones. Those were so noisy, they started turning them off during the day, but at night found the white noise effect useful for blocking outdoor sounds. For daytime, they got three machines that work by ionization, a quieter process than the fan-driven models, though the Adamses soon concluded that the machines may be so quiet because they have little effect on the air. They now own six air purifiers altogether.

Catherine McVay Hughes and Tom Hughes with their two sons, Matthew and Philip, and their seven air purifiers. "I was never concerned about dust before Sept. 11," Catherine said. Photo: Carl Glassman

"The air in my apartment is probably cleaner than anywhere in the rest of the country," said Adams.

Apparently she has not met Catherine McVay Hughes and her husband, Tom, who run four large BlueAirs, plus, in the winter months, three Venta-Airwashers (humidifier-air purifier combos)-24 hours a day.

The Hugheses overlook the Trade Center site from their lower Broadway loft and have seen the residue in their filters turn from a "fluffy gray" in the months following the attacks to sooty city black.

"I was never concerned about dust before Sept. 11," said McVay Hughes, the founder of Asthmamoms.com and a community outreach worker at New York University's School of Environmental Medicine. "But you look at your air purifier after a couple of months and it's pretty dirty and you say, 'Thank heavens I have this going.'"

"The filters are replaceable," McVay Hughes added. "But your lungs aren't."

Kathleen Moore, whose Cedar Street apartment also overlooks the site, said that dust spewing from the construction below and from the damaged Deutsche Bank building remains a problem. Two days after washing her windows, she said, "It looks like someone has thrown mud balls" at them. Not only does she use the two air filters she got from the Red Cross, she said, "I'm thinking of getting another one."

Her neighbor Mark Scherzer is less troubled. He used his Red Cross

purifier all the time at first, but it now sits "unobtrusively" in the corner of his bedroom, He still has concerns about long-term health effects from particles in the air, but feels the filter "is kind of a silly precaution." His roommate likes to turn it on because it makes his throat feel better, Scherzer said, "but if it were up to me, I'd donate it back to the Red Cross."

Pam Weadick agrees that donation is the way to go.

"I have noticed whenever I have gone to any neighborhood loft sales, there are always air purifiers for sale," she said, "I don't think selling them is the right thing to do, when air purifiers are probably the main item we all got for free. There are plenty of children with asthma who could use them."

But finding an organization to take them is not so easy. Several local nonprofits said they do not accept donations of used air purifiers. The Red Cross and the American Lung Association, which gave them away, will not take them back.

Hartmann, on the other hand, says she has no plans to get rid of hers, and not only because she would have to find another place to keep the violin. "It's more superstition," she said. "We can pretty much be guaranteed that if we got rid of it, we'd need it again."