I wrote this reflection on the one-year anniversary of 9/11 as a way to process what I experienced that day, but also to remember. Memories fade and even change. Revisiting this reflection on the twentieth anniversary of that horrible day both challenges and changes some of my memories of that day.
I live two blocks south of what was the World Trade Center, in a section of New York known as Battery Park City. It is the most beautiful neighborhood in Manhattan, with tree-lined streets, parks, and a spectacular backdrop of the Hudson River. Although quiet and residential, it is but minutes from the hyperactivity of Wall Street and City Hall—a small suburban enclave at the southern tip of the capital of the world. My wife Sandy and I bought a small studio apartment (our first home) the previous summer and had only recently finished decorating.
We loved living in Battery Park City. There was only one thing that concerned Sandy. Every so often, when walking past the World Trade Center, she would look up toward the towers and ask me in all sincerity, “John, do you think they could ever fall down? If they did, do you think they would land on our building?” She had asked the same question of the Empire State Building when we lived just a few blocks away. “What? Don’t be ridiculous,” I would scold. “Why would you even contemplate that?” Why would anyone?
***
The morning of September 11th I woke at 7:30, as usual, showered, shaved, and ate breakfast. Normally I would leave the apartment at 8:30. However, because I had a gig that night, I spent about ten minutes packing my drums so that I wouldn’t have to when I arrived home from work. I kissed Sandy good-bye and left the apartment at approximately 8:40. The 1/9 Train that I took to work passed directly under the World Trade Center. In fact, until recently, I had regularly used the subway station below the World Trade Center. I chided Sandy for being lazy when she suggested that we use the next stop, Rector Street, to save us from walking an extra few hundred feet, but I began to use it as well.
The weather on the morning of September 11th was perfect for late summer—cloudless skies with the temperature in the low 70s. Before crossing the pedestrian footbridge over the West Side Highway, I turned my head to the left toward the World Trade Center. The towers glistened majestically in the morning sun.
I must have entered the Rector Street subway station at about 8:45. Normally a train would arrive every two or three minutes. After waiting five minutes or so, some of the increasing number of people gathering on the platform checked their watches or folded their arms impatiently. When ten minutes had passed and a train still had not arrived, a voice over the loudspeaker announced that “due to an incident” train service on the 1/9 Line was suspended, and we would have to exit to the street and take an alternate line two blocks away. Amid sighs of frustration and muttered cursing directed against the MTA, I joined my fellow straphangers in trudging toward the exit. Yet no sooner had the announcement finished than a train arrived, which I boarded on my way to Midtown.
Once in the train, the conductor announced that we would bypass the World Trade Center station. Now, trains will often skip a few stops to make up time when they’re behind schedule, so even though the World Trade Center was one of the busier stations on the 1/9 Line, I didn’t think bypassing it meant anything foreboding. When we stopped at every subsequent station, however, including some which saw only a handful of passengers enter and exit the train, I thought that possibly there was a police investigation at the World Trade Center…a water main burst, perhaps, or a gas leak.
Exiting the train at 50th Street and Seventh Avenue at about 9:20, I still did not notice anything unusual. No one on the street was acting as though anything out of the ordinary had happened. (From where I work on Broadway, the view south toward the World Trade Center is blocked by the wall of office buildings around Times Square.) It was not until I was walking down the hall that led to my office that I suspected something significant had happened. The atmosphere was charged with anxious energy. Upon entering my office, however, I found my boss talking to one of my fellow editors about the vacation he had recently returned from. Had something happened or not? Suddenly, my office phone rang. A freelance editor was calling to say that she was going to try to make it in, although she wasn’t sure that she would be able to. “Why not?” I asked innocently. “Haven’t you heard? Two planes hit the World Trade Center!”
***
I turned to my boss in disbelief, but she confirmed the horrible truth. I immediately called Sandy at home. No answer. I left a message on our answering machine, urging her to call me back. I tried calling a second time, and once again the answering machine picked up. In the middle of the more urgent and worried message I was leaving, she answered. I told her to turn on CNN and let me know what was happening.
By now it was 10:00 and Sandy was relaying information to me as it was reported on TV. As she spoke, I heard a rumbling sound, as of distant thunder, coming through the phone. She screamed and then the line went dead.
Hours passed in the endless minutes that I waited for the phone to ring, because despite repeated attempts I could not get through to Sandy through my office phone (this was before we owned cell phones). When at last it rang, I was relieved to hear her voice, despite the fear I sensed in it. She was safe but terrified. She had watched on television as one of the towers collapsed while she waited for the impact to devastate our building. Looking out our fourth-floor window, which faced south, away from the towers, the scene had suddenly changed with the collapse of the South Tower. Bystanders who had been gawking from a safe distance at the smoke pouring out of the upper floors of the towers now fled in terror, running for their lives from unfurling fumes of ash and dust that chased them down the canyons of the Financial District.
The tension in her voice rising, Sandy mentioned that the dust cloud was reaching into our apartment as well, not only from without—through the window—but from within. Peering down the corridor, she saw the dust cloud seeping through the elevator doors. "What if the second building goes down?" she asked, nearly hysterical. I said nothing. I didn't know whether to tell her to leave the building or to stay inside. She had survived the collapse of one tower. Maybe she was better off inside, away from falling debris and panicked crowds. There was no activity from the other apartments on the floor. Sandy was screaming, crying, and praying. Somehow gathering herself, she said that she would pack some clothes and call me right back.
I went to the conference room where everyone had gathered to watch the news on the one TV in the office. I gaped at the screen as the second tower came down just like the first, collapsing in on itself rather than toppling over, as Sandy had feared. I again tried to reach Sandy by phone but to no avail.
Feeling helpless at work, I decided to walk to the deli owned by Sandy’s sister, thinking that Sandy might instinctively know to go there. I rushed out onto Broadway into a throng of humanity. The sidewalks were impassable. Cars were frozen in place. Pedestrian traffic flowed down the center of Broadway, turning the Great White Way into a living river of humanity. Amazingly, everyone appeared calm. No one was screaming. No one was running. No one was panicking. In retrospect, my own thoughts seem remarkably clearheaded. As I was walking down Fifth Avenue approaching 34th Street, I thought it wise to steer clear of the Empire State Building, in case it too might be a target. Instead I turned east and continued my trek south down Madison Avenue, eventually reaching the deli.
Sandy’s sister had not heard from her. It was now noon. Nearly two hours had passed since I had last spoken to her. My heart leapt when the phone behind the counter rang. "It's for you," Sandy's sister said, handing the phone to me. It was my friend Dave, who somehow had the presence of mind to try to reach me at the deli. An investment banker, his office was located across the street from the South Tower. He had been exiting the subway when the second plane struck approximately 80 floors above his head. As he was asking me about Sandy, the phone beeped. “Hold on," I said. "I have another call."
It was Sandy. She was calling from the phone in the lobby of our apartment building. Our plan was to have her walk up the east side of Manhattan and we would meet at a friend’s apartment in Greenwich Village. Hours later she arrived—shaken, trembling, but safe.
***
On the Sunday before September 11th, I finished my morning run and sat down on the grass in the small park in front of our building. Gazing up at the South Tower, I reflected upon Sandy’s fear of living so close to the towers. I looked at our building and then back toward the South Tower, trying to estimate the distance between them. “Well,” I thought, “if it toppled over like a tree in a storm and fell in our direction, yeah, I guess it could land right on top of our building. But that is ridiculous. Those towers are not coming down.”
***
Strangely, I feel about the loss of the World Trade Center and the nearly 3,000 who perished on 9/11 the way I felt after my brother died nine years ago this very month. One year later, it still doesn’t seem real, yet the reality of it never leaves me. Not a day goes by that I don’t think about the towers. Living where I do, it’s unavoidable. The subway line I now take lies adjacent to where the South Tower stood, and the train passes through the World Trade Center station, whose turnstiles remain wrapped in yellow police tape. Large planks of plywood with the words “Do not stop here,” intended to remind train drivers to refrain from stopping out of habit, are still visible.
Sandy and I lived in such proximity to the towers that we were almost too close to appreciate their imperious grandeur. Our daily activities saw us more focused on what lay below ground than above. While the towers were a place of work for some, and a tourist destination for others, for me they were the place where I met Sandy at the subway station each night to walk her home, the place I did my banking and clothes shopping in the mall beneath the towers. Only when my family came to visit the previous summer did I view the towers with the eyes of a tourist, from the observation deck atop the South Tower. As magnificent as the view from that aerie was, I was even more impressed the night I stood alone in the middle of the outdoor plaza between the bases of the towers, craning my neck skyward and gawking at their seemingly endless immensity. I felt humbled, insignificant even, to stand in their presence, yet at the same time proud to think that human beings were capable of imagining such wonders, let alone building them.
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