story6158.xml

story6158.xml

born-digital

story

yes

no

2002-09-12

The WTC tragedy is never far from my mind, today and every day.

My apartment faces south on Houston Street and from every room I could see the twin towers. I miss them. Not that I enjoyed the architecture, but I miss the mood in that neighborhood. I remember walking by the towers every day, at least twice a day, when I worked downtown at different jobs. I remember seeing the rush of people exiting the PATH, subway and express busses. The vendors in the farmer's market, the paintball flyer guys in their flak
jackets. I miss the smell of ambition and money in the air.

That day, I was walking the 1.5 miles to work, as usual, but I left a bit later. Before I got to Canal Street, I looked up and saw a plane directly overhead. "God, that plane is flying awfully low," I thought to myself. Then
I saw it enter 1 WTC.

"Oh my God!" said a parking violations attendant writing tickets. "A plane just flew into the World Trade Center!"

"You're a police officer," I replied. "Do something."

Then I heard the siren and saw a fire truck racing along Canal Street.

I kept walking. Like an automaton. At Canal, I saw the laborers standing and staring south at the building and the smoke. "I can't believe that building is still standing," I said to someone near me.

I headed down Church Street, debating "should I go in or go back, go in or go back" and plodding on my route. I worked at 130 Liberty Street, at Deutsche Bank, directly south of 2 WTC. I was at about Park Place when a crowd of people came rushing toward me, panicky, as if in a movie.

"Go to the park!" someone shouted, so I went east to City Hall Park, thinking that if a building came down, or there was gunfire, there was more open space there than on Church or Broadway. I found a zip disk on the ground and put it in my purse. "Someone will be wanting this," I thought.

Still I kept walking. Now I could see 2 WTC was on fire. I went to Nassau, to get away from the crowds on Broadway. Should I call the office? People were fiddling with their cell phones, but not one was working.

It was 9:30 and I was at Sym's on Trinity, a bit south of my office. I met two women from my department who told me the building was evacuated. (Amazing that I could meet anyone I knew in that crowd and chaos.)

"OK. That's it. You saw me here. I'm going home. Anyone want to come with me? I live a half-hour away." "No thanks, we'll wait it out here and see what to do." (They fled to Staten Island on the ferry and spent the night there at a colleague's house.)

I took the non-Broadway route back until I got to Worth Street. As I headed north on Broadway to Canal, I saw cars stopped in the street. Their doors were open, their windows were down. Their radios were blasting the all-news stations so everyone in the street could hear. People waited patiently in line at the phone booths. (How were they working?) Many, many people were heading uptown. At Canal, a policeman said the subways were working north of Canal, but by then I was 8 minutes from home.

When I entered the lobby of my apartment building, it was 10:00. Someone said the WTC had fallen. I walked out and looked. Sure enough, there was only one tower there.

At home, I had no phone service. I went to my computer and copied the email addresses of my family members. I went to the library, logged on and sent an email to my parents, siblings, husband and daughter at college: Subject "I'm
OK from Janet."

I told them in detail what I had seen. I waited for replies. After a while, I received an email from my daughter. She had once visited my office and knew exactly how close it was to the WTC. Then I heard from my sister. She called my mother, who was talking to my brother, who worked on Hudson below Canal and somehow had cell phone service. The magic of call waiting united the three of them. They knew I was safe.

I gave my sister my husband's phone. I didn't know which would reach him first, email or voice mail, since he goes in and out of the office when teaching classes. Eventually, our daughter in high school got through to him and learned I was OK.

That night, 20 large dump trucks were parked on Houston Street near my building. They were waiting for instructions. It was clear where they were headed.

In the morning, they were gone. I saw three workers in hard hats walking south. "Are you going down there?" I asked. I didn't have to say where "there" was. We all knew. They nodded. "Be careful."

I found the zip disk the next day. I wondered whether or not I should open it; what if it had a virus? I decided to open it anyway. There were a few letters and a resume. I called the phone number in Queens and left a message. The fellow, say his name was Tom, called me back that night.

Thank you, thank you," he gushed. "You have made my life so much easier by finding that disk. I didn't know I had lost it."

Tom told me that he had taken the E train from Queens to the WTC and was headed to work in New Jersey via the PATH. Something was wrong when he got to the concourse; people were leaving the building, so he followed them. (The first plane had hit the building, but no one knew what was going on.) Someone said, "People, I don't think this is very safe here," so they started to run. That's when his book bag must have opened and the disk flew out.

We shared our stories. Then I said, "We were both very lucky and we are members of houses of worship. Please make a donation in acknowledgement of our good fortune."

Tom agreed to do so and we made a plan for him to pick up the disk at my apartment building the next day; I left it with the doorman. I had no need to meet him.

That night the doorman gave me Tom's Hallmark thank you card. I thought that was very sweet, that he went out and bought a card to thank me.

What do I do differently?

Whenever I talk to my daughters at college on the phone, I tell them I love them before I hang up. You never know.