story1950.xml

story1950.xml

born-digital

story

yes

no

2002-09-09

I remember leaving my apartment very early that day on my way to a doctor's appointment on the upper West Side of Manhattan. The doctor's office faces Riverside Park and you can see the West Side Highway from her windows. My appointment was for 8:45 a.m. and I remember commenting to her that "gee there seems to be alot of noise out there this morning". Even for a hardened New Yorker who is use to all kinds of noise it was apparent that something was going on. We paid no mind to it and upon leaving her building I noticed there were several helicopters hovering overhead. It many ways it seemed like "business as usual" and I remember calling my office on my cell phone to retrieve messages. The calls wouldn't go through and I remember being somewhat agitated as the phone had been charged that very morning. I went to the 9 train which runs down the west side of Manhattan and remember vaguely hearing one woman saying to another something about some small planes. Nothing to seemed to be different and no one seemed terribly upset. When I got off on 50th Street it was quite apparent that it wasn't business as usual. People were standing in the middle of Broadway looking up at the sky. I walked over to a man and asked him what was happening and he looked at me like I had two heads. He said "lady the World Trade Center was attacked". That's the last thing I remember as I ran across town to my office. People were coming up to me and asking if they could my cell phone. I said of course if they could get it going. Now we know that all communication had been knocked out because the Towers had fallen. When I got to my office our receptionist told me that my husband had been franticly calling the office as he knew I would be taking the subway to work and had no idea where I was at that point. I contacted him (fortunately I was able to get through to him), had a good cry, and then went into one of the senior partners' office and watched the second tower go down. It's a time and a day I will never forget.