9/11/2001
“If we learn nothing else from this tragedy, we learn that life is short, and there is no time for hate.”
The sky above lower Manhattan on the morning of September 11, 2001, was a cloudless cerulean blue. It was a beautiful early fall morning, the kind of morning that makes it a little easier to say goodbye to summer. The air had the faintest chill, a prelude of things to come in the coming months as fall gives way to winter.
How can I recall so vividly a morning twenty-two years ago? Because I was there.
It was the last leg of my hour-and-a-half commute, a ten minute, two block walk from the PATH station below the north tower of the World Trade Center to my office on the 17th floor of the Woolworth Building on Lower Broadway. This journey started at around 6:30am, from my home in Pearl River, NY, where I lived with my family at the time.
I was 100 yards from the Barclay Street entrance to the Woolworth Building when the roar of a jet engine startled me by its proximity. Before I could even turn my head toward the source of the sound an explosion louder than anything I'd ever heard punched a hole through the morning. I looked up and found a gaping, charred hole where the top floors of the north tower of the World Trade Center used to be.
It was surreal. I had trouble reconciling what I was seeing. The evidence of my ears and eyes suggested that a jet engine had just flown into the World Trade Center. But how could that be? It was a clear blue sky; and jets don't fly that low except during takeoff and landing. I reasoned that it must have been a small aircraft but I couldn't reconcile the sound. Nor the massive hole in the tower, which was now smoldering, flames licking the edges of a vertical crater that spanned four or five floors.
A crowd started to gather on the street around me. One man ran by pointing up toward the tower and shouting "It was a plane!" One of my colleagues appeared at my side; we stared up at the tower in shock, a state of disbelief. After a few minutes we made our way into the Woolworth Building and up to our office on the 17th floor. There, we joined fifteen or so of our colleagues who were gathered in the southwest corner of the floor looking up at the fire starting to envelope the top of the north tower.
Thick, black clouds of smoke now billowed out of the tower and paper and other office debris floated from the hole in the building, riding the wind across the East River toward downtown Brooklyn.
"Man, that is going to hard to put out," I remember thinking to myself. I wondered how firefighters were going to get up there to get what seemed like an inferno under control. Then somebody gasped as the first body plummeted from the roof of the tower. Then another. I was grateful that our view of the street below was obscured by the buildings in between us and the World Trace Center; we were at least spared having to witness the bodies land on the pavement below.
[I feel compelled to point out that these events were happening in real time. Since that morning there have been hundreds of thousand of hours of video and news coverage and millions of words of analysis covering the events of 9/11/2001. But those of us gathered on the 17th floor of the Woolworth Building that morning didn't have the benefit of any of it; it was all going down right in front of our eyes, in real time. And it was horrifying and confusing and terrifying.]
As I watched those poor souls stuck on the top of the north tower choose to jump to their certain death to escape the fire something caught the corner of my left eye. I turned and saw another plane flying up the East River. It was flying much, much too low.
"There's another plane!" I shouted, seconds before it plowed into the south tower. A gigantic fireball erupted from the north-facing side of the tower. It was now abundantly clear that the crash of the first plane was not an accident.
Being inside a tall, iconic New York City building suddenly felt very unsafe. So we all grabbed our belongings and evacuated the building as quickly as possible.
I didn't have much of a plan besides walking north, toward home. I headed up Broadway, through snarled traffic and waves of gawkers headed in the opposite direction, toward the towers. From the radio of a truck that had been abandoned in the middle of Broadway I learned that another plane had hit the Pentagon.
I was now able to piece together some of what was happening. Planes, it seemed, were being used as missiles to target specific buildings. And there were potentially more of them up there.
I looked up and found myself standing in front of the Foley Square Federal Building. Could it be next? I picked up my northbound pace.
All I could think of was getting home to hold my kids, who were 5 and 2 at the time (my third hadn't yet been born). I had been trying to call home to let my then-wife know that I was ok; I knew she would be worrying because she knew that my commute took me through the World Trade Center.
After what seemed like a thousand tries I finally got through. She picked up and burst into sobs when she heard my voice. We agreed that we would meet in Fort Lee, NJ, just over the George Washington Bridge. I walked to my mother-in-law's apartment in the West Village, and she and her husband gave me a ride uptown. But all bridges were closed to traffic (I wasn't allowed to even walk across) so I waited with hundreds of other anxious commuters who were also trying to escape Manhattan and get home to their families.
Finally, after about thirty minutes, the NYPD started running shuttles across the bridge. I was on the first bus to depart and I remember feeling like it was moving across the bridge in slow motion as I anxiously scanned the Hudson River for airplanes that might have the bridge in its sights.
Once safely across, the bus driver dropped us off just over the bridge, on Rt. 4 in Fort Lee. I slung my bag over my shoulder and started walking north again, not realizing that the New Jersey State Police had (understandably) closed the Palisades Parkway to southbound traffic. It didn't matter to me, though; I was prepared to walk the twenty miles home, even if it took all night.
Twenty minutes into my walk my cellphone rang. My family was waiting for me in the parking lot of a diner in Ft. Lee, a twenty minute walk way. Once I reached them we fell into each other's arms before getting back in the car to head home.
During the thirty minute drive I looked out the window at the landscape speeding by, and, despite the shock and the sadness I felt grateful to be alive. But I knew that after that terrible day nothing would ever be the same.
In the evening, eleven or twelve hours after the first plane struck the World Trade Center, I was at home fielding calls from concerned family and friends. It was only then that I started to come to terms with the true magnitude of the events that transpired earlier that day, in ways both profound and personal.
Over 3,000 people were missing and presumed dead at the World Trade Center site, including scores of police and fire fighters. The two towers were now smoldering ruins; it was hard to imagine surviving their collapse.
Among the dead were two kids I grew up with in Patchogue, Long Island, both of whom worked for Cantor Fitzgerald; one of them was like a cousin to me, the son of my mom's best friend, a kid whose bar mitzvah I attended thirty years earlier.
Later that night, as I lay in bed trying to sleep, I listened for planes. But the skies were silent; all commercial flights were grounded for several days after the attack in what was the first ever unplanned closure of US airspace. It was many, many months (maybe even a year or more) before I could hear a plane overhead without being overcome by a sense of dread and deep foreboding.
It took a while to fall asleep that night. And when I woke up the next morning - September 12th, 2001 - everything was changed.