It’s hard to bear witness to one of the greatest travesties of history. While you are watching it happen, you don’t know what to think, or if what you’re seeing is real or even if it’s very important… On September 11, 2001, it took a few hours for me to understand the magnitude of what I was witnessing. Like a typical New Yorker I got up to face a stressful day and kept plowing forward trying to do what I was absolutely sure I had to get done. Even in the face of what was actually happening, I was sure I was going to meet my client right up to the moment it finally registered with me this was a real disaster. Knowing that the detailed events of the day would quickly fade in my mind, the following is detailed diary of the events of the morning of September 11, 2001, right up until the point that I realized how serious things were. I have edited out a few devices from freshman creative writing and clarified a few things. These are my actual thoughts and actions in detail over a two-hour period as I recorded them later on that same day …
I woke up in a bit of haze after a late evening and little sleep. I was stressing out that I had a heavy day. I love Manhattan, but I don’t have the temperament to be in the big city all the time. To me, it’s a necessary evil of my business, and I hardly ever get to play in New York. I spend as little time as possible in the city, and as much as I can in the quiet, even boring, sanctity of Northwestern Jersey. I was anxious because the day included different locales, which meant a lot of crowded subways at the height of tourist season. This all culminated in my racing back uptown to find my car on the street and driving to the airport to fly to California. I dreaded the prospect of all that running around in one day for weeks in advance. I feared the worst thing as a mere logistical snag that made me miss my flight … little did I know…
I was not just flying to California but from Newark to SanDiego; the same route and carrier as flight 93 that came down in Shanksville, PA. Years later I could never imagine cutting it so close for a mid afternoon flight with today’s security.
At 7:30AM, I was I was pulling out of my haze; I was contemplating the relatively trivial logistics of the day. I contemplated getting a subway day-pass for four dollars, since it was going to be cheaper than paying a buck and half for each trip. I had a couple appointments downtown near Union Square, then over to Brooklyn and back home to the Upper West Side. The whole loop is accessible by subway, but some subway trips were really short and could be eliminated if I walked. It was such a nice day, and sometimes you spend more time waiting on the platform than actually moving. The anxiety of the flight hung over me. I checked my subway map while making breakfast, just to make sure I knew where I was going.
I was cleaned, shaved, dressed for business and checking my email at about 8:30 AM. My wife, Lisa, had just left for work. The NBC Today Show was on in the background – this was my usual self-employed morning routine. It’s somehow comforting to have mildly intelligent background noise and news in the morning since I am often alone at home. When the soft news programming ends, off goes the TV.
I watch the Today Show because I feel that it gives the most accurate pulse of middle America. I have always been deeply fascinated by morning television – like watching a slow motion train-wreck. If there is really nothing of substance in the news, the show is a mostly boring TV version of Ladies Home Journal. On a slow news day every half hour, NBC would quickly encapsulate the lead news stories in less than a minute – on a really slow day NBC had a hard time filling that minute. When the news minute was up, they cut back to filler. But if real world events were happening, NBC news would swoop in and take over the whole Today Show with hard news coverage of current events. On those heavy news days, sometimes the news pushed aside all the filler and clumsily mixed with the Today show personalities. I had intimately observed this Today Show news-metering phenomenon since my childhood. To me, how much time the Today Show allocated to NBC news for hard news was a metric that told me how concerned I needed to be about the world around me. On this morning, there were no worries.
Ironically, the summer of 2001 was such a dull news period, that the Today Show couldn’t even get people to watch the filler; the world was that complacent. Ann Curry was using the Today Show to sensationalize was what qualified as terror at the time: shark attacks in Florida. Oddly, shark attacks were lower than previous year, but there was nothing else going on so attacks were highly publicized by every news outlet.
This morning: Matt Lauer was interviewing an especially uninteresting effeminate character about some novel aspect of Howard Hughes life. It was truly a low in Today Show history. Like an image from the turmoil of the 60’s, SPECIAL REPORT suddenly interrupted the show. Abruptly the NBC news alert screen disappeared and raw footage of the first impact of a plane slamming into the World Trade Center. It was somewhat gingerly announced as if to imply: “this may be nothing” – an odd sentiment for one of the greatest yellow journalism machines of all time.
Local NBC in New York stayed live with the special announcement. The nondescript announcer was taking phone calls from witnesses. The first caller self-assuredly stated that the plane was a small plane, possibly a little four-person Cessna. The second caller said that it was a jet, but not a big one, maybe a private one.
I began to do a relatively random analysis of the situation in my mind. I really needed to have a successful day, so the force of denial was strong within me. My first thought was that there are a lot of private jets flying in and out of Teterboro, N.J. and maybe the wrong doctor just got his pilot’s license. My mind flashed on a personal pet peeve: how anyone can rent a huge RV with just a driver license, don’t they actually have to know how to drive a vehicle that large. Only a few weeks earlier the lead news story in the country was the death of pop-star Aliyea who had gone down in an overloaded private plane – somehow the two correlated my head for a second. Further the media was repeatedly reporting that New York airspace was overcrowded. Apparently with the Internet boom, air traffic control was on the verge of collapse. I had visions of the mayhem of what traveling through a New York airport had become. It made it easy to believe that just about anything like this was possible, including an under-trained pilot in private plane hitting the World Trade Center by accident.
I was stressed and totally focused on what I needed to accomplish at my meetings, and then getting through the rest of the day. I didn’t want to believe there was any issue –this sort of sounded like just another piece of hype on a slow news week.
I went to the bathroom and read the paper.
When I walked out of the bathroom a picture of the World Trade Center on fire was live on the TV screen. The stilted phone rapport between the callers and the announcer stumbled on. The second jet impact was shown live on TV in New York city. While the live picture wasn’t as dramatic as the later footage, it was very clear that it was not a small plane, but a jumbo jet smacking squarely into the middle of the World Trade Center releasing a huge orange fireball.
The announcer questioned if this could be a problem with air traffic control – which I really wanted to believe. A caller finally declared out right: “this is war.” The newscaster casually dismissed the caller and tried to keep the calm, not wanting to jump to any conclusions. The newscaster informed us that the World Trade Center was able to withstand the impact of a 727 – but the jet that just hit the towers was much larger than a 727, likely a 57 or a 67, I thought. For a fleeting moment I wondered if this calculation had included the consequences of the jet fuel in a fire, or whether the model was simply based on physical stress of impact based on some object the size of a 727.
I decided that I would take just my Daytimer downtown and not schlep my full briefcase and laptop. It’s hard to believe in retrospect that I was thinking I could still go downtown, but I was determined to get this deal rolling — fire in the World Trade Center or not, I had to try. Not taking my laptop was a good concession in my limited mental capacity at that moment. If anything, these events had heightened my stress about my meetings and my ability to get out to Newark and make my flight. I was absolutely sure that the World Trade Center could take the impact of a jet – the idea that it would not take the impact was never an issue in my mind.
I found myself with the remote in my hand standing in front of the door of my apartment. I was having a hard time hitting the off-button to leave when the phone rang. I always feel guilty when I am working at home, and felt worse about get busted watching daytime TV, quickly I turned off the TV. Not thinking about who it would be, I picked up the phone by force of habit. It was my sister-in-law, Lynda, wanting to know if my wife was okay. The first thing I thought was that making a phone call myself might be the best way to answer my questions about what I should do next — maybe I should call to see if my appointment was canceled. Not really paying attention to Lynda, I muttered, “I’m sure she’s fine.” Now I was on autopilot, all I wanted to do was get her off the phone without further panicking her. My mind was racing; should I go? Could I cancel right now? Lynda was very noticeably concerned and pressed hard with questions. I nervously told her that I had no more information than she did, but Lisa wasn’t going anywhere near that part of the city. Lynda kept on pushing, I plead ignorance again, and finally just rushed her off the phone. The phone call had made me much more anxious; I was really late now — so I hurried out the door.
I left my building and started walking down West 72nd hoping to catch the “2,3” Broadway express subway line down to 14th Street. I commented to a stranger that WWIII had just started; she said, “Yeah, I know, it’s going to be mad down there,” but we were still going ‘down there.’ The story was being played on TVs and radios all up and down my personal safe-haven of W. 72nd Street. By most standards, my neighborhood is not exactly the calmest and most civilized place in the world. But by Manhattan standards it is the tranquil uptown ‘burbs. Every person on the street without exception already knew what had happened. You could read worry on their faces. Yet like stress-driven-lemmings we fought to get on the subway anyway.
On the subway platform there was confusion. It was 9:20 AM and the World Trade Center buildings were still standing and on fire. There was eerie quiet that you don’t typically find on a subway platform. A transit employee was making announcements standing on the platform addressing the crowd; something I had never seen before, or since. The usually feisty early morning commuters treated him as though he was giving a news conference. He reported that none of the lines leaving the station would be stopping south of Chambers Street in Manhattan, but they still went on into Brooklyn. This implied that they were still running directly under the World Trade Center while it was on fire. After he made his announcements, questions pursued: “How do I get to downtown?” amazingly that didn’t sound as insane at the time as it should have. He repeated that trains were running very late and that we should be prepared to be very patient. Somehow we all still had to get on the subway headed directly under the World Trade Center.
At the time, I decided the logical thing to do was to jump on the first southbound train that came into the station, especially if there were going to be delays. I got on the #9 local – a train the ends at World Trade Center and would ultimately be but out of commission by the events of the day. After surviving the ordeal of finding a southbound train that was still running, I was feeling a little calmer. Finally I became aware of other people around me, and that something really significant was going on. People were on edge – some nervously chatty and overly friendly, some stoic and unapproachable. I was starting to realize how foolish getting on the subway was. As I passed Time Square and Penn Station — you could see fear and confusion on the faces of people on the platforms.
When I got to 14th street I decided that I did not want to stay on the subway. I had the option of making a cross-town connection to get to my destination. To do that I would have had to walk a long distance through the aged catacomb-like walkways to catch a cross-town train, the L. (Which is silly in retrospect, I just didn’t know the subways very well, yet.) The L-train would only take me two or three blocks. I had never made that transfer, and transferring to a train I have never ridden is one of the things that makes me the most anxious in Manhattan. I was in a strange place underground during what was unfolding as a significant disaster. Getting out of the subway was all I wanted to do. I walked directly up the stairs at the first exit I could find. My pace quickened as I attempted to head east to Union Square hoping to cover several blocks in less than a minute. I figured that once I was out of the subway, it was a beautiful day, I could catch glimpses of the towers, kinda like site-seeing, relax a little … I found myself east bound on 12th Street walking quickly.
At Seventh Ave, I could see the towers, they were on fire and the cloud of black smoke loomed straight up like a mountain range. As I walked down the next block it was very clear that there was a greater disaster in the making than I imagined. I passed a school where the scowls on the faces of parents were complimented by quiet, knowing looks on the children. Yet, I still hustled towards my meeting as fast as I could. Like every other idiot on the street I was pumping on the send button on my cell phone, trying to call my cell phone’s voice mail — I could not get a signal.
As I approached Sixth Ave., people start running down 12th St toward the Avenue so they could see the view of the towers. I also ran to see what was happening. I asked what happened because I couldn’t make out anything. Someone said that one of the towers had just collapsed. When I looked up I saw the North tower on fire at about the 80th floor and huge clouds of black smoke behind in with the normally black and white towers. It didn’t look any different than it did block earlier. I could make out a white line that looked the stone facing on the corner of the South Tower – it was faintly discernible in the smoke. To me, it looked like the tower was still standing. I kept wondering where would it collapse if it fell? How could it collapse? Didn’t have to fall to one side like a tree? The faint white line that framed the northwest edge of the South Tower tumbled like a fragile stack of thin white blocks. The tower had fallen, I had witnessed it, but I couldn’t really tell what I saw. As I turned to look up Sixth Ave. police were starting to block off the street. I saw a women crying. I was emotionless and confused – and still late for my meeting.
The streets had slowly started to fill with people. For some reason, I felt that it was imperative that I get to my destination, a faceless coffee shop where all us entrepreneurs liked to hold meetings (before Starbucks forced them all out of business). As I dashed the last couple of blocks east, the streets were flowing with people moving north and police were more obvious.
When I got to the coffee shop where I was going to have my meeting, it was closed. I looked around a bit. I hoped to find my business colleague, who was magically now my best friend. More than half the people on the street were trying to use cell phones, including me. Each pay phone had lines forming.
I realized I should head back uptown so I entered the subway and 14th and Broadway. It was one of the huge stations, in fact one I had been very lost in before. I was thinking to myself how returning to the subway was insane and yet still thinking of the subway as my salvation, my best way out. Like any New Yorker, I knew it was by far the fastest way all the way uptown – as if a cab was a really option with the police closing down streets. I remember going down the stairs and looking around for any kind of sign indicating that there was a state of emergency — any sign of the status of the subways — any information. I didn’t see any notices or any police rallying people. I went through the turnstiles and walked right by a police station, which strangely appeared to be totally calm.
There were not many people on the platform. I was very anxious to get on the train. As I walked down on the platform, there were trains moving through the station, so I figured I was okay. A completely unintelligible announcement came on the garbled subway public address. The only part of the announcement I could understand was the names of the lines “NRWQ.” In an odd personal moment of levity, I remembered a Saturday Night Live skit about NY transit workers unintelligibly squawking at each other as though their normal speaking voice were like a bad public address system. I assumed there were some cancellations, but I had no idea if all trains were all canceled-canceled or just the southbound trains were canceled. A second unintelligible announcement came. I stood and fidgeted for another minute, and a third unintelligible announcement. I turned to the group of people standing next to me and asked if they had deciphered the announcement.
It is not unusual to find people agitated and unresponsive on a NY subway platform at 10 AM. It took a while but I finally engaged someone, he looked at me as though I was from another planet. He hadn’t heard the announcements either. He was shell-shocked – he’d been at the World Trade Center. Another guy tried to convince me that they must have been running northbound. I remember asking how that could be if they wouldn’t be able to come from the south. He started to explain to me his theory about turning around trains (an actual physical impossibility). An officious guy walked by, barely looked up and cut him off and bluntly laid out the facts: “they’re not running at all; subway’s closed.” That ended that conversation, and we all started to file out.
The shell-shocked fellow started to walk out with me. It was clear that he wanted to talk to me but was sort of speechless. He told me that he had been in World Trade Center 6 when the first plane hit. He said, “I was in a meeting and the building shook. We had no idea what was happening; my boss said ‘we should get the fuck out of here.’ As soon as I walked out into the hall the windows were blown out, broken glass and bodies everywhere. I saw just a torso, no arms, no legs, just a chunk of meat. It must have come down from above.” What do you say to that? Trying to think of condolences and empathy, all I could do was muttered a soft, dumbfounded, “holy shit.” He was in a building across the street from the first building when it was hit; the impact was directly 70 floors above him. This quickly translated that things were, yet again, a lot worse than I was thinking.
I finally understood that I was not going to work on anything that day and I better prepare for the worst. This was now looking to be more like Pearl Harbor than a major building fire. The thought of Anthrax popped into my mind (no Anthrax threats had been made at this time) along with the idea that there could be additional attacks on the same day, including chemical agents. I was now in a big hurry to get back North. With survival a concern, it was absolutely imperative to me that I find my wife, get to my car by foot, or by cab if I was to be so lucky, and drive out of town to my house in New Jersey.
My new friend continued to tell me that he had been walking north from the WTC in a daze since the first impact. He had made it up to 14th Street, where he decided it was safe to catch a subway. In retrospect it is remarkable how 14th St. continues to be the magic dividing line in the mind of New Yorkers. He had picked it as the place to be safe to get back on the subway. Ironically he could have walked out of the building and got right on the same subway I had taken downtown and gone right back uptown – he would have been out at Penn Station already. But he chose to walk to 14th Street.
We walked upstairs and tried to ask the police at the station the status of the subways. I found it odd, that with a police station in the subway station, the police would have just left us standing stranded on the platform indefinitely. The cops had no information to offer. They were very nice, strangely relishing the attention, some even smiling.
I remember trying to hurry out of a northbound pedestrian tunnel hoping to avoid the rush up the stairs in the middle of Union Square. Now, for some reason, the catacombs were preferable place for people to hide. I was stopped by a cop and sent back to the mayhem at main entrance. My new friend was with me.
I guess I was subconsciously holding on to the idea that some miraculous response had kept casualties very low. I have been in a number of natural disasters in my life. Strangely, each time damage and fatality estimates were always initially very high, and each time, in the end, the press had wildly overstated the casualties. I couldn’t help to think about the fateful October day in 1989 when I was driving up Interstate 880 in Oakland directly towards the Bay Bridge on my way to San Francisco to watch San Francisco play Oakland in the World Series. At the last minute I chose to head up Edwards Ave. next to the Oakland Coliseum, home of the A’s, to go to my Oakland apartment. I decided I should watch the game in peace instead of being razzed by my hardcore pro-San Francisco friends. That relatively random decision kept me from being on the freeway approach to the San Francisco Bay Bridge at the time it collapsed in one of the largest earthquakes ever reported. In that disaster, estimates of the dead were in the hundreds, in essence, I was one of the assumed dead. In the end, there were only a handful casualties.
As we stood on the street trying to figure out what to do next, an Amish man came up to ease-drop on our conversation to see if we could provide him with any useful information. Again, I was laughing inside. What was this guy doing in this part of New York? Where was his horse and carriage? I casually studied him to see if this was for real. He had a small gray beard and a wide brimmed hat; he was not Chassidic, which would be the easy conclusion for New York. I looked to see if he had buttons on his clothes, he didn’t. I will never forget the look of bewilderment on his face, he never said a word and then he disappeared. (Amish come to the Union Square farmers market all the time; it was just new to me.)
Somehow that was the moment that I realized that in a single day, the world had changed completely, permanently.
We started to walk north up Broadway. I tried to make lighter small talk with my friend. He was too rattled to do anything but ramble on with morose philosophy. He wanted to get to Penn Station to pick up the Long Island Railroad home. I felt a need to try to console him, stay with him, talk to him and help him. I finally realized that he was alive and healthy and I had my own problems.
The world had now changed forever. I had been too close for comfort to what was to become “ground zero” and now I needed to get out of there. I knew that my next objective had to be finding my wife, buying her walking shoes to replace her heels and getting us out to NJ.
This is where I ended my story. I remember very well what happened next. But at that point I was putting things into a personal perspective that’s curious about me, but not so historically interesting. I didn’t think that was appropriate to report at the time.
When I reached my wife’s office at a major agency, they were convinced that there was no reason to stop working. They even seemed offended that I told them I was taking her with me, NOW. We bought tennis shoes for her on 23rd Street for cash and walked all the way to 72nd Street.
A few key highlights of the walk were people verbally accosting a Sikh cabbie, because somehow his turban implied he was related to the event. I remember the eeriness of an empty Times Square. And I think the weirdest thing was that Central Park horse and buggy tours were still continuing in a business as usual fashion on a perfectly lovely day. When we reached 72nd Street, the arteries leaving the city were closed, so we waited. Oddly you couldn’t get a table at eating establishment, they were jammed. It was like some sort of holiday, something bad may have happened but it was clearly a day off and no one was working.
At 3PM the George Washington Bridge opened. We drove from our Pied a Terre to our house in New Jersey. My wife stayed glued to the TV. I opted for beer and power tools. I rounded up scrap lumber to build a doghouse in the exact style of our bungalow. Things were silent for days … 10 months later we had our first child. I saw God in her eyes when she looked at me, and my years of whimsical agnosticism were over. The rest as they say, is History.
