Blue sky memories

Last week I was out for drinks with a friend, and we were talking about the gorgeous blue sky that day, that specific cloudless blue that you usually only see early to mid-September. I always have mixed feelings about a sky like this. One the one hand, its one of my favorite colors, and seeing it has the immediate impact of putting me in a good mood. On the other hand, it reminds me of a day eight years ago when the sky was this exact incredible color. We traded our recollections of that infamous day, which for both of us are still vivid.

I think on the eighth anniversary most New Yorkers are reflecting on that day, like we do every September 11th. What follows is my experience from that day, and the days following.

NEW YORK, NY
SEPTEMBER 11, 2001
8:46AM
It was one of those perfect September days, one where it was in the low 70's with a cloudless sky. As I climbed out of the subway at the Chambers Street A station, I noticed there was a crowd gathered at the corner of Chambers and Church Street. I was a little early for work, so I wandered over to see what was going on. Everyone was looking up to the southwest at the Trade Center. What they were looking at was incredible: there was a huge gash in the upper floors on the north facade of one of the towers. Everyone assumed it was an accident, that a Cesna had flown into the tower. A sidewalk vendor kept telling people that no, it was not a small plane, it was an American Airlines jet that crashed into the North Tower. I was amazed, the hole just didn't look that big, the scale of the building was deceiving. No one seemed to believe him, thinking he was exaggerating, that he was mistaken in what he had eyewitnessed. I left the corner to go to my office.

9:03AM
I called my mom to tell her to turn on the news, that a plane had flown into the Trade Center. As I was getting the words out, I felt a faint tremor. The second plane had hit. There was a collective realization that this was not an accident.

My office was on Reade Street between Greenwich Street and Hudson, and there were only a couple of us there. We didn't know what to do: should we get to work? should we leave the area? I had walked down to the corner of Greenwich and looked south. There were rows and rows of people walking north on Greenwich. They were all covered in dust and blood. I looked up towards the tower and saw people jumping from the top floors of the tower. I turned away in horror from this sight and walked back to my office.

My office was in the ground floor of my boss's townhouse, and he had come down to tell us to come upstairs. The three of us who made it in that day went up to his living room and spent time talking about what was going on, watching the coverage on TV where we learned that we were not the only city that had been attacked. There were rumors that a plane had hit the Sears tower, and there were rumors that there were up to 10 planes that were missing. Luckily this did not turn out to be true. I walked up to the roof and looked south. The top of both towers were engulfed in flames, and people were jumping from the windows. One after the other they lept, at least 30 of them in the matter of a minute. The mind works in curious ways, and I was reminded of an educational filmstrip that I saw when I was probably around 8 years old. It was of a group of lemmings jumping off a cliff. At the end of the film, my teacher would run it backwards, and you could see the lemmings rising from the water up to the safety of the cliff. I immediately felt ashamed for the comparison, and put it out of my mind. I can't even imagine having to make the choice these people had to make knowing they were never going to make it out of the towers alive: be burned alive or jump to your death.

9:59AM
I walked back inside the penthouse to watch the news coverage. A couple of minutes later, there was a rumbling, and the guys finishing up work on the roof rushed inside. They told me the tower was coming down.

I went down two flights to join the rest of my office and my boss's family. The south wall of the townhouse was glass, and at the time it was like looking at an opaque wall, the smoke outside was so thick. We all silently stared at the wall, hoping that flames were not to follow.

10:29AM
After the smoke cleared, Sara, my boss's wife, suggested that we go down to the office to get our purses and other personal belongings just in case we needed to evacuate. Liz, the office manager, and I offered to go and get everyone's stuff. As we were grabbing the bags, there was another rumble, just like an earthquake. The glass storefront started vibrating, and we ran to the cellar. We stayed down there for a couple of minutes, and then went upstairs once we thought it was relatively safe.

For the rest of the morning and into the afternoon, we continued watching the news coverage, and called our families. The relief in my parents' voices was palpable. They did not know how much of Lower Manhattan had been affected by the tower collapse, and I was only five blocks away. My mother told me that my sister hadn't heard from her husband, he was at work in WTC 5, one of the lower buildings. She didn't heard from him for hours; when she did finally hear from him he told her that he had run out of his office, leaving his cell phone and wallet behind, and none of the payphones were working.

We stayed at my boss's house until around 5PM. I borrowed Sara's bike, and rode back to Brooklyn. As I biked down Reade Street crossing West Broadway, I took one last look south towards the Trade Center. It was a blur of red, orange, and black, a hellish sight. I wondered what the next couple of days would bring.

I called my mother when I got home, and she told me that three of my cousins were missing, all firemen. Later that evening, I gathered at an apartment on Atlantic Avenue with friends and my friend Will kept my glass of bourbon and ginger filled.

The next day, Heidi and I walked around Brooklyn looking to donate blood. Lots of other people had the same idea, and no more blood was needed - they had nowhere to store the blood that the flood of volunteers was willing to give. I spoke to my mom who told me that all three of my cousins had been heard from, they were apparently a little busy the day before, and couldn't call their wives and mothers. I knew I wasn't going to be able to go to work for the rest of the week, so I took a train up to the compound to get out of the city. I have never wanted to escape New York in that way before.

That Friday, I got a call from my office manager. She said that Lower Manhattan below Canal Street was closed to the public, but that on Monday they were going to start letting people who lived between Canal and Chambers through the barrier. We were going to meet at the SoHo Grand Hotel for breakfast Monday morning, and attempt to get down to the office. My boss was thinking that since he lived in the area, he would be able to get his employees in the secured zone. He was right, and the National Guard officer told us that over the next couple of weeks we would need to bring ID and a letter proving our employment within Lower Manhattan. We walked the nine blocks to Reade Street to see the state of the office. My boss hadn't been home yet, so he had no idea whether there was power or telephone service. We walked in, tried the lights and phones, and everything was in working order. Apparently we were lucky: because the building was new (construction had just finished the month before), we had been able to connect to the relatively new electrical and phone service coming from the north. Most of the neighbors service came from the south, which ran under the WTC and had been destroyed. We were able to get back to work, which allowed me to start to get back to a sense of normalcy.

Of course, things were not normal. I had to go through a National Guard post to get to work everyday. Trucks with debris from the WTC drove past our storefront several times a day. There was an RV parked outside our office from Chunky Soups, they were donating food to the workers. There was also the stench from the burning site, a combined smell of burning plastic, metal, and things we didn't want to think about. Although the EPA had stated the air was safe to breathe, my boss came in one day with the independent test results that the PTA from his kid's school had contracted. Their recommendation: wear an N100 mask if you can spell the smoke. I wore a mask intermittently almost everyday for the 99 days that the towers burned.

NEW YORK, NY
SEPTEMBER 11, 2009
10:19AM
I'm watching the news coverage of the annual event at the WTC. The Reading of the Names started after a moment of silence at 8:46AM, and they are up to the letter K. It is absolutely heartbreaking seeing family members lose their composure when getting to the name of their loved one. The immensity of 2,819 deaths over the course of approximately 1 hour and 45 minutes is apparent is hearing this seemingly endless list. At the first anniversary of the attack, the NY Times ran a section with the photos of all the victims. Seeing page upon page of the black and white 1"x 1 1/2" photos had the same impact.

Its good to see that there has been progress on the building site. The steel structure for the memorial can be seen behind the stage, and I'm remembering back to the day this past year when I heard that what had been referred to as the Freedom Tower, would offically be called 1 World Trade Center. I think this was an important move of looking towards the future and what the site will become upon completion.