Sunset Park, Brooklyn
I usually leave for work at Allee King Rosen & Fleming at 9:30 on Tuesdays, but I was thinking of leaving at the usual time of 8:30 when the alarm went off at 7:35, still set for the day before. Instead of getting up, I lazed in bed, dozing, listening to 1010 WINS on the radio, and finally got out of bed to get ready at about 8:45. I had just walked into the bathroom when I heard the “Breaking News“ special bulletin alert and walked back out to turn up the radio on my stereo. On it was a woman reporting over the phone that a plane had just hit the World Trade Center. She described a plane actually banking into the WTC, hitting in a fireball, and black smoke pouring out of several floors of the building. My first thought was that it was a small private plane, an accident, a pilot in trouble and out of control. Then she said it looked like a large plane, a passenger jet. I could feel my mind almost physically shying away from the idea that it was deliberate.
The phone rang in the middle of this and it was Kath, calling from DC, asking if I were all right. As we were on the phone, a second plane hit the second tower. At that moment it was clear, even to me, that it was no accident. I called Melinda at work and told her I wouldn’t be coming in because a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. She hadn’t yet heard. As I got off the phone, the first tower collapsed. I remember the woman on the radio saying, “Oh my God oh my God! The building just fell down!” I pictured it toppling over, imagined the devastation for blocks beneath it. I couldn’t really wrap my mind around the idea, but I suddenly realized I needed to call Mom and Dad to let them know I was okay. Dad sounded shaken and sad, and said he was watching it on the TV. I didn’t speak to Mom. Instead, I hung up and called my best friend, Melanie, right away, having heard that at least one of them was an American Airlines plane. Mel’s husband, Dave, who’s a pilot for American and often flies out of Logan, picked up the phone, and I said, “Thank God you were on the ground, buddy.” and burst into tears. Dave said, “Do you want to talk to my better half?” and I said “No, just tell her I’m okay.” and hung up, completely freaked. I hadn’t cried up to that point, but hearing Dave’s voice just broke me somehow.
As I kept listening and crying, more awful things kept happening. Even the radio announcer said something to the effect that we keep thinking it can’t worse and it just does. The Pentagon was hit by a third plane, a fourth down in Pennsylvania. I tried to call Marcia and Val on my cell phone and couldn’t get through.
I got online to see what was coming over the net and sent out the following e-mail to all my New York friends at 9:22, making a conscious decision to stay off my main phone, which was working only intermittently anyway:
Please let me know if you all are okay and weren’t near the World Trade Center this morning. I was still in Brooklyn at home. I sent out this e-mail to everyone else at 10:07: Just to let you all know that I’m okay and wasn’t near the World Trade Center this morning, thank God.
I called Jen in DC and told her what had happened, and checked to see if she was okay. She wondered why I sent her such a weird e-mail because she hadn’t heard about anything yet—hadn’t turned on her TV, read the headlines online at 8:30. By now, there was a fire on the Mall too. Later, I heard a truck bomb was found outside the Supreme Court building.
Wanting to see something, I went downstairs to my neighbors and sat with Larry and David in their living room watching the live coverage on their TV. The first building had already fallen, and still it didn’t occur to me that the second one would go, too.
And then it did.
I think the image of it crumbling so neatly as though it were being demolished, each floor pancaking one into the other, one thin corner strip of it hanging in the air, impossibly, then sliding slowly downward as though on a track, disappearing into dust, will stay with me for the rest of my life. It looked so impossible, and so majestic, the way building demolitions do—almost beautiful, but devastating. I just stood with my mouth open, hands over it, eyes wide.
I came upstairs then, knowing I couldn’t watch anymore, and left the door open, just wanting to know that someone was around and downstairs. Larry and David both came upstairs a couple of times to check on me. I was still crying, and Larry seemed really worried about me. He seemed horrified but calm, the way you’d expect a Vietnam vet to be. David, who’s younger and works in a hospital as an orderly, seemed far more shaken.
I called Emily, knowing that she was probably already on her way out to Nassau Community College in Long Island, and left a message on her voicemail, letting her know I was okay, and asking her to call or e-mail me when she got the chance.
Replies to my e-mails started to trickle in by 10:20. The first two came from a fellow New Yorker, Dvorah, a psychiatrist at NYU, and Brian Brown, an old friend from grad school now living in Seattle. Thank you so much for the note, Brian wrote. I am glad that you are safe, and delighted that you took a moment to let us all know. We woke up here to the news on NPR, and though it is far away geographically it is utterly surreal. “Surreal“ was a word that cropped up repeatedly throughout the day, as did the phrase “bad movie.” the latter somehow coupled inextricably with the name Bruce Willis.
Responses from the New York crowd were typically terse and stunned.
I just saw the world trade center collapse, I feel like I’m in the middle of a war zone. It’s a scene I’ll never forget, from Bill, watching from the roof of Bayard Advertising at 21st and Broadway.
Okay. Big love. We’re okay, from Peri, somewhere in Brooklyn.
Thank you for the news. It’s nerve wracking to think that we can’t get news... from Erica in Jersey.
Many answers from my New York friends trickled in agonizingly slowly. The first of the near-miss stories came from a former colleague at AKRF, at 11:20: I was at a doctor’s appointment in the Village. Hopped on an F-Train as fast as I could while everyone else stared at the buildings. Made it to 4th Avenue before they stopped service. S. & I are both home and safe. A friend of mine from work called to say she was okay, but my building looks like a shambles (7 WTC). This is very surreal. That word again. I called Marcia and Val once more, and finally got through to Val to learn that she and Marcia were okay, both at home in Queens. Val asked if I had enough water in case they dumped something in it. I only learned a few days later that the CDC had been scrambled to check for biohazards and biological weapons shortly after it was determined this was a terrorist attack.
I don’t remember eating anything, but I must have because there were dirty dishes in my sink later.
At 10:50, I wrote the following to Kath, under the subject line, “No Words.”
Jesus Babe, get home safe tonight and stay there, you and Lou. Are Kathy and Anne and Ro okay? Do you know? Jen’s all right. I watched the second tower go down with Larry downstairs and then I couldn’t watch anymore. I still can’t believe it. I can smell the smoke out here across the river. There are 50,000 people in those towers, at least half of them didn’t make it, I’m sure, though some woman on the 92nd floor of the second one made it out, so who knows? I haven’t heard from Kelly yet, but I’m glad she got downsized when she did and hope she wasn’t down there. There’s going to be hell to pay for this. I hope this doesn’t make us an uncivilized as the people who did it.
At 11:22 I sent out the following e-mail:
My main phone line seems to be out (big surprise) but my modem line is working and so is my cell phone, though it’s really hard to get through. I’ll probably be on-line for a while checking in with people here, but I’ll switch the phone lines over later. That number is [. . . ]. There’s no call-waiting on that line, so if it’s busy that means I’m on-line or on the phone. My cell phone number is [. . .] and my service is working but the lines are pretty jammed. E-mail’s the best way to reach me right now. The city’s locked down—bridges and tunnels and roadways closed—so I won’t be going anywhere for a while. It’s probably best to stay off the lines anyway for emergency purposes. For once, I’m glad I live in an undesirable neighborhood and don’t have a high-powered job. Please keep us all in your prayers and thoughts. Love, Ann
At 12:42, I got the following email from Kathleen O’Malley in DC:
Thanks for letting us know you are well. All of us here, Anne, Kathy, and Ro have been sent home because we’re all in government jobs near DC.
I know you’re having trouble getting through to folks, but if possible, can I ask you a favor? I can’t get through to my mother and my dad often works downtown, and my brother works on high iron and my sister-in-law is an EMT. Is there any hope you might be able to put a call in to my mother? Her number is [ . . .]? She won’t answer the phone but if you tell her you are calling for me “Kathleen“ and that you just want to let her know that Kathleen, Anne, and Rosemary are all home and fine in Maryland, and we’re worried about them, if she’s there she’ll pick up and maybe you can find out for me? If this is too much trouble, I’m also asking people on Venice Place [a Starsky & Hutch fanfic list that she moderates] to help me. We can’t get any call into NY at all.
I was lucky enough to get through to Kathy’s mom on the first try, and she picked up right away, when she heard I was calling for Kathy. Everyone in the family was accounted for and okay, and I e-mailed Kathy back. Great relief all around. I then decided I could do the same thing for other folks on the list I belong to, a Star Wars fanfic list with 1,000+ members, some of whom I know live in the metropolitan area. One person passed on my notice to someone else in Boston, but that person found her relative. Another list member, “Majilique.” who works at Fort Bragg, kept us informed of the current defcon status while frantically searching for her sister, who worked in the towers.
Things I remember from that day: dust and debris all over the Wall Street area, looking like Seattle after Mt. St. Helens erupted; John Montone of WINS saying over and over again in his broadcast how grateful he was to a doorman, who was probably now dead, who shooed him away from one of the WTC buildings only moments before the second building collapsed; the smell of electrical fires in the air; sneezing uncontrollably; the sound of Dave’s voice on the other end of the phone; the report that paper from the buildings had been blown as far away as Coney Island; someone saying they thought the shower of paper outside their window was the beginning of a tickertape parade; someone else saying it was as though all the file cabinets on every floor had been blown open, spewing their contents out the window; the horror in reporters’ voices when relaying that hundreds of police and firemen had been crushed in the collapse; Larry hugging me stiffly; trying to get into the Watchtower homepage to find out if any JW’s had been working in the WTC and if they’d gotten out, and realizing that every JW with internet access in the world was doing the same thing right now, something like a couple million of us, at a rough guess.
I spent most of the day online, crying, listening to the radio updates as they got worse and worse, checking for news from my fellow list members and trying to put out the fires of prejudice and hate there that occasionally cropped up. All I kept thinking was that 50,000 people work in those two buildings, not counting tourists, people there for meetings, people just passing through, people in the subways, in the shops, in the PATH trains. There was no possible way anyone at or above the fires got out, and no way of telling how many others did. It took me a while to find a way to comprehend that number. I kept trying to find the right size city I knew to compare it to: Ann Arbor? Traverse City? Grand Rapids?
Emily finally called me around 4:30. She’d been thrown off the train at Union Street in Brooklyn (she lives in Bayridge) and gone to Heather and Tim’s house in Park Slope. Tim, being a night bartender, was still asleep and wouldn’t answer the phone when people called. Emily woke him up. She’d gone to a bar at 9:30 in the morning to find somewhere to wash up, dust and debris blowing across the river and falling all over Park Slope. The car services were all busy, the trains not running. She finally got home when the trains started running again in early evening. Tim, she said, had been talking about going out with a baseball bat and finding somebody to rough up. She managed to dissuade him until Heather made it home. I was amazed she thought the markets would open on Wednesday. Here’s Em’s account of her experiences:
I was in Brooklyn when the whole thing happened, on the subway on my way to work, and when the subway stopped, everyone on it was stranded in downtown Brooklyn with no further transportation. I milled around for several hours in what retrospectively seems a state of confusion—for quite a while no one was clear about what was really going on. I saw that the WTC was on fire, but thought it was just a “normal“ fire until passersby with radios began to report more frightening things. Eventually I went into a bar (at 10 am or so) and had a beer and watched CNN for a bit. By this time ashes and burnt papers were falling on the streets & me, so I finally managed to wake a nightshift bartender friend and went over to his place to hang out until the trains started again. I did not really grasp what a big deal it all was until much later that day—my friend urged me to phone my family and let them know I was OK and I just kept saying, “But they know I don’t work in Manhattan!” I checked my voicemail and found messages from friends overseas trying to make sure I was OK, and was so puzzled as to how they could have heard about the problem. I am amazed at how efficiently my mind compartmentalized everything—there I am standing at crowded bus stops beside people who walked over the Brooklyn Bridge, all the phones out of service, ashes raining down on me, and I am thinking, “Now what is the best strategy for getting back to Bay Ridge? I suppose I should call in sick to work.” I just kept believing in normalcy until I was safely home. Still thought I was fine until I noticed that I couldn’t talk to anyone without arguing with them, that I had a dread of going to Manhattan, and that I jumped at loud noises.
Sometime around 6:00 in the evening, WTC 7 collapsed, having been on fire most of the day. While it wasn’t nearly as tall as the towers, it was 47 stories—not a small building. More rubble. At least people had been able to evacuate from it before it collapsed. A little while afterward, I wrote to Kath again, in part: As for being safe, well, remember the scene in The World According to Garp where the plane crashes into the house he’s thinking of buying, and he takes it because—what could happen now? I am toast from crying all day. It’s so horrible. I’m just selfish enough to be glad my loved ones are safe, and I grieve for those who aren’t.
By the end of the day, most everyone had checked in, either by phone or e-mail. The only people I hadn’t heard from were out-of-towners: Paul, who was in London, and Don, in Boston. I’d heard from people I hadn’t heard from in a long time, mostly old friends from grad school that I’d sort of lost touch with. Rob, in Detroit, now working for the Episcopal Archdiocese, responded with this: We’re having an immediately organized ecumenical prayer service at the Cathedral tonight. You’re all in our prayers. I wish I could reach my friend Paree in Washington DC, but thank you for reaching us first. Somehow, I’d managed to escape losing anyone near and dear to me. Unable to pray myself, I just sent up a heartfelt thanks.
I’m not sure what time I went to bed, but I didn’t sleep well. The smell from the fires kept me awake once the wind had shifted after dark. It’s the smell of electrical fires, acrid and harsh.
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