Every New Yorker has a WTC connection. During my ten years in New York, I had many.
My first encounter with the towers was actually in 1976. I was a teenager living in New Hampshire, but our family was visiting my uncle (who lived an hour upstate from NYC) so we could watch the tall ships for the country’s bicentennial celebration. We watched them sail majestically in the harbor from our vantage point in Battery Park at the lower tip of Manhattan.
At one point, I broke free from the "fam", and ran to the WTC towers, then just newly built. Because they were so huge, I thought they were only minutes away, but even for a running teenager, it took about ten minutes to get to them.
I remember standing (breathless) at the very foot of one of the towers — what I assume now to be the South Tower — and looking up. It was amazing. Because there are no recesses in the building (like, say, the Empire State Building), you could stand toe-to-toe with the base of the building, crane your neck up, and look at the top — half a mile into the sky. It was pretty impressive for a kid who grew up in rural New Hampshire.
Ten years later, I was living in New York (well, living in Brooklyn, working in Manhattan). I had moved there in 1986 after college with my then-girlfriend Fiona, who secured a job as a waitress at Windows On The World, the classy restaurant atop the North Tower. On several occasions, I dined there and enjoyed the magnificent views.
Over the years, I had numerous meetings in various offices of those towers, for various reasons. Even halfway up the towers, looking out those windows was amazing. And feeling the slight sway of the buildings under your feet during a windy day was kind of fun.
February 26, 1993
I was a third-year law student at NYU in 1993. As any third-year law student will tell you, a 3L’s focus in the second semester is not so much on completing law school and passing law school exams, but preparing for the impending bar exam.
Throughout law school, I clerked part-time at the law firm of Slotnick & Baker, a small "boutique" law firm specializing in high-profile criminal defense cases. The firm consisted of 4 lawyers, me, a paralegal, and a secretary. I had worked there since 1987 (I started as a paralegal).
A few weeks earlier, I had informed the senior partner Barry Slotnick that it was my intention to cut back on my time with the firm during my second semester, so I could focus on BarBri bar exam preparation courses. So I was there only once or twice a week.
I was not supposed to work on February 26, 1993. But I made an unscheduled visit to the law office, mostly to tie up some loose ends.
Slotnick & Baker at that time was located at 225 Broadway, just diagonal from the World Trade Center towers. Pictured here is 225 Broadway on 9/11/01 (it’s the tall building on the right side of the photo — one of the Twin Towers behind it is collapsing).
Every day when I was employed there, I took the subway to work. I typically would get off at the WTC stop, and come up to the street through the underground concourse mall two stories below the entire WTC complex.
I only planned to be at the firm for only a few hours on February 26. I had just finished a class that morning, and I had another one sometime in the early afternoon. I was just going in to get a few things, grab some lunch, and go back to school.
Nadia was glad to see me. She was the paralegal there, having replaced me a few years earlier when I moved up to "law clerk". A few days earlier, she had been given an actual office with an actual window. She no longer had to work in the law library, sitting at a long desk. "Come see my office," she said. "I’ve decorated it."
I was happy to oblige. Her office, in fact, was my old office (or one of them, I should say). It was full of girly Nadia-things, as I expected. We did our usual amount of chit-chat and flirting. I looked out her window from the 22nd floor, which faces south.
"Nice view," I said sarcastically.
"At least I have a view now", Nadia smiled.
We chatted a few minutes more about various things. Office gossip. Nadia’s second job as a tour guide for Big Apple NYC Bus Tours. More flirting.
Suddenly, the building shook. The window, which I was leaning against, rattled. And a large bang.
"Bangs" are not uncommon in New York. Usually, it’s a sanitation vehicle slamming down one of those large green industrial trash bins. But this is something different.
"Whoa", I said.
Nadia giggled (because that’s what she does).
We speculated as to what it might be, but seeing nothing from her window, we quickly forgot about it. And ten minutes later, I was saying "so long" and venturing out of the office to get lunch somewhere in the WTC concourse, and eventually return to NYU up in the Village.
As soon as I stepped outside 225 Broadway, I heard the sirens. I turned the corner and headed toward the WTC and that’s when I saw the flashing lights. I connected it to the blast I heard ten to fifteen minutes ago. My initial reaction was one of annoyance: will this prevent me from getting lunch in the WTC concourse?
Then I wondered if there might have been a subway accident — a collision of trains perhaps — which might explain the bang we heard.
I hovered for several minutes, inching my way closer to what appeared to be the center of attention at the foot of the towers. Others on the street were craning their necks upward, and so — like a lemming — I did, too.
I was almost at the base of the towers, on the plaza (which was surprisingly devoid of people), when I saw them: two women coming out one of the doors on the east side of the North Tower. They were holding each other and looking very fatigued. One of them was covered in soot and coughing.
The explosion, as we know now, was a bomb set off in one of the underground parking garages by an al Qaeda terrorist bent on causing one of the towers to collapse. He grossly underestimated the strength of the building. However, smoke from the explosion had poured up through the tower’s interior, and cut off power inside. Just as they would eight years later, workers were evacuating the building — sometimes through smoke — by stairwell.
I went to the women and asked if they were okay. One of them — the sooty one — asked for water. I said I didn’t have any, but I said I would take them to where I had seen emergency vehicles minutes before. And the three of us walked. They asked me what had happened. I said I didn’t know, even though I suspected it had something to do with that "bang" I heard half an hour ago.
As we walked around the base of the building toward the west side. A fireman saw us approaching and helped the stricken woman to a paramedic vehicle, her friend in tow. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw another fireman looking up, and I looked up as well. There was a plume of smoke coming from one of the high floors in the tower.
Just then, I head a scuffle and looked over to see a man in a gray business suit collapse to the ground. I assumed he was another worker in the office, although (from the glimpse of him I caught) he didn’t appear to be covered in soot. Several firemen and policemen quickly went to his aid.
Apart from me, there were a few other civilians in the immediate area. I heard a policeman instructing them to move back several blocks. He was concerned about falling glass from the upper floors plummeting down to the streets below. Not needing a hint, I left the scene and made my way to the subway, looking back over my shoulder to watch the events. On my way, I ran into a few other people looking for medical attention, and I directed them to the emergency workers.
I arrived at the subway entrance, where a policeman said that they were closing the subway. This meant that I would have to walk several city blocks uptown to get to the next station.
I doubted that the subways were running, so walking to another station didn’t make much sense. With nothing else to do, I stayed around for a while (behind police barricades) watching what I could.
About 20 minutes later, I happened to see an empty cab, which I hailed. I took it to NYU, just in time for class. The cabbie said he heard it was a bomb on the upper floor (he was wrong, it was in the underground garage).
Six people died that day, and over one thousand were injured, in the first largely forgotten al Qaeda attack on American soil.
September 11, 2001
Eight and a half years later, I’m no longer a "New Yorker" (not that I ever really was). I had moved to North Carolina in 1997, getting a job with a large southern law firm doing tobacco litigation.
On that Tuesday, I was to meet with a partner, Bob Pierce, that morning to go over some responses to discovery. Bob, like me, is a transplanted New Englander who practiced law in New York for several years before heading down south.
I was running late that morning, but my meeting with Bob wasn’t until 11:00. I was almost out the door at 8:55 a.m. when Cheryl called.
Cheryl and I have almost nothing in common, except that we’re both news junkies. A dyed-in-the-wool southern conservative and a dyed-in-the-wool northern liberal, we took great pleasure in ribbing each other about the failures of Clinton/Bush (as the case may be). In fact, our frequent political debates are still legendary.
But the two of us had a huge falling out about a couple of years earlier, and had barely spoken since then, even though we worked side-by-side (literally and figuratively). Only recently had we recommenced our communications with each other outside of work, so this call from Cheryl on 9/11 was extremely out of the ordinary.
"Are you watching this?" she said.
"What are you talking about?"
She told me to turn on the TV, which was in the bedroom of my rented house. I did. It was on all the channels. The North Tower in flames. A plane had flown into it.
We stayed on the phone, both watching our respective TVs, speculating as to what was happening. We were both about to hang up and make our way into work when the second plane hit. We saw it at the same time.
Like the rest of the country, we were riveted. As it became clear that America was under attack, Cheryl started to cry. Her tears turned to panic. She was concerned about her daughter in school, and whether or not she should take her out for the day.
I calmed Cheryl down and told her that junior high schools in Winston-Salem were probably not high-ranking terrorist targets. But Cheryl — ever the alarmist — was concerned about planes flying into nuclear plants, and the spread of radiation. But over time — interrupted by phone calls from her mother — I stayed on the phone with Cheryl and calmed her.
At 10:30 a.m., I was abandoning hopes of tearing myself away from the television and making my 11:00 meeting with Bob. So, I called him from home. He had heard that a plane — one plane — had flown into one of the towers. No, I said, it was two planes, and the Pentagon had been hit. He thought I was kidding at first, but then he could tell I meant it.
I also told him that the towers had collapsed. There was a long silence on the other end of the phone. No doubt Bob, like me, was going through the Rolodex in his mind, trying to think of any friends or colleagues from his New York days who lived or worked in the WTC area.
"How much of them have collapsed?", he asked.
"Both of them. All of them. There’s nothing there."
I’m not sure he believed me. "Okay", he said quietly. We talked a little about people he knew who worked in the area, but our conversation ended abruptly when his wife called.
I tried to call Mary, a friend in New York. I couldn’t get through.
The sense as events unfolded that morning — as I’m sure you all remember — was "What’s next?" As soon as you thought it was over, the news would report some more horror. A crashed plane in Pennsylvania. And so on.
But shortly after noon, when it was clear that the "attacks" had subsided. I made my way to work, although little work was being done that day. Mike, the senior partner at the off-site facility where I worked, gathered all 100 or so employees in the tiny conference room and encouraged people to see past the day’s events and recognize this as a national tragedy which, like all tragedies, is something to overcome — not something to feel defeated or threatened by. As I recall, he quoted Chruchill.
Weeks later, shortly after regular flight service resumed, Melinda and I flew to New York. It was, I believe, in mid-October. Naturally, we visited Ground Zero which was — incredibly — still smoldering. New York was still in a state of shock.
Makeshift memorials dotted every corner, firehouse, and park. At night, two shafts of light penetrated the sky where the Twin Towers once stood.
And the posters. My God, the posters. The walls of Grand Central Station were lined with "Have You Seen…?" leaflets, printed and distributed by families and friends hoping that their lost loved ones had still survived. At that point in time, all hope of finding lost loved ones had perished, but nobody was prepared to take the posters down. So there they were, a museum piece of current history — a sad reminder of what had taken place mere weeks earler.
It was a very sobering trip.
It’s been a rather sobering five years.