Remembering September 11th

During the summer of 2001 I was 27 years old. I had a great job as a production coordinator and lived in downtown Manhattan with my boyfriend of three years. I was in love. We had recently moved into a beautiful brand new apartment on the corner of Greenwich and Rector in the financial district. The building was located at 88 Greenwich Street, NY, NY 10006. Mapquest it.

We loved our new neighborhood. It was bustling during the day, but around 7 PM every night it became a ghost town. It was calm and quiet and we liked it that way. That summer we adopted two puppies and every evening when we both got home from work we would make dinner and then take our dogs for a walk. Sometimes we would walk over to Battery Park City and go to the dog park or walk around the esplenade where we had a terrific view of the Statue of Liberty. That summer every weekend there were fireworks going off at the esplenade. We would often get up early on the weekends and walk to the Krispy Kreme Donut shop in the base of the WTC and have coffee and donuts as we read the paper on the benches in front of the Twin Towers. Many people don't know this, but there was a mall in the basement of the towers. There was a Gap, and a Sam Goody, a Bath & Bodyworks, and a J. Crew, and a Duane Reade where I bought shampoo and deoderent, where I bought magazines and gum, where I bought lipgloss and toothpaste. We had acclimated to the neighborhood, found the perfect grocery and liquor stores, we knew many of the counter workers and subway attendents. We finally felt at home. Our existance was very picturesque. Almost too good to be true. Everything changed on September 11th.

We lived on the 12th floor of a 35 story building located two "short" blocks from the World Trade Center. (Short blocks meaning the distance between blocks going north and south, versus east and west, which are significantly, well, shorter.) On that infamous Tuesday morning I did not wake up to the sound of a plane hitting the north tower, or even to the sirens and commotion going on out on the street below my apartment window. I awoke to a man screaming in the hallway, "Do you wanna die?"

I thought there was some kind of domestic altercation going on in the hallway. I jumped out of bed and ran to the door to my apartment. My boyfriend was in the shower at the time and as he came out of the bathroom he asked me what was going on. I answered that I thought one of our neighbors was about to kill his girlfriend. I had my ear up against the door trying to listen to what was going on long enough to figure out that the person the man was yelling at was obviously not being taken against her will (I remember her saying something like, "Should we take our rollerblades?) and so I laid back down in my bed while my boyfriend continued to get ready for work. I also had to go to work but I ususally didn't get up until around 9:30 to be at work by 10:30. I was lucky, the 9 subway train station was directly under my apartment building and it was an express to the Paramount Building on 51st and Broadway where I worked. It was the easiest commute you could ask for in NYC.

My boyfriend worked downtown at Goldman-Sachs and walked to work. He usually left around 8:45 to be at work by 9. Just as I was falling back asleep he kissed me goodbye and left for work. Our apartment was shotgun house style in it's layout. The door to the apartment opened into our bedroom, then there was a hallway with a bathroom, then the kitchen, then the dining area, then the living room. In the living room there was a single huge window that looked out over Washington Street. Our bed was set up against the wall that was next to the elevator shafts in the main corridor of our floor. I could always here the elevator bell ring when the doors would open to let someone on and off. I remember hearing that bell ring for the elevator that Jason must have stepped onto and then hearing the doors close. Thats when the second plane hit the south tower and shook our building so hard that I was thrown to the floor.

Since I was only wearing my underwear at the time, I immediately jumped up and grabbed some pajama bottoms out of a drawer and threw on a t-shirt. I then ran to the one window in our apartment that overlooked Washington Street and pulled it all the way open. The next moment I will never forget because I remember it happening in slow motion, like straight out of a movie. I looked down to the street, to try and figure out which way my building was falling down and saw a sea of people on the street looking up into the sky. Before I was able to turn my head and follow their gaze, I felt the heat on the side of my face. I slowly turned my head towards the south tower and my mouth fell open. There was a giant burning hole in the side of the tower, in the shape of an airplane.

I could see that the north tower was on fire also. Tears immediately welled up in my eyes. I had no idea what was going on. My phone started ringing. I turned on the television. I fielded calls for the 15 or 20 minutes. Friends, family, my work, they all called to see what was going on. I was pretty calm throughout the whole thing. I was too caught up to even think at the time where Jason might be, it turned out he was stuck in the elevator that he was on when the second plane hit.

I spent a long time on the phone with my mother, trying to assure her that everything was going to be fine, and at the time, I really did believe that. She kept trying to encourage me to leave my apartment and I kept trying to convince her there was really no place to go. There was chaos in the streets, the subway system was obviously out of commission, no one would have been able to find a cab at that point, and since I lived south of the towers, the only place to go was into the water. Manhattan is, afterall, an island. So, I sat and watched television and tried to figure out what the hell was going on. I went to my window and watched for a while and got out my binoculars when I saw that something kept falling off the towers and landing on the ground with a dull thud. As I looked through the lenses I caught sight of a man and a woman holding hands and jumping to their death. I put the binoculars away and left the window.

Jason was finally released from the elevator and made his way back to the apartment. We talked about what was going on as we watched it on television like we were in Boise, Idaho, not two blocks away. We flipped through all the stations and everyone was saying that it was obviously a terrorist attack.

"A what? Bin Laden? What are these people talking about?"

"But we're in America, you can't do that to Americans!"

Yes, I was naive then, just like the majority of us.

Jason and I never really discussed what we should do. It seemed like the fire would just burn itself out. I didn't feel like we were in any real danger. And then we heard the south tower begin to rumble.

I ran to the window which was still wide open and looked out at the tower. It looked like it was shaking in an earthquake. I looked down and saw hundreds of people turn and run for their lives. Jason, being smarter than me, came over and grabbed me and slammed down the window. We looked at each other with fear in our eyes. If the building fell like a tree when you hack into it with an axe, it could definitley land on our building, we were that close. We ran to the back of our apartment and got on the bed with our two small puppies and braced ourselves. Then we listened to the building fall. We watched through the window as a huge black cloud of smoke engulf everything to the point where it was just black outside. After a few minutes everything kind of settled and our phone rang. We looked at each other in shock that we were alive and okm, and then I got up and went down the hallway and picked up the phone. Once again it was my mother. After I convinced her that we were ok, once again she tried to convince me to leave. And once again I asked her where we were suppose to go, especially now that outside was pitch black. I stayed on the phone with her until the second tower fell.

When the second tower fell, we lost power and the phone went out. We were crouched in the corner of our bed in complete darkeness. And that's when I kind of lost it. I couldn't see my hand in front of my face. And we had no idea what to do. It was like getting the air knocked out of you and having a panic attack because you can't breathe, except this one didn't last for only a minute or two. It lasted for at least 20.

I don't remmeber what we said, or what I thought really. I just remember being scared.

At some point there was a knock at the door. We opened it and it was our super. He told us to put on sturdy shoes and clothes, find something to put some water in and come down into the basement. As we tried to prepare ourselves to leave our apartment by the light of a candle, I looked around at everything I owned and wondered what I should take with me. At the time, I didn't know if I was ever going to be able to come back or what lay ahead of us outside. I packed a bag with the FM radio from my shower, a ziploc bag full of dog food, emptied a 2 liter of coke and filled it with water, and packed a loaf of bread. Then I grabbed my laptop and one of my puppies, with Jason carying the other one, and we left our apartment and made our way to the basement.

Our basement had a huge fitness center and among the treadmills, elliptical machines and weights were about 30 other people sitting on the ground, all looking slightly bewildered. Some were covered in ashes, as they were obviously outside when one of the buildings fell and probably ducked into our building for cover. Many had their pets with them and a bag. Nobody really talked much. We just sat there dumbfounded.

A few hours later they finally told us that we could leave the building. No one told us what to do or where we should go really, just that we should start walking up FDR drive.

When I stepped out of my apartment buidling, it felt like I had stepped into the aftermath of a nuclear war. There was ash and dust a foot deep on the ground. You could not see the sky, just smoke and haze. There were papers flying everywhere. We carried our dogs and began walking, not knowing really where we were going. Just away.

As we walked towards the east side of the island I stopped at a pay phone and called my mother. We had been on the phone when the second building fell and had lost our connection, that had been at least two hours before. When she answered the phone she was in hysterics. She kept saying that she wanted me to come home (to Memphis) and I kept having to explain to her that nobody was going anywhere anytime soon. I finally convinced her to calm down enough so that I could get out of downtown and that I would call her when I found another pay phone (Cell phones were on overload and none could get through).

So, we started to walk up FDR to the Brooklyn Bridge where we had been told we should cross over and go into Brooklyn. It took us a least a couple of hours to make it that far, along with thousands of other people making the trek. I'll tell you this, almost the most scary thing that happened that day was walking across that bridge thinking that it could blow up any minute. I'm surprised no one had a heart attack crossing that bridge because my heart was beating out of my chest.

When we landed in Brooklyn, most everyone just kind of stopped. Where were we supposed to go? We all kind of just found a place and sat down. I pulled out my shower radio and tuned into a news station and had 20 or 30 people gather round as we sat and tried to figure out what was going on. We heard about the Pentagon and the other hijacked plane that had crashed. Some people were saying that the Brooklyn courthouse had been bombed (which obviously turned out to just be some visious rumor that made it's way through the crowd).

At some point we decided that we were hungry and walked further into Brooklyn until we found a restaurant that was still open. We went in with our dogs and sat at a table and ordered macaroni and cheese. (Talk about needing some comfort food.) And then we plotted our next move. Jason's Aunt and Uncle lived in Norwalk CT, which seemed to be the closest people we knew that did not live in the city (we couldn't get in touch with any of our friends anyway since we couldn't get through to cell phones.) So, we called them from a pay phone and somehow figured out that MATA was giving free train rides to people at Central Station. Now all we had to do was make it there. no easy task when you're in Brooklyn and no public transpo is running. So we walked back to the bridge and sat there until they told us we could cross back over into the city. When we got back into the city, we tried to go back south towards our apartment for the small chance they might have let us back in, but that was a shot in the dark and they were not letting people go south of Houston Street. So we began the long walk to Central Station. It was late when we finally made it. We were tired and dirty and hungry, but it felt like we had survived. Like we had somehow won because we made it.

The next three days I spent on the couch in front of the television at Jason's aunt's house. Though we stayed together for two more years after 9/11, that harrowing day was definitly when the first cracks in our relationship happend. I didn't get along with Jason's aunt and that strained our relationship. We couch jumped and stayed in hotels for the next three weeks before they would let us back into our apartment. Two weeks after I returned to work, MTV laid off my entire department. We had to deal with FEMA and join an asscociation to battle our landlord to let people out of their leases and to lower our rents (cause obviously the $2500 a month we had been paying was hardly what the property was worth now). We endured round the clock work going on at Ground Zero. We walked by the pictures of the dead and missing every day. plastered on every building, fence, wall, waindow, everywhere. Almost every day as I walked around my neighborhood, I would hear loud crashing noises that sounded like bombs going off. I never knew whether to run away or to ignore them. The air was horrible, but we were told it was safe. We were both basically aggrivated 24/7. And then there were the tourists. The fence to keep people away from the mass grave was located directly in front of my building, so every time I left or came home I had to fight my way through gawkers.

I think Jason and I just kind of went numb. Our perfect world was gone. And if we had been stronger people, maybe everything that happened would have brought us closer together, but instead it just drove us apart. We continued going through the motions so long, one day I woke up next to someone that I felt like I didn't even know.

I didn't know anyone who died on September 11th. But I know that a little peice of all of us did. It changed all of our lives forever, in so many complex ways. Ways in which many of us are only fully coming to grips with now, 5 years later. I don't want any of this to come off like what happened to me even compares to how it effected those who lost friends and family in the attacks, or even those whose friends and families continue to lose their lives in the ongoing war that is happening right now as I write this. It's just my story, and many people have asked me about what happened that day, and tonight I felt compelled to tell you.

Here are some photos one of my neighbors took on that day.