On September 11th, 2001, my place of work was 6 World Trade Center. I lived on the 29th floor of a tower on Manhattan’s west side that had given me a spectacular view of lower Manhattan with the towers in the center of that view. My home was next door to a Fire House. My neighbors answered the call that morning, and none of them returned.
9/11 happened in a world without blogs or Facebook and the ability to check-in as safe online after a significant event to let everyone know you are safe. Email was the closest thing available to social media. A couple of days after the towers came down, I started writing to let everyone I knew know how I was in one single mailing. I didn’t think I would write much, but once I started writing, I kept writing. I kept writing until just before the start of Rosh Hashana, a week and a day after the towers fell.
I just re-read what I wrote for the first time in years, and it has stood up as a time capsule of what it was to be a New Yorker during that week. I’ve edited it very lightly for the sake of clarity (I was writing fast). I have also deleted a couple of comments about our former Mayor that have not aged well (while keeping others in). I’ve deleted them less to avoid embarrassment but more to prevent them from distracting from the rest of the text.
Except for those minor edits, this is what I felt the need to share with the world about how I experienced that beautiful sunny morning and the following New York week . . .
Sent: Wednesday, September 19, 2001 12:48 AM
Subject: Happy New Year
Sorry this is obviously a broadcast email. I’ve received so many calls and emails over these last few days it has gotten difficult to keep up with the replies. I thought it would be better to collect my thoughts together in one attempt. I’m sending this to everyone I know has asked after me for whom I have an email address. If there is anyone who has asked you about me whom I don’t seem to have sent this to, please feel free to forward this on.
I started writing this at 11:00 on Thursday morning, two days and two hours after the WTC was hit. I started my morning going through the same ritual that I went through every time I re-entered my apartment over the first two days. I went to the windows that used to provide, as a realtor would put it, spectacular WTC views. I can actually see all of lower Manhattan. My view for the first five days was instead of the dust cloud. I would check which way it was blowing to see if it had subsided. Then, I would try to look through the cloud to see the Towers. Everyone did that. Many people admitted that they would expect to see the Towers emerge from behind the cloud when they first looked at it. I then remember that the towers aren’t there and turn on the TV.
I have my TiVo set to record BBC World News. If the cloud hasn’t grown since the last time I looked out, I watch the no more than three hours old BBC news. If the cloud has grown, then I turn on ABC or one of the other local stations and hope that it didn’t mean that another one of the buildings has collapsed. No one seems to be watching CNN. With the exception of CBS, the 24-hour coverage stopped on Sunday night. The local channels offered comfort. They showed us our home from a perspective that New Yorkers would recognise.
My plan on Thursday morning was that I would settle into doing some work at some point on Friday. My assumption was that I wouldn’t have an office to work from for some time. I did know that our business was up and running from our disaster recovery site across the river within hours of impact. I stayed sufficiently professionally engaged to check the Fed’s website periodically to see how things were going. (Although the markets were closed, the payments systems kept running all along). I also checked in with my boss twice a day. Two of our group’s admins were initially unaccounted for. It was hard to imagine how they could have gotten into trouble given our location in the WTC, but no one had heard from them by Wednesday night. My boss told me that she lost at least one friend. I spent most of the first two days tracking people down to make sure they didn’t worry about me, tracking down everyone I knew to make sure that they were OK. Given the lack of phone lines, it was an annoying and frustrating exercise. So far, I’ve heard from everyone who may have had anything but the remotest reason to be downtown. The loss that’s hard to deal with is that of my neighbors:
The building next to my apartment building is a Fire House. Honestly, my interaction with the Firemen next door over more than three years has been no more than moving my car on the ocassions when they yelled at me for blocking the access path to their House for their rig. If you’ve ever been in a car with me near the building, you may have noticed my sensitivity to not even wait in the turning zone). On another occasion, I asked them to move their double-parked cars when I’d unknowingly parked in one of their spots. After the reserved parking sign was pointed out to me, I sheepishly apologized and promised never to park in one of their spots again.
The Fire House was perfectly located for Tuesday morning. It’s two blocks away from the West Side Highway. The crew was downtown within minutes. All ten of them were caught inside one of the towers when it collapsed.
Since Wednesday morning people have been leaving flowers and candles outside the Fire House. The doormen in my building have been volunteering to help the night crew deal with visitors and reporters. One evening one of the doormen pointed out the fallen firemen’s cars, still double-parked several days on in the street where they had to leave them because some residents of my building had unknowingly taken their spots. When I came home on Wednesday night, the night shift Firemen were sitting around outside the Fire House, still dazed. The flower bed had grown. I spoke to Robert, one of the doormen in my building who had helped them. He went down with the other shift on their rig to Ground Zero. He told me about the scenes the cameras aren’t picking up on TV, of body parts strewn across West Street and mixed in amongst the rubble. Robert left me to help a woman who was stuck in one of the elevators. I walked outside where three of the Firemen were sitting on the edge of their rig. I told them I was sorry for their loss. I told them that I worked in the Trade Centre and was grateful for what their friends had been doing. It was a small and probably pointless gesture. Although the Firemen thanked me, I don’t know if my gesture meant anything to them. I needed to say something, I couldn’t just walk past. I walked away from them with a deep empty feeling. I woke up late the next morning and turned on the recording of the 6:00 am BBC news. The 6 o’clock news included a BBC reporter broadcasting from outside my neighbors’ house, the sign “Rescue Company Number 1” behind her head. They showed the collection of flowers and candles and cards that had grown overnight.
By Thursday morning the city was very far from back to normal. On Tuesday, all the avenues were closed to traffic. I rode on a bike down 5th avenue to the East Village in the late afternoon. The silence, as the cliché goes, was deafening. Later that night, people had gathered in Union Square. Long rolls of brown paper were held down on the pavement by candles. People wrote messages and drew pictures expressing their feelings. I turned away from what was being written quickly after reading a few comments. There are still people who do still believe that no matter what happens, America is always wrong. Yesterday lunchtime, I took more time to read the scrolls and took in the diversity of people’s reactions. The two silhouettes of the towers, two long rectangles, took on iconic status as people drew their form together with their messages and other images. People who have not yet taken in the enormity of the human tragedy said goodbye to the two obelisks that had been part of their daily lives.
Other images:
A New York city bus driving down an empty 42nd street full of policemen taking up all the seats and standing packed tighter than regular passengers would ever be allowed during rush hour.
Police cadets drafted in to direct traffic across the blocked avenues.
A Clarkstown PD patrol car driving through the Manhattan streets, (where is Clarkstown?).
People gathering on street corners in Chelsea, holding candles and hands. Many of them sitting for large parts of the night on the curb on 8th avenue until the streets were cleared because of a bomb scare in the Empire State Building.
The Empire State Building on Tuesday afternoon, once again the tallest building in New York. I stood on 34th street that afternoon. I can’t remember the sky ever being that clear. I can’t remember ever being able to see the rocket tower structure at the top as clearly.
The World Trade Centre on Tuesday morning . . .
I woke up late. I decided the night before between running in the morning and going to work at 9:00 or going in very early and leaving early for a Spin class. I woke up later than planned but decided to run anyway. The morning was perfect. I felt good. My running was smooth; I lost myself easily in its rhythm. I ran down the Hudson River Park down to the Trade Centre. I ran around the pier converted into a golf driving range. As I normally do, I looked out at the river. The sun rose above the city. I saw the Statue of Liberty as it caught the sun’s light.
Further down the West Side the density of runners increased. My run from my home down to the top of Battery Park covers about six and a half miles. There are very few other runners as I start and end my run. The new purpose-made jogging, skating and cycling path fills up with activity as you head downtown. I gauge my progress by the other runners and by the proximity of the towers. I fix on them, my attention settled on reaching the footsteps of the two towers. New Yorkers pride themselves in differentiating themselves from tourists by saying that only tourists look up at the buildings in the city. That isn’t true. We always look up. We look up and see the colours the Empire State Building has been lit up with each night. We tell the weather by looking at the cloud cover or lack of it around the Twin Towers. We look up to be reminded about just where we live and why we are so proud of it. I fix my gaze on the Towers at the end of my run to remind myself of where I am, of the city I worked for years to move to, of the city I love.
As I ran downtown that morning, I also looked at the water of the Hudson; glints of sunlight were reflecting off the water. Seagulls flew just above the waves. I remembered a discussion with someone about recognizing and appreciating moments of beauty. I told her about my last sunset in the waves of the Atlantic on the last weekend of the summer. I recalled her agreeing with me about the importance of such moments and also about how she thought such moments were precious and that they couldn’t be had on a daily basis. In the enthusiasm of my run I wanted to go home and tell her I disagreed. You can find those moments every day. This morning was perfect.
I finished my run. The temperature was in the low seventies. I walked the last two blocks to my building. I felt the cool autumn breeze blow off the sweat on my skin. I showered. I had breakfast. I made myself a good cup of coffee. I was going to be late for work, I didn’t mind. Life was good. I was going to take my time this morning to appreciate it before I threw myself into what was going to be a very long working day. At 9:00 I prepared to leave and a colleague called from the airport. He was preparing to leave for London but had heard that a plane had hit one of the Towers. I looked up and out of my bedroom window to see smoke coming out of the North Tower and the fireball surrounding the South Tower.
More images:
Flyers stuck on walls, lampposts, subway stations appealing for help to find people not heard of since Tuesday morning.
More flowers and candles outside my neighbors’ house. The vases have been replaced by buckets. Ten men’s pictures framed in their window. The picture on the bottom left is of the Fireman whose parking space I took.
More Fire House’s all over the city with similar tributes in front of all of them.
Quotes of poets and authors chalked on the sidewalk along Broadway on the Upper West Side.
People run into each other in the middle of the street and hold each other in long embraces.
The Stars and Stripes hanging at half-mast on a cable hanging from a construction crane. The flag is everywhere: People hang it out of their windows. Dogs wear it on bandannas around their necks.
Union Square covered in candles, flowers and messages.
Ten men gathered to sing the national anthem on the north side of the square accompanied by a single trumpet. They sang “America the Beautiful” and the rest of the canon in calming gentle voices, barber-shop-quartet-style. They finished with an understated version of “New York, New York”.
Similar sights in Washington Square Park: A crowd gathered around musicians as they turned the clock back thirty years playing and singing songs like “Bridge over troubled water” and “Let it be”.
As the sun went down on Sunday night, I looked up through the arch at the top of Washington Square, up Fifth Avenue at the Empire State Building. They had turned the lights on for the first time since Tuesday morning: Red, White and Blue.
People have gathered in each other’s homes so that they wouldn’t be alone. The television was on permanently, not necessarily watched with total attention by everyone. Like members of any family, friends bickered over the remote. Everyone was, and is, inspired by the Mayor. His love for this city is obvious . . . David Letterman returned to the air last night. His moving monologue was replayed across the morning on the news shows. He said that he didn’t trust himself to return to the air and act appropriately. He said that he only did so because the Mayor had asked everyone to return to normal. He described how he was inspired by the Mayor’s very real courage. He carried on, visibly moved, to say how the city would never again take it’s heroes, the police, the firemen and emergency medical teams for granted.
Many of my friends volunteered for something. Many others tried and were turned away. I got the call to return to work on Thursday afternoon after sitting down for a couple of hours to start writing this. We are working out of our Disaster Recovery site in Jersey City. A business supported by 400 people is being run in shifts out of two large converted storage cupboards, each with 20 workstations sardined together in rows. All the managers are working in the canteen. Through the window, we can see Ground Zero from the other side. The smoke has cleared, and we can see buildings we shouldn’t be able to see behind the Winter Garden of the Financial Centre. In the medical center next to the canteen, counselors have been conducting sessions on a continuous basis. In the canteen, people take breaks from work and swap stories of where they were on Tuesday morning. They laugh and smile. They joke about their stupidity, about how they took so long to take in what was happening above their heads.
My aunt, my father’s sister, died on Sunday morning. I haven’t been able to focus on my grief for her. I will go to synagogue on Friday night to say khaddish for her. When I stand to say the mourner’s prayer everyone else in the synagogue will be standing as well. Last night was the start of the New Year. I didn’t manage to leave work early to accept either of the very kind invitations I received to celebrate the holiday. I had to go to work today.
I went to the West Side Highway last night. You’ve seen the people gathering there, waving flags, cheering, and applauding the police, firemen, construction workers and the others working on the clean-up. I waved a flag and applauded the two out of every three vehicles that were so obviously heading to or from Ground Zero. The drivers honked back. I walked home up the jogging path of the Hudson River Park, the first time I’d been there since my run on Wednesday morning. I received a call from a friend on my cellphone offering condolences for the loss of my aunt. We agreed we would make a plan together to make sure that we have somewhere to go next week for Yom Kippur. Around eleven o’clock I walked past a group of policemen standing outside Chelsea Piers. A woman walked up to them with a large tray of cookies she had baked. I walked on and was passed by a convoy of thirty to forty ambulances heading slowly up the Highway.
On Sunday night, I met my friend Stan and his girlfriend Marisa at that spot on the Highway where New Yorkers gathered to cheer the rescue workers on. Stan is a total mensch. If you don’t know what the word really means please look it up. No other word does him justice. I told Stan and Marisa about my aunt. We walked and sat and ate. Stan is a native New Yorker. We’ve been close friends almost since I moved to New York. Stan has long ago stopped regarding me as a migrant. The only reference to my “newbie” status in our relationship is the way he refers to me as “British Dan” to distinguish me from his other close friend, “American Dan”. On Sunday night, Stan felt it was important to point out to me, to make sure that I understood how incredible it was that people were voluntarily flying the flag in New York. New Yorkers don’t do that. That’s what people do in the rest of America. That’s what people do in America. Someone just rode past me heading to the park on a good fast bike, the flag flying from his handlebars. On September 11th, New York became part of America.
It’s supposed to take ten years before someone can call himself or herself a real New Yorker. I can’t tell people about my experiences during the blackouts. I can’t talk about what the refuse collectors’ strike was like. None of that matters anymore. Last week I jumped the line. Everyone who was in the city on September the 11th is a New Yorker in the only way that matters. I was thinking about moving out of Manhattan for a spell to save some money and wait for the property market to drop before buying somewhere in the city. I’d started to think of moving to places just across the Hudson in Jersey. There is no way I’m leaving this city now. Since moving here this city has been very good to me. Her heart is broken. I intend to stay here while she heals.
I’m going to a large dinner party tonight to celebrate the New Year and hope it will be a better one for my home, my family in London and in Israel and for everyone I care for. It will be a great evening full of good people. I hope you and everyone you care for have a wonderful and happy new year.
A Stranger in a Strange Land 