This is my story of looking up to see an airplane crash into the World Trade Center, and all of the ensuing events in New York that day 10 years ago. I still remember the whole thing like it was yesterday.
Prologue
In the summer of 2001, I was a new college graduate living the dream in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn. The neighborhood was full of my also recently graduated friends, and every day I would ride my bike 10 miles to Midtown Manhattan, to my job putting together prospectuses for a mutual fund. It was nothing I cared about, and it didn't pay much, but it paid enough to maintain me in my lifestyle of meeting my friends for hours at the Park Slope Teahouse or the Blah Blah cafe, and going to dinner with my girlfriend at our favorite restaurants - either Red Hot Szechuan or Laila Middle Eastern in Brooklyn, or Meskerem Ethiopian in Hells Kitchen.
I was pretty deeply alienated about mainstream politics, and long before there was ever a Daily Kos, I did my political arguing and bickering on everything2.com (who else remembers that!?). Not to over-romanticize it, but I was kind of living the dream - at least the dream that I had when I was a teenager stuck in a pissant town straddling the midwest and south:
I was in the big city - but in the 'keeping it real' part of it - with a cool roommate and a bunch of friends, with a not very challenging job and no homework. It was long before I had ever thought about grant applications, before I had a CV, when I still had a landline phone, when my dad was still alive, and before any girlfriend had ever realized that she had a biological clock.
And then I looked up and saw an airplane hit the World Trade Center.
Orange fireball up the street
On the morning of September 11, 2001, I was riding my bike as usual from Brooklyn to Midtown Manhattan. I was stopped at a light at the corner of 6th Avenue and 14th street facing north, when there quickly began a very visible commotion on the sidewalk. People were looking to the south with terror on their faces and some were even wailing. I turned around just in time to see a giant flash of orange at the top of the World Trade Center.
That was the first plane hitting. One thing that is remarkable is that a jumbo airliner exploded into the side of a building two miles away, and those of us on the street right there heard no sound from it. Such is the ambient noise in a Manhattan rush hour.
At the time I, and I presume most of the others around there, thought it was a small plane. I immediately thought of the small plane that hit the Empire State Building in the 30s. Little did I know. I continued on my way.
ICQ and stuck in the office
When I got to the office my two co-workers and friends, Natalie and Alex (I wonder what ever happened to them, we lost touch later) said 'You won't believe this, a plane hit the World Trade Center' and I said "I know, I saw it!" and they said 'No another plane hit the World Trade Center'. We were listening to the radio and repeatedly refreshing CNN.com, trying to figure out what was happening. I also loaded up ICQ (who else remembers that!?) and started chatting with my friend from back home, who was asking WTF was going on in NYC. It was clear no actual work was going to be happening this Tuesday.
After some time Alex, after yet another website refresh, said "The Pentagon is on fire". By that time the highest ranking person in the office had turned on a TV in the conference room, and soon we saw the first tower collapse. Then news of a plane crash in Pennsylvania, then the second tower collapsed.
All this time, we had been asking for permission to leave, and the boss lady had steadfastly refused. There was then a report on the TV, which many people remember, that as many as eight planes were still unaccounted for, and people were urged to leave high risk places. At that point she did a 180 and said "Go! Nobody's keeping you here."
Chaos on the bridge
I ran out of the building and got my bike, but the streets were complete chaos. People were filling the sidewalks and streets, scrambling all over the place, crushing toward somewhere. Police vehicles and ambulances were wailing, trying to part the crowds. There were a number of buses that were loaded down with people, even people hanging from the mirrors (!), but they were mostly stuck among the chaos.
I followed the crowds and walked my bike toward the 59th Street Bridge. A mass of humanity was pouring onto the bridge, all over the roadway. The police were desperately trying to keep one lane open for vehicles. They were stopping every truck and bus and making them take on people. People were piling into the back of delivery vans, riding on the roof, hanging from the mirrors, trying to get a ride.
While slowly walking the bridge in the enormous crush of people, I talked to a man who showed me an ATM receipt marked 9:47 AM. He said he was from New Jersey, commuted in by the PATH trains, and was in the basement concourse of the World Trade Center complex right when the first plane hit. He didn't know anything had happened and got on the subway uptown as usual.
He was miles from home walking in the exact opposite direction, like millions of other people, with no idea how he was going to get home. I was fortunate to have my bike. Most of the people stopped on the other side of the bridge, but I was able to get on my bike and ride south. I could see the whole of downtown covered in smoke.
Eerie calm
Still, there was something really surreal about being across the river in Queens then. All of the chaos and danger was exchanged for a strange calm. On my way south I stopped for food in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and ate outdoors at a cafe with hipsters who were just waking up for breakfast. That was also so surreal and a bit disturbing - even though the chaos was right across the water those people had such a detached heir about the whole thing, like it was all happening in a different time and place and didn't even matter. It was so strange.
I cycled on, and by mid-afternoon I was back home. My roommate said he thought I wouldn't make it, and it turns out he saw the first plane hit during the brief time the F Train elevates in Red Hook, and decided right there to get off and come right back home. We didn't like our downstairs neighbors, but we we sat outside with them and exchanged stories of how we got home.
Our street was littered with papers and debris. And there was a smell that pervaded the air for days afterwards. People who lived in New York then, especially in places that were right in the debris plume, remember that smell. Who remembers it?
Back for more
The crazy thing is that I actually went back into Manhattan! I was supposed to meet my parents' friends, who were visiting, for dinner. So I got back on my bike and cycled back through Brooklyn and over the bridge into Manhattan, and went right to their hotel in the Village. As you might imagine, there was so much to talk about, and the restaurant was full of people who were stuck in Manhattan, who couldn't get home to New Jersey or Westchester or wherever. Everyone was talking and sharing their experiences from the day.
After dinner I got back on my bike and headed south. However, I ran into a blockade at 14th Street, and the cops told me that the whole city was closed south of there. I said I had to get back home to Brooklyn and no subways were running, and after some discussion, the officers told me to go east all the way to the FDR drive, which was closed to traffic, and take my bike on the highway south to the Brooklyn Bridge.
I was amazed at the chance to ride my bike on the highway. So I said ok. But as I was riding on the FDR drive as told, there were GIANT trucks, earth movers, and every other manner of huge equipment passing me on the road, right next to me. Talk about intimidating, when you are on a bike and a giant piece of equipment where the wheels are taller than you are is in the next lane!
I still remember so vividly as I was peddling slowly on the freeway south near the entrance to the bridge, that the night air was so thick with particles and debris, that it looked, with my headlamp shining, like I was swimming in an aquarium, or in a snow globe. But in reality I was biking through the still night in the blown around charred remains of the World Trade Center.
For the next few weeks, the city had that smell, that combination of burned metal and paper and whatever else it was. There were all of the makeshift memorials, and all of the handmade missing persons flyers hanging everywhere. As the days went by it was clear those people would not be locating their loved ones.
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Epilogue
Everything since then, politically, has been kind of terrible. The attacks jolted our country up out of the mass narcissistic coma of the 90s and into something even worse, a petty, reactive authoritarianism. Commander Codpiece, in spite of stealing the 2000 election and dividing the country with Karl Rove's evil Macchiavellian maneuverings, became the golden boy, and too many of our Democratic officials were cowering wusses, giving their acquiescence to our misguided epic waste of blood and treasure in Iraq. Politics moved steadily right ever since. The continuing decline of the middle class was masked by a housing bubble that allowed the rich and the financial class to loot as much as possible before the crash. Bush and Cheney bankrupted the country, intentionally, with billions of givaways to Haliburton and the richest among us, and the takeover of our economy, politics, and very way of life by corporate power accelerated to the point of no return. What looked like a new era of hope with Obama quickly soured in the face of treasonous Republican intransigence. I think our country may never recover. I hope it does, but these days it is so hard to be optimistic.
What about me? In the 10 years since that ridiculous, surreal, life changing day, I moved to Southern California, then moved to Washington DC for some of the best years of my life, then landed in the Bay Area. I drove across the country, coast to coast, 5 times. Jen and I didn't survive the first move to California, but then there was Rebecca, and then Denise, and then Keanna. In 2007 the building I was living in burned down as I ran out of it, then a week later my dad fell off a ladder and died. I've made some new best friends and lost touch with some old ones. I got a PhD, then did a postdoc at NASA, then did another postdoc, gave talks everywhere from Chicago to Cambridge to Krakow, taught some amazing college kids and some others who were amazingly bad. As I sit a continent away in the shadow of the mountains my life seems so completely different than it was 10 years ago. Sometimes it seems like a lifetime ago. We'll see where it goes from here.