story2060.xml

story2060.xml

born-digital

story

yes

no

2002-09-10

I was living at 71 Broadway on the fourth floor with windows that faced north onto the churchyard of Trinity Church and the World Trade Center beyond. Both towers were visible from the bedroom and living room.

My girlfriend and I had moved into the apartment at 4:00 P.M. on September 10, 2001. We had moved from 275 Greenwich Street, which is two blocks north of where the North Tower stood. The night of September 10th, I looked out the window at the two huge towers and wondered how long they would stay up (everything in New York gets torn down eventually and I had always thought they were ugly) and how in the world you would go about tearing down two 110-story buildings. It was just a coincidence, but a sad one.

At 8:46 I was getting dressed for work when I heard a sound like a missile and then a loud thud. The thud sounded like a large truck going over one of the steel plates that cover repair work on the city streets. In fact, it sounded so similar and I have lived in New York for so long (my whole life) that I almost didn't turn to look out the window. In fact, my first instinct was to look up Broadway, towards City Hall, where I saw nothing. When I turned my head left, however, I saw a waterfall of paper streaming out of the side of the north tower. My first thought was that a small plane had hit, but I was suspicious that it was an attack because of the missile-like sound that I now know was the engines of a passenger jet.

I ran downstairs and stood at the corner of Liberty Street and Church Street, at the southeast corner of the plaza that held the two towers. Papers were fluttering everywhere. It's something you don't really see on the television footage of the attacks; I don't know why. I picked up several pieces of paper, a bill, some information on employee insurance, some trading tickets and imagined that the people attached to these papers had been sitting a their desks one moment and then killed instantly the next.

As I watched amidst the growing chorus of fire trucks and ambulances, I was startled by a very loud noise to my left. I looked up and very clearly saw the profile of a passenger jet plow cleanly into the side of the south tower. Although the footage clearly shows a huge fireball, I have no recollection of the explosion. I distinctly remember thinking that the attackers must have stolen the jets out of hangars somewhere (Dallas sprang to mind, I don't know why) and flown them empty. At that point I had no idea that anybody was on the plane I had just seen.

The crowd I was in turned as one and fled to the basement of the Trinity Building, directly across from Liberty Plaza. In the basement there was the sound of some muted whimpering and weeping. I was surprised at how calm I felt. I immediately decided that I had to get back to my apartment and found my way through the basement and out onto Broadway. I got back into my apartment at about 9:10.

In retrospect, we know that no more flights would crash on New York, but at the time I was concerned that planes were going to start raining down from the sky at any minute. I turned on the news and discovered for the first time that the planes had been hijacked and that I had just watched a group of passengers meet their death. I felt disgusted, like an voyeur or Peeping Tom who had no right to witness the intimate moment of their death.

I called my parents, who live in Manhattan, and assured them I was okay. I paged my girlfriend, who was an emergency room doctor at Bellevue, and told her I was okay. As I was speaking with her, I watched bits and pieces of the tower fall. I didn't tell her, but I also saw bodies fall. I remember one in particular who fell backwards and I could see the arms flailing. Unlike the the debris, which was mostly exterior panels that fluttered on the way down, the jumpers fell straight to earth. At the time, I tried to convince myself that they couldn't be people; they were just metal. But I knew they were people.

As I hung up the phone, I said to my girlfriend, "There are bigger pieces falling down now." After the jumpers, I didn't want to watch any more, so I focused on the television. Suddenly, I felt foolish watching the event second hand when it was all happening outside my window. I looked up at the south tower. The light and shadow on the east face suddenly changed and I realized that the top was collapsing. Looking at the footage later confirmed my impression of the time; the top of the tower initially started falling east and a little south - directly at my apartment building. The tower was something like 1,300 feet tall. I was not certain that I lived over 1,300 feet from the south tower. In panic, I did something so pathetic it is laughable; I closed my living room window.

Then I ran into the hallway outside the apartment and waited for what I thought would be the impact of the south tower of the World Trade Center on my building. I did mental calculations. My building was decked in stone, having been built near the turn of the century. Would it hold up against a skyscraper falling. I heard screams throughout the building, muted by the apartment doors and the huge rumble outside.

Of course, nothing ever hit. I later learned that the tower simply slid down on itself, but standing in that hallway I was convinced that I might die there or be trapped and injured.

I had locked myself out of my apartment so I took the stairs down to the lobby.

The glass doors facing Broadway revealed nothing. It was like looking into a filthy fish tank. People from the street started coming into the lobby covered with soot. We stayed this way for what seemed like an eternity but was probably only twenty minutes. A woman next to me sat on the floor and sobbed.

A police officer in a uniform of blue trousers and a pristine white shirt suddenly appeared in the lobby. I have no idea how this officer was not covered in soot. I can't even remember if it was a man or a woman. The officer told us that the other tower was going to fall and that we all needed to get as far away from the tower as possible. There was some confusion as to which way that was (a lot of people had run into the lobby and didn't know where they were). I knew that exact opposite direction of the towers was down Broadway towards South Ferry and Battery Park. So I showed some people the way out of our building through the subway exit (which is in the lobby) and we made our way out onto Broadway and headed south.

The soot was already about three or four inches thick on the ground and it was very difficult to see or breathe. None of us knew if the second tower had fallen. I headed south to Bowling Green and then towards Battery Park with the idea that I could breathe more easily if I could get to the shore of the harbor. At the very bottom of Broadway police began to direct the growing crowd up the FDR Drive.

One memory that sticks out is of a woman standing at the bottom of Broadway. In her right arm she cradled bottles of Poland Spring water. In her left hand she held paper napkins. She was wetting the napkins and handing them to strangers to use as masks. I took one and have been grateful ever since. No idea who she was.

I also felt startled everytime a bus moved by because I wasn't sure that another plane wouldn't come raining down on us at that point.

I needed to call my girlfriend and let her know I was okay. She had done the same mental math about my proximity to the towers and wondered if it had fallen on our building and killed me. At the hospital, the took her into a family counselling room to help her collect herself.

Every pay phone had a huge line. I decided to head for the South Street Seaport and find a phone with less people. I made my way to the back end of the top floor of the Seaport and found a bar.

In the course of the next hour, I drank five pints of beer and smoked a full pack of cigarettes, but I felt nothing. In another moment of strangeness, the bartender worried about serving beer before the bar actually opened at 11:00. We assured her that today was probably okay for an exception.

I spoke to a guy who had been on the 15th floor of the north tower when the plane hit. He'd been in the WTC in 1993 when the bomb went off and he did not hesitate to clear out. Another man sitting near me worked at the hotel at the base of the south tower. He had seen a man with both his arms severed.

I called my office, but everybody had gone and I got only email. I reached my parents and told them I was okay. I paged my girlfriend, 07734 - "Hello" upside down on a pager.

Nobody knew what to do at the bar. We watched CNN and MSNBC. At one point, the television was reporting that as many as 12 airplanes had been hijacked and were in the air. Finally, at 2:30 P.M., I tried to make my way home.

Going across Wall Street, I saw the janitors at one building already cleaning the street in front. At that pont I remember thinking, "Someday, all this will have been a year ago, then five years ago and then ten years ago."