I wrote this for my nephew Jared for a project on 9/11 for him. The new tower is being finished this week and I suspect that his school had them interview people about 9/11 because of that.
I was on the subway under Chambers street when the second airplane hit. Chambers street was the subway stop one the ACE line that ran under the world trade center. A woman boarded the train, she was covered in dust and said “a bomb just hit,” Startled, we were frightened,but the train moved on.
I got out of the subway like I did any day and went up to the 22nd floor of the building I worked in like I always do. On a TV was a picture of the buildings with billowing smoke. Back then, there was no instant messaging per se or text or really any smart phones, I was on email with a friend who did not have a TV and we wrote messages back and forth.
“I think there was a plane in DC.”
“Are we going to travel this week?”
“What is going on?”
“The south tower just fell.”
9:59 AM and the building crumbled on itself. I didn’t have to see the people jumping from buildings or the dust covered people running in the street, but the horror was there. And yet, there was a sense of calm in a crisis as well.
We evacuated the building, went to a lower building we had in the city. There was an auditorium and in a flash of inspiration, I started to play the movies we had there for the English as a second language learners, to calm people down. We didn’t know how long we were going to be there so we ran out to the stores and restaurants outside and bought up food and drink.
I was arranging cans on a table and in my OCD, I put all the cans facing forward. The CEO who didn’t talk to me much at the time said “I heard you were talented, but I didn’t know that was your talent.” In retrospect, he was lightly mocking me, but gallows humor was all we could afford at the time.
We were let go at the end of the day and in a hindsight that seems ludicrous today, I was allowed to ride the subway back under Chambers street and back to Brooklyn. The train did not stop there, but I saw a dust filled chaos in the station.
I didn’t walk the Brooklyn bridge with everyone else, I didn’t help people on the street, in the almost sterile environment of a subway car, I want back to Brooklyn and stayed there for the next two weeks without anything but the Simpsons DVD to keep me company. I didn’t go back to ground zero, and the areas around it, Chinatown, Soho, and the Wall Street Seaport area for almost a year after.
Note: When The World Trade Center towers fell they took down the cable television, the cell phone towers and much of what we take for granted in what we use to communicate. Only pagers worked that day and that technology is not used today.
I was supposed to travel that week, and I kept saying to my friend and colleague, I am going, no matter what I am going. He kept saying, there is no way I am going to go. I said, there is no safer time than now (after the planes hit), he said you will have to fire me. We all have very different reactions to things like this and each time is different. I don’t know what I would do now, but on that day, I just put one foot in front of the other and kept moving to keep out of people’s way.