story6981.xml

story6981.xml

born-digital

story

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no

2002-09-13

Ever since I had moved with my family to Central New Jersey in
1993, I commuted from my home to my law office in lower Manhattan.
The last leg of my daily commute was a 22-minute ride on the Port
Authority Trans Hudson (PATH) train line. The last stop on that
trip was the underground station deep beneath the World Trade Center.

On the morning of 9/10/01, I had to stop off at my office on Wall
Street to pick up some papers enroute to a court appearance.
At exactly 8:46 a.m. on 9/10/01 I was exiting the PATH train and heading
up the escalator to the underground WTC Concourse level.

When I left my office on the afternoon of 9/10 I had already loaded into
my briefcase the papers I would need to cover court conferences scheduled
to be held on 9/11 in a lower Manhattan courthouse. The significance of
those minutes of preparation will remain with me forever.

Knowing I could proceed directly to Court and avoid the need to stop by
my office on the morning of 9/11, I left home bit later than I had the
day before. At about 8:50 a.m. I was in the midst of my daily PATH ride.
One of the mundane activities PATH commuters engage in every morning is
glancing eastward toward the lower Manhattan skyline, visible in the not
too distant horizon as the train approached and passed beyond the Journal
Square station in Jersey City, NJ. We had just been told we were being
re-routed to the midtown PATH terminal station near 33rd Street and Broadway
due to a "police action" ongoing at the World Trade Center. I glanced up at
the white towers of the WTC and saw a large, dark gray cloud of smoke
billowing out of the south tower, 2 WTC. Ironically, my law office had been
located on the 26th floor of 2 WTC about two years earlier!

At that point, I had no idea of the enormity of the events about to transpire.
I continued on to Manhattan believing my court appearances about 6 or 7 blocks
northwest of the Trade Center would not be affected by a "fire" that far away.
Shortly after arriving and exiting onto the midtown streets, I began to learn
what was happening. I observed a stream men and women in business suits,
briefcases and shoulder bags swaying at their sides, all striding North from
lower Manhattan. An attorney I had met in Court the week before happened to
be a member of that scurrying army. He saw me moving southward and stopped
long enough to tell me the buildings in lower Manhattan were being evacuated.

Having realized my only option was to return home to New Jersey, I began to
make my way westward towards Pennsylvania Station, intending to catch the next
outbound New Jersey Transit train. It was a futile attempt. By that time,
all bridges and tunnels leading in and out of Manhattan had been shut down
under a security protocol apparently in place for emergency situations.

I joined the thousands of other commuters scattered around the Penn Station
area, assuming a similar scene was being acted out in the vicinity of Grand
Central Station, the other main commuter terminal in midtown Manhattan.
At that point I happened to look southward to where earlier that morning
stood the twin towers and realized they no longer stood out in the lower
Manhattan skyline. I shortly learned from a nearby car radio that the World
Trade Center--and the concourse beneath it that I had been using on a daily
basis-was no longer there.

Eventually, the trains began to run and I joined thousands of shocked and
angry commuters in a trip home that I will never forget. The westbound trains
exit the tunnel under the Hudson River and enter into the daylight of Central
New Jersey. They then turn to the South, heading to Newark Penn Station,
the main terminal for westbound Amtrak and commuter trains.

While heading South from the tunnel exit on the daily commute home, one
usually turns his or her eyes eastward, grateful to see the fading Manhattan
skyline in the distance. It always signaled the end of another workday and
the beginning of the unwinding that would occur during the long ride home.
This time the view was anything by soothing. An unfathomable, smoldering
cloud of dust and smoke dominated the airspace over lower Manhattan. The
sense of leaving work and the City behind was replaced by the realization
that my daily trips to and from Manhattan would forever be over-shadowed by
the memory of the sites and emotions experienced on that day.

I still find myself glancing wistfully and sadly on my daily commutes at
the eternally altered lower Manhattan skyline, knowing that the events of
9/11/01 will forever be a part of who I am and how I live the rest of my
life. I'll re-live those walks through the lower concourse, of the stores
I shopped in and the countless people I saw there each day, not knowing who
amongst them I would never see again.

At some point there will be new buildings standing where the Trade Center
once stood. But the shadows of what had been there will always be reflected
in my mind's eye as I pass through on my daily commutes into and out of a
City forever changed.