After more than two years, you might think remembering the day would get easier. It doesn’t. I still get choked up, the tears still come. But memory blurs with time, so this is a good thing: commit these memories to permanence now, before they fade with time.
Not the feelings, the impact, the significance: That can never fade. But the details, the things I saw there, we shouldn’t lose that. I’m so afraid of losing the details. I’ve been to the World Trade Center site so many times since, and I see the buildings that survived, and I think: This is where this happened, there is where that happened; 114 Liberty Street is where the cat was rescued, the marina is where the flag was taken that was seen around the world while the boats were pressed into service ferrying people to New Jersey, the McDonald’s is where policemen and rescue workers escaped the choking cloud of smoke and ash billowing down Greenwich Street. All these places deserve historical markers, so that people will know what happened here, in detail.
I worked on Greenwich Street, a mile north of the World Trade Center. Close enough so that the towers were a part of the sky. A mile away, and still you had to look up to see the top. When the first plane hit I was at my desk, and like just about everyone else, I assumed it was an accident. I sent a few emails out to friends, to let them know what had happened. The second plane hit, and it was clear it was no accident. We were all watching. It was like feeling a fist tighten around your gut. This was not an accident, it was an attack.
Being a construction manager I had a little knowledge of the World Trade Center. I knew there were 35 to 50 thousand people there on a typical work day, and the number there at the time of the attack would largely depend on the severity of traffic that morning. I also knew that after the 1993 attack, it took 3 hours to evacuate the buildings. Somewhere in my head I started the clock ticking.
We took pictures with a digital camera, and sent them around the world on the internet. In hindsight, a silly thing, because this was quickly turning into the most watched, most intensely covered event in history. But, I wanted people to know what I was seeing myself, me and not a television camera. I felt it was important at the time.
The subways stopped, the bridges and tunnels closed, the city was locked down. The street was filled with people, watching. At first, the damage, from a mile away, seemed small, yet somehow impossible, like watching the moon on fire. Police and Fire vehicles were racing to the site, called in from everywhere.
The south tower fell, and I tried not to believe what I was seeing. I told myself it couldn’t have; it’s just all the smoke, we can’t see because of all the smoke. The clock in my head stopped, and at less than an hour, I knew it wasn’t an empty building that had just fallen. How many people had gone down with that building? If it’s 100% evacuated in 3 hours, how empty is it in just one? 50%? 75%? The people in the street cried, and they were still crying when the north tower fell. One of our secretaries was in a state of quiet shock; her husband worked in the area and hadn’t been heard from. All thoughts turned to friends, relatives and coworkers in the area.
The telephones were out, the cell phones were almost useless. As the long train of refugees began moving up along Greenwich Street, we let people use our office to send emails. Miraculously, the internet was still up. I had heard it was designed to survive anything, and this was a real test, I guess. Police and fire vehicles still raced south, the noise of sirens was constant. I watched them go past. I wasn’t seeing that many New York City vehicles anymore. The names on the sides of the trucks were from towns outside the city, more and more distant each minute. The call went out for any available doctors and nurses to go to Saint Vincent’s Hospital, a few blocks away from us, which was being turned into a casualty evacuation center. The National Guard was mobilized, and the heavy roar of military aircraft was added to the sound of sirens. By early afternoon the word was out that the entire city south of 14th Street was being evacuated, except for rescue workers.
It was a small construction company, we volunteered to do what we could, but we were turned down. We didn’t have the heavy equipment they needed. So many things we didn’t learn until later, and this was a fact that became precious to me: there was never a shortage of volunteer labor. From the first moments, so many people mobbed the site that the rescue workers had their hands full turning people away. But seeing that, knowing what was happening, and able to do nothing, that is a terrible feeling. I had been a soldier years ago, and I wished I could be in the Army again, because we knew we had entered a war, and I felt a hunger to do something about it.
The secretary’s missing husband showed up at our office. A brief moment of joy amidst a mourning of shock and tears. They headed for home, deciding to walk, across the Brooklyn Bridge and eastwards to Queens. Eventually, I joined the refugees headed north along the waterfront, to the piers where the ferries, the only transport across the Hudson still open, were moving people across to New Jersey. Along the way, what I saw was the most uplifting site of my life. The response to the attack was being organized, smoothly and professionally, by people who obviously knew what they were doing. Movement along the West Side Highway was no longer a desperate, haphazard reaction- it was a carefully controlled movement of emergency vehicles. Rows of ambulances were lined up in convoys with markings chalked on their windshields- just like we did it in the Army, except these were rows of civilian ambulances, from hospitals and ambulance services all over the city, and beyond, ambulances from small town volunteer ambulance corps, from city agencies, from the elite private hospitals, from the Catholic and Jewish organizations that runs ambulance services. We knew that hundreds of firemen were missing, that other buildings were collapsing, and STILL the firemen headed south into that inferno. They were fighting the Battle of New York, and despite 343 of their brothers gone that day, there was no surrender to fear.
On the Hudson River, a fleet of small civilian boats were supporting the ferries, evacuating people to New Jersey. Everything that could float was converging on lower Manhattan. The sky was empty except for military aircraft. The sound of fighter jets overhead is a strange one in New York. It echoed off the skyscrapers, and seemed to come from everywhere.
A convoy of four Coca Cola trucks went by, escorted by the police. Later, McDonald’s sent two trucks, “mobile restaurants” called in by the owner of the McDonald’s on Greenwich street. He was one of the many restaurateurs who decided, on the spot, that the mission of the his business, for the foreseeable future, was to provide free food to the rescue workers. With his own store overwhelmed, he called in reinforcements, and the corporate headquarters obliged. I thought it was ironic- ask people around the world which sort of corporations give them a negative image of the United States, and they say, “McDonald’s, Coca Cola”. They don’t know what I know about McDonald’s and Coca Cola, and the other companies that answered the call.
One of which was New York Waterways. I walked past the ferry terminal at 23rd street. It wasn’t the crowd, which was enormous and growing. It was that I wasn’t ready to abandon the city, not just yet. I kept walking, watching, until I reached the New York Waterways terminal at 34th street. The lines stretched for blocks. New York Waterways wasn’t collecting fares- the company had told its ferry crews to pack the boats, unload in New Jersey, and come back for more, as fast as they could. Still, it took hours, but for the most part, despite bearing witness to what we all knew was the first act of a new war, the crowd kept its composure.
From the ferry we could see the flame and smoke, and the ruin. Nothing I can write would describe it. It was an obscenity. We didn’t know what else would happen that day, or the next. Would there be other attacks? How far would the fire go? Would we lose all of lower Manhattan? The crews handling the evacuation on the New Jersey side were in the dark about a lot of things too- somehow they got the idea that we might all be contaminated with something, and we were decontaminated, a process that involved passing through a gauntlet of high pressure water sprays. It may not have really been necessary, but the crews performed with skill, compassion, and professionalism.
I think the rest of the world knows about how the city- and the country- came together. People donated what they could- food, money, clothing, blood- moral support if they had nothing else to give. Musicians and Massage Therapists showed up at the National Guard Armory to offer their own skills to the troops. (And an awful lot of New Yorkers were reminded of just why we have National Guard Armories.) The Jacob Javits Center, which became the volunteer collection point, was crowded the next day with tens of thousands of construction workers, most of whom were turned away because only steel workers were needed. There were long lines at the blood banks. Food and Toy drives. The police cars I saw around Hudson and Bleecker Street were from Miami and South Carolina! They hadn’t waited for orders, just loaded up their cars and headed north where they knew they’d be needed.
This was a shock to me, in many ways a bigger one that the attack. I knew there were people in this world evil enough to do that, but in truth, I had become somewhat cynical, and until I saw it for myself, I never thought that the rest of us were people good enough to respond in the way we did. It should be a terribly reassuring thing, if you are an American, to know that you live in a country where strangers will show up by the tens of thousands to dig you out of ash and rubble.
***
If by some chance I should win this, I’m not in it for the prize. A two
hundred dollar gift certificate won’t really impact my life. Send it to
the USO, or some such worthy organization.
Copyright © 2004 Benjamin Levy