story7601.xml

story7601.xml

born-digital

story

yes

no

2002-09-16

It was the most beautiful of late summer days, crystal clear skies, cool breeze, bright sunshine. So perfect. I commuted to my job at the Metropolitan Museum of Art from Brooklyn with my 7 month old son, Edward. I was at my desk by 8:30 am. A co-worker and friend Hermes Knauer called to let me know that a plane had hit one of the towers of the World Trade Center. He did not have many details and all in the office thought it was a mere accident involving a single engine prop plane. Then my husband, Anthony, called to inform me it had been a passenger plane.

All I could think of was my mother, a flight attendant, who had just left us that morning to fly home to Minnesota. I imagined that this horrible accident may have involved my mother?s plane. Several calls later and I found out the first plane was not a Continental flight and while on the phone with Hermes again, the second plane hit the other tower and at that moment it became obviously clear that this was no accident. I talked with my sister in Houston who was watching everything on CNN.

A co-worker had a radio and we listened to all the latest news, the plane that hit the Pentagon, the crash in Pennsylvania, the grounding of all flights, and the news that there were still two planes in the air and unaccounted for. We were all in shock and some were in denial. Suddenly, the calm and collected news person on the radio who was talking about the fires at the World Trade Center started screaming, ?Oh my god the south tower is collapsing, the tower is collapsing, the tower is gone!? I could not believe what I was hearing, I was trying to continue with my work but my hands were shaking. I had so many undescribable emotions running through me. What seemed like only a few minutes later, the north tower collapsed. My husband called to say that the World Trade Center was no more. All I wanted to do was leave, pick up my son and go home.

This, however, was not going to be very easy. All bridges and tunnels were being closed to vehicular traffic, the subways and buses were running erratically, if at all. By 11:00am my friends, Edward Hunter and Fred Caruso, and I left to walk home. We picked up my son carrying him in his front carrier with my friends helping with the diaper bag. We were still not aware that the attacks were over, we were frightened. On the way home we kept overhearing people compare this to Pearl Harbor. It was very eerie to not have commercial planes flying about as they follow the avenues on their approach to LaGuardia Airport. The only air traffic were F-16 fighter jets, usually in pairs. We constantly skirted from east and west to avoid possible targets, the UN and the Empire State Building. We passed by hospitals with emergency personnel and empty gurneys awaiting the trauma victims that never showed up. As we approached downtown we joined the exodus from lower Manhattan going into Brooklyn. There were people covered in dust, people on cellular phones, people like us who just wanted to get home to loved ones. My son luckily fell asleep on my chest oblivious to the tragedy that had unfolded. I remember holding him close, thankful that he was with me.

When I arrived home, I finally was able to see what had happened. New Yorkers have gotten very used to seeing their beloved city trashed in the movies and those pictures of the planes slamming into those buildings over and over again looked like computer generated images. That horror combined with the absolutely beautiful day was very surreal. It was an event I had hoped to never experience.