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story8.xml

born-digital

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2002-01-26

On the morning of September 11th I rose early so that I could perform my civic duty of voting in the mayoral primary before heading down to my office in Tribeca. It was, as everyone in New York on that day has since testified, a perfect fall day and after quickly voting (the turnout at the polls being unimpressive) I took the long ride downtown. It was going to be a busy day?our first staff meeting of the fall, followed by a myriad of meetings, capped by a photography exhibit party back uptown at Columbia in the evening. It didn?t seem unusual when, somewhere below 42nd Street, the train crawled to a halt and the conductor gave a typically cryptic announcement that trains were backed up ahead due to a problem at Chambers Street. Each subsequent station that we eventually reached ended up being a lengthy pit stop during which more and more passengers exited, having lost hope of ever reaching their destinations. All in all, not an untypical morning on the subway.

At some time after 9 am, the train finally lurched into the Franklin Street stop. I emerged out of the subway to the sound of warbling sirens and the sight of more people than usual. Turning west on Franklin Street in Tribeca, the view south is blocked by the densely packed buildings and so, when I noticed the crowd up ahead on Hudson Street, all turned in the same direction, I only assumed that once again my access to my office would be hampered by the filming of an episode of "Law and Order" or "Third Watch." Certainly, the stillness of the crowd seemed to reinforce that conclusion. I remember now, just before I reached the corner, seeing a tall woman heading toward me, a troubled look on her face. Amazingly, I recognized her?a fellow parent in my children?s playgroup whom I hadn?t seen in years since our children are adults?and now I realize that my first impulse to stop her and say hello was squelched by her expression.

Moments later, I turned the corner expecting the usual view of the twin towers, the two huge monoliths looming over the low buildings along Hudson Street. I now know that I arrived shortly after the second plane struck the tower. The utter clarity of the day, which seemed to emphasize every detail, every window, made the gaping hole and flames and billowing smoke that much more shocking. The size of those buildings and the size of the fire were terrifying?in the contrasting silence of the crowd, I immediately remembered glimpsing a fire in a high-rise (and I assumed "fireproof") apartment in Harlem some twenty years earlier and the remark of a fellow rubbernecker that he couldn?t imagine what could be feeding such flames.

I finally made it to our office, where my colleagues were all staring at the fibrillated, barely decipherable images coming over the uncabled television. Two planes had struck the World Trade Center, they reported, another had hit the Pentagon. One of my colleagues, A., who had exited the subway further south at Chambers Street, was particularly upset, having seen people falling from the towers: she was terrified that the buildings would fall. A master of denial, I assured her that would not happen?more accurately, I added that if such a calamity were to occur, the buildings would not fall like downed trees. At a distance of some eight blocks from the towers, I thought we were not in any direct physical danger but at that point who knew what else might occur? The alternative of retreating to our midtown offices, adjacent to the likely secondary target of the Empire State Building, didn?t seem viable.

I called my wife who was watching the calamity on television and reminded me?as master of denial I had forgotten?that our younger son?s girlfriend, E., had just started working in a law firm at the WTC a week or two earlier. Our son was frantic, trying to contact her.

After getting off the phone, I told everyone to head home and we quickly, but methodically, closed the office, set the alarm and left. On the street, we joined a massive exodus north. I walked with two of my colleagues up Hudson Street, each of us trying A.?s cell phone, which wasn?t working. The farther we moved away from the twin towers, the clearer it became that many people were dying and I became increasingly worried about the fate of my son?s girlfriend. This is it, I couldn?t help thinking, this is the event?amidst so many terrifying events from the 1960s onwards?that we won?t survive unscathed. It was just too clear that many people were dying and why should we be spared in such a moment of utter devastation?

And yet, while heading up Hudson, pointlessly dialing the cell phone, searching for a gap in the long lines piled up behind the previously reviled pay phones, as a historian I found myself seeking the refuge of horrible precedent: the images I?d seen offered the gruesome reassurance of repetition: the falling bodies evoking the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Fire?s plummeting victims; the already apparent devastation of downtown an echo of the lithographs I remembered seeing of the catastrophic 1835 fire that wiped out much of the built city.

We stopped at Houston Street so that A. could look for her son at the public high school there. Waiting with P. outside the building, midway down the block, we noted the crowd at the corner looking south. Our trip uptown had been punctuated by continual turns southward, noting the increasing obscurity of the smoke blotting out the towers and charting, we feared, the escalating destruction. Suddenly we heard a collective, unforgettable gasp?a collected exhalation of breath punctuated by shouts and shrieks. I ran to the corner, but there was nothing to see but a massive column of smoke and dust. The unthinkable had, indeed, happened.

P. headed east to try to find her way to Brooklyn and A. and I continued our trek north, turning onto the west side highway, lined by retreating pedestrians and empty but for the hollering ambulances and police cars heading downtown. We stopped at the occasional radio-blaring car, joining our fellow refugees to listen to the news?or, more accurately, rumors?about other terrorist-controlled planes, other unsubstantiated attacks. The brilliant sun, the cloudless day seemed a terrible counterpoint to the confusion and fear around us.

The crowds thinned out after we passed the westside ferry. By that point, I had reached my wife via an amazingly unused payphone to learn that, indeed, we had been spared and that E. was safe. By the time we reached the southern border of Riverside Park, it was as if we had entered another world, populated by sleek rollerbladers and leisurely strollers, their pastoral sojourn only interrupted by the distant roar of jet fighters overhead, every head turning skyward to just make sure it wasn?t something else.