lc_story150.xml

lc_story150.xml

born-digital

story

yes

no

2003-12-20

I awoke late that morning. I live on the upper west side of Manhattan. As i first turned on the television the reports were just coming in... a plane had hit the WTC. It made me immediately recall how a few years earlier a small commuter plane hit the Empire State Building after some problems with its navagation gear ( I think it was cloudy that day) and hit the building. It survived and a few perished. The building was fine.

It was odd and strange but not a freightening. I went in the shower and when I came out, the second tower had been hit. I was watching local news, channel 4 NBC, here in NYC. They were replaying the second hit, over and over and trying to figure out was it a missle or was this another plane, a jet in fact. It was incomprehensible. I watched in horror. At that point phone service was still possible. But as the morning progressed and the news got more freightening, Pennsylvania, The Pentagon... New York suddenly felt like a war zone. Phone service soon became unavailable.

The normally busy streets of the city quickly became desolate. An occasional emergency vehicle flew down without the normal gridlock that makes travel in the city a tedious detail.

Finally getting in touch with friends via the internet, I learned that my cousins husband was at work in the WTC that day. He had called his wife from his office in Cantor Fitzgerald, saying how a plane and hit the building, he was fine and they were evacuating. It was soon after that he left a call for his wife, while she was showering, that he left a passionate message of love for his wife and their new born child. Family members called and said I might expect him to eventually come to my apartment since travel to his Long Island home had now become impossible. He never came.

I think the single biggest for impression for anyone in the city that day was one of sheer terror. Rumors of nuclear bombs, biological attacks and more planes were rampant. While some friends went down to see what was happening downtown, I stayed huddled in my apartment alone and wondered in terrified stupor what was next. The smell of burning plastic... and what could have been human life.. wafted to the northern points of Manhattan. This as the normally well dressed men and women of Wall Street finally made it to uptown, ashen covered, disheveled and some (so I heard) bloody.

It wasn't a day of history! It was a day of fear, terror and loss. The loss of friends, the loss of security and the loss of my belief that mankind is essentially good at it's core. I lost many friends that day... one who was mearly visiting Windows on the
World restaurant attending a business seminar. We lost so much that day but we gained an awareness, that NYC didn't belong to the people who live here, it belonged to the world. So in all of the sadness and loss a new perspective was born. PJM365