"Totally terrorized": observations from 9/11/01
I was living in New York City during 9/11, and in the days that followed the tragedy, I sent out a series of emails to friends and family, reporting what I had seen. Over the next day or two, I will be posting these emails, as well as voicemails I left my parents (thanks again for writing them down, Mom). In addition, I am adding my present recollections of the week's events to provide context.
I am extremely fortunate, in that my 9/11 story is much less dramatic than many people's - and my goal in posting it is simply to provide a normal NYC resident's recollections of the catastrophe and its aftermath.
September 11, 2001
The first I heard of the 9/11 attacks was a couple of guys talking about a plane crash on the uptown 4 express train. I had taken the L train into work from my apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and switched to the 4 at Union Square to get up to my job at a large advertising agency in Midtown Manhattan. The guys on the train didn't seem too worried about the plane crash they were talking about; I assumed they were talking about TWA Flight 800, which had crashed off of Long Island in 1996. The mysterious crash was still the subject of intense debate and speculation in 2001, and it was not uncommon to overhear people around town talking about the crash or the endless investigations.
I got out of the subway at Grand Central Station around ten minutes after nine, and walked to my office, six or seven blocks northeast of the massive transit hub. Until I got to work, I was completely unaware that there was anything unusual going on, even though the first plane had hit the World Trade Center more than twenty minutes earlier. This was probably due in part to the fact that I was hurriedly walking in the opposite direction of the WTC, and in part to the fact that I always listen to my mp3 player to drown out the noise of the city.
When I got to 777 Corporate Plaza, three of the girls I worked with were standing outside, crying, and pointing down Third Avenue towards Lower Manhattan. They told me that two planes had hit the Twin Towers, and as I turned and saw the smoke in the distance, the first thing I said was that there was no way this could be an accident.
We rushed into our building and took the elevator up to the 27th Floor, where everyone was crowded around the flat-screen TV in the lobby watching CNN. After twenty or thirty minutes, people starting heading back to their cubicles to try to contact friends and family. A lot of the folks I worked with had a close friend or family member, or an acquaintance of some sort, who worked at the WTC. The consensus among us was that the only people who were in real danger were those who were on the floors in close proximity to where the planes had hit, or the floors above them. No one had even considered the possibility that the buildings would fall down.
I'll never forget running from the lobby into the room where my cubicle was, and shouting "Guys . . . the south tower just fell down!" The collapse of the south tower, at 10:05 AM, represented something of a turning point. Before the south tower fell, we knew we were in the midst of something crazy. After it fell, we knew we were in the midst of something catastrophic.
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Message on my parents' voicemail, Raleigh, NC, 9/11/01, 10:05 AM:
Hey Mom, this is Thad. Just wanted to tell you that I'm all right. The bottom part of Manhattan has been totally terrorized. It's crazy - you'll see it on TV. I just wanted to say that I'm all right. OK. Bye.
-------------------------------------------------------------
At some point between 10:00 and 11:00, Colin Powell was quoted on the news saying that the US government believed Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda was probably responsible. The initial reaction of some of my co-workers was to ask how they could already know who had carried out the attacks - a reasonable question. I thought Powell was probably right, and I filled them in to the extent that I could, based on a couple of articles I had read about bin Laden and al Qaeda prior to September 11th.
I remembered that, after reading one particularly disturbing article in the Times during spring of 2001, I had excitedly called my Dad to tell him about this international network of terrorists who called themselves "The Base." Everyone kept asking "why haven't we heard about these people?" That question struck me as a profound one - and still does. What if everyone who had read that article about al Qaeda had told all of their friends about it? I certainly hadn't done anything to help the situation.
But there were more pressing issues. The Pentagon had been hit by now, and there were reports that up to 8, 10, maybe even 12 planes had been hijacked. It sounds crazy now, but the only rational thing to do at the time was to discuss whether any of the landmarks near our office were potential targets for the next plane. Would these guys want to hit the UN? The Trump Tower? What about Rockefeller Center?
Around 12:30 PM, the agency sent out an email telling all employees to go home for the day. A few minutes later, I emailed my supervisor, who worked on another floor, to tell her that my assistant and I were leaving for the day. Her one-word response was mind-blowing: "Why?" Now, understand that she was well aware of the attacks, and had been cc'd on the email from the CEO's. I guess she just didn't see how the largest attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor, taking place a few miles from where she was sitting, affected her life.
-------------------------------------------------------------
Message on my parents' voicemail, Raleigh, NC, 9/11/01, 1:15 PM:
Hey Mom, it's Thad calling. It's about 1:15. We're all safe. I walked somewhere in Midtown Manhattan, actually. It's pretty crazy here. Just wanted to call and tell you guys I'm safe. Alright. Bye.
-------------------------------------------------------------
I didn't know what to do. The subways were out of service, and I didn't want to walk down to the Williamsburg Bridge, which is only a few neighborhoods away from Wall Street, to get home to Brooklyn. My friend Dan from work said he was going over to another co-worker's apartment in Midtown, so I figured I would tag along.
Third Avenue, like all of the other avenues, was filled with people streaming northward. It was like something out of a Godzilla movie. We started to wonder what the next couple of days were going to be like. Were grocery stores and delis going to be open? I remember thinking that food shortages, and even looting, were distinct possibilities. We decided stopped into a crowded deli to buy supplies. Our purchase consisted of several large bottles of water, two huge cans of tuna fish, a couple loaves of bread, a six-pack of Budweiser, and a pack of Camel Lights (and neither of us were even regular smokers - cigarettes just seemed like a good thing to have in case the city descended into some kind of Mad Max squalor).
As we walked over to our co-worker's apartment, in the upper-50's, we passed fancy restaurants where patrons were seated calmly, and even a salon where ladies were getting their nails done. After we got to the apartment, we spent the afternoon watching the news and trying to call friends and family. All of the phone lines were jammed, but occasionally you could get through. I was relieved when I got in touch with my old friend Matt, and he told me that his girlfriend Judy, another good friend of mine, had made it home safely from her office a few blocks from the WTC.
Late in the afternoon, Dan and I decided to walk we would walk over the nearby Queensboro Bridge (or "59th Street Bridge") to Long Island City, Queens, and then make our way from there down to my place in northern Brooklyn. There was no way Dan was getting home to Long Island, so I offered him my couch. As we walked over the bridge, the sun began to set, and we looked out at the huge plume of white smoke blowing east towards Brooklyn, framed by a swath of bright pink sky.
Once we got to Long Island City, we caught a bus down to Williamsburg, where we met up with some friends of mine from Raleigh. One of them, who had been working a few blocks from the towers, had walked over to look up at the damage from the planes. He told us that when the south tower fell, debris and dust flooded into the street he was standing on, and everyone was running into parked cars, street signs, and each other. Finally, he came to the corner of a building and took a quick left around it, and the dust continued to blow down main street, but not the side street, a scene he described as being like something out of a cartoon. He had already showered twice by the time we spoke, and still couldn't get out the horrible taste and smell of the dust.
See also: "We kept our masks on": observations from 9/12/01, "Missing" signs: observations from 9/13/01, and "This is the morgue": observations from 9/14/01.
I am extremely fortunate, in that my 9/11 story is much less dramatic than many people's - and my goal in posting it is simply to provide a normal NYC resident's recollections of the catastrophe and its aftermath.
September 11, 2001
The first I heard of the 9/11 attacks was a couple of guys talking about a plane crash on the uptown 4 express train. I had taken the L train into work from my apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and switched to the 4 at Union Square to get up to my job at a large advertising agency in Midtown Manhattan. The guys on the train didn't seem too worried about the plane crash they were talking about; I assumed they were talking about TWA Flight 800, which had crashed off of Long Island in 1996. The mysterious crash was still the subject of intense debate and speculation in 2001, and it was not uncommon to overhear people around town talking about the crash or the endless investigations.
I got out of the subway at Grand Central Station around ten minutes after nine, and walked to my office, six or seven blocks northeast of the massive transit hub. Until I got to work, I was completely unaware that there was anything unusual going on, even though the first plane had hit the World Trade Center more than twenty minutes earlier. This was probably due in part to the fact that I was hurriedly walking in the opposite direction of the WTC, and in part to the fact that I always listen to my mp3 player to drown out the noise of the city.
When I got to 777 Corporate Plaza, three of the girls I worked with were standing outside, crying, and pointing down Third Avenue towards Lower Manhattan. They told me that two planes had hit the Twin Towers, and as I turned and saw the smoke in the distance, the first thing I said was that there was no way this could be an accident.
We rushed into our building and took the elevator up to the 27th Floor, where everyone was crowded around the flat-screen TV in the lobby watching CNN. After twenty or thirty minutes, people starting heading back to their cubicles to try to contact friends and family. A lot of the folks I worked with had a close friend or family member, or an acquaintance of some sort, who worked at the WTC. The consensus among us was that the only people who were in real danger were those who were on the floors in close proximity to where the planes had hit, or the floors above them. No one had even considered the possibility that the buildings would fall down.
I'll never forget running from the lobby into the room where my cubicle was, and shouting "Guys . . . the south tower just fell down!" The collapse of the south tower, at 10:05 AM, represented something of a turning point. Before the south tower fell, we knew we were in the midst of something crazy. After it fell, we knew we were in the midst of something catastrophic.
-------------------------------------------------------------
Message on my parents' voicemail, Raleigh, NC, 9/11/01, 10:05 AM:
Hey Mom, this is Thad. Just wanted to tell you that I'm all right. The bottom part of Manhattan has been totally terrorized. It's crazy - you'll see it on TV. I just wanted to say that I'm all right. OK. Bye.
-------------------------------------------------------------
At some point between 10:00 and 11:00, Colin Powell was quoted on the news saying that the US government believed Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda was probably responsible. The initial reaction of some of my co-workers was to ask how they could already know who had carried out the attacks - a reasonable question. I thought Powell was probably right, and I filled them in to the extent that I could, based on a couple of articles I had read about bin Laden and al Qaeda prior to September 11th.
I remembered that, after reading one particularly disturbing article in the Times during spring of 2001, I had excitedly called my Dad to tell him about this international network of terrorists who called themselves "The Base." Everyone kept asking "why haven't we heard about these people?" That question struck me as a profound one - and still does. What if everyone who had read that article about al Qaeda had told all of their friends about it? I certainly hadn't done anything to help the situation.
But there were more pressing issues. The Pentagon had been hit by now, and there were reports that up to 8, 10, maybe even 12 planes had been hijacked. It sounds crazy now, but the only rational thing to do at the time was to discuss whether any of the landmarks near our office were potential targets for the next plane. Would these guys want to hit the UN? The Trump Tower? What about Rockefeller Center?
Around 12:30 PM, the agency sent out an email telling all employees to go home for the day. A few minutes later, I emailed my supervisor, who worked on another floor, to tell her that my assistant and I were leaving for the day. Her one-word response was mind-blowing: "Why?" Now, understand that she was well aware of the attacks, and had been cc'd on the email from the CEO's. I guess she just didn't see how the largest attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor, taking place a few miles from where she was sitting, affected her life.
-------------------------------------------------------------
Message on my parents' voicemail, Raleigh, NC, 9/11/01, 1:15 PM:
Hey Mom, it's Thad calling. It's about 1:15. We're all safe. I walked somewhere in Midtown Manhattan, actually. It's pretty crazy here. Just wanted to call and tell you guys I'm safe. Alright. Bye.
-------------------------------------------------------------
I didn't know what to do. The subways were out of service, and I didn't want to walk down to the Williamsburg Bridge, which is only a few neighborhoods away from Wall Street, to get home to Brooklyn. My friend Dan from work said he was going over to another co-worker's apartment in Midtown, so I figured I would tag along.
Third Avenue, like all of the other avenues, was filled with people streaming northward. It was like something out of a Godzilla movie. We started to wonder what the next couple of days were going to be like. Were grocery stores and delis going to be open? I remember thinking that food shortages, and even looting, were distinct possibilities. We decided stopped into a crowded deli to buy supplies. Our purchase consisted of several large bottles of water, two huge cans of tuna fish, a couple loaves of bread, a six-pack of Budweiser, and a pack of Camel Lights (and neither of us were even regular smokers - cigarettes just seemed like a good thing to have in case the city descended into some kind of Mad Max squalor).
As we walked over to our co-worker's apartment, in the upper-50's, we passed fancy restaurants where patrons were seated calmly, and even a salon where ladies were getting their nails done. After we got to the apartment, we spent the afternoon watching the news and trying to call friends and family. All of the phone lines were jammed, but occasionally you could get through. I was relieved when I got in touch with my old friend Matt, and he told me that his girlfriend Judy, another good friend of mine, had made it home safely from her office a few blocks from the WTC.
Late in the afternoon, Dan and I decided to walk we would walk over the nearby Queensboro Bridge (or "59th Street Bridge") to Long Island City, Queens, and then make our way from there down to my place in northern Brooklyn. There was no way Dan was getting home to Long Island, so I offered him my couch. As we walked over the bridge, the sun began to set, and we looked out at the huge plume of white smoke blowing east towards Brooklyn, framed by a swath of bright pink sky.
Once we got to Long Island City, we caught a bus down to Williamsburg, where we met up with some friends of mine from Raleigh. One of them, who had been working a few blocks from the towers, had walked over to look up at the damage from the planes. He told us that when the south tower fell, debris and dust flooded into the street he was standing on, and everyone was running into parked cars, street signs, and each other. Finally, he came to the corner of a building and took a quick left around it, and the dust continued to blow down main street, but not the side street, a scene he described as being like something out of a cartoon. He had already showered twice by the time we spoke, and still couldn't get out the horrible taste and smell of the dust.
See also: "We kept our masks on": observations from 9/12/01, "Missing" signs: observations from 9/13/01, and "This is the morgue": observations from 9/14/01.
posted at 6:40:00 PM | permalink
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