You are currently viewing the stories for “September 2001.”
Some people around here watched the towers collapse from their rooftops. I didn't even think to go up to the roof. Like baseball, I preferred it on TV. Hell, I'm an American. When the second tower I fell I took a walk outside with my friend. We both live in Astoria and we both work at home (well, he's a [...]
On a cold and rainy and wintry Sunday in New York, I went to a memorial service for a fireman in Manhattan. (Schedules of funerals have begun appearing in the DAILY NEWS, with urgent appeals for people to attend. There will be over 300 of them. ) Today's memorial service is the only one I have seen scheduled for Manhattan. [...]
The World Trade Center had this fascinating opacity: two steel-grey slabs stopping thought. The more you looked at it, the less it gave you back. The Twin Towers came out of the minimalist aesthetic of the late 1960s, Donald Judd sculptures: their only decorative adornments were those aluminum Y's, provoking you by their tight-lipped abstraction, like the curved curlicues in [...]
Stephanie Black does not want to talk about the September 11th World Trade Center attack in the context of her movie, "Life and Debt." "I'm still processing it, like everyone else," she said on the phone the other day, speaking from her apartment in downtown Manhattan. But her film, which is currently playing at the Cinema Village (12th Street and [...]
I've disliked living on Long Island for about as long as I can remember. Now I hate it. It started as child, thrust into a culture that coddled me. My friends never understood why I, as a music student, craved visits to the city. To them, Long Island offered everything Manhattan did with added bonuses: sprawling houses, trees, yacht clubs, [...]
It is 8:30 p.m. on September 10th, the day before the World Trade Center attack. I am at therapy like I am every Monday night. "New York is killing me," I complain to my therapist. "At every turn, I am filled with a new contempt for New York. A garbage truck passes me and spews out thick exhaust in my [...]
Late this afternoon I stood amongst a tightly packed crowd of onlookers at Broadway and John Street, watching from behind a barricade as engineers prepared to remove from the World Trade Center rubble the 500 foot wall that -- for many of us -- had somehow, over the past two weeks, come to symbolize our city's struggle to pull through [...]
My neighbors don't have window shades. They are a man and woman in middle age, childless, quiet, and coping. At night, they shudder in the light of the TV which is always on in their bedroom, reruns of Kojak or The Lucy Show or Dick Van Dyke. Often, he's sprawled in bed, surfing the channels, while she's staring at some [...]
The weekend after the World Trade Center collapsed, I went down toward the Promenade to see what was left of the skyline. The Promenade is a walkway at the edge of the Brooklyn Heights bluffs where you can see all the landmarks of the city at once, from the Statue of Liberty to the Empire State Building. When I got [...]
9:30 AM It’s a slow morning like so many, in that I am running slow. I get into the bathtub, and turn on WCBS Newsradio. Downstairs I can hear my wife assuring our fifteenth month old that breakfast is fast approaching. And then I hear the unfamiliar sound of a plane about to fly into my house on Sullivan Street [...]
I need to walk. I walk and walk and end up at Silver Lake Park and when I turn around to take in my favorite view of the skyline, up high on the hill looking straight down Victory Boulevard, I half expect the towers to be there. I swear I can still see a faint outline of where they used [...]
Last night, I attended a memorial service for an artist I knew, Michael Richards. He was fortunate to have been selected for the lower Manhattan cultural council's program "world views’ (or something like that). He was unfortunate in that his studio was on the 92nd floor of Tower One. I met Michael two years ago when I first came to [...]
"You have star quality. " My aunt once wrote this to me in a get-well letter. It had been our joke; years before, she had been the nanny in the house of a well-known film director, and these were the only words his parrot knew. And now my aunt had actually said them to me. Star quality evoked images of [...]
I was in the shower when our building shook! My wife yelled out and I ran out of the shower and saw that the second tower had been hit. It was then we knew that it was a terrorist hit. It was so difficult to fathom. I decided I wasn't going to let a terrorist change my life and my [...]
September 11, 9:30AM I was still nursing a baseball hangover from the previous night, a game that never started. Just as warm-ups were finishing, a 43 minute downpour erased all hopes of watching Roger Clemens add one minor record to his ego, winningest percentage among 20 game winners. Goers huddled near the concessions, splitting peanuts and sipping Budweiser, cops warned [...]
Outside a Fresh Fields market in Manhasset, there is a parking lot large enough to hold one hundred cars. Now, there are only to be found seven Mercedes Benz SUVs, four Range Rovers, two of the BMW convertibles that the new James Bond drives, one Hummer, three Audio A8s, a smattering of Inifitis, Acuras, and Lexuses, five different kinds of [...]
My Sister was silent on the Saturday following the WTC collapse. We were in the country trying to degauss our heads from the city's pain. She was an OB on call in the emergency room when the planes hit. I cooked and the rest of the family drank caffeine on the deck, in the sun. Dinner finally finished cooking and [...]
On the day it happened we walked briskly to the hospital almost before our emotions had time to respond. Our eyes stung from the sun and our heads pounded from the hangovers which prompted us to remark that the blood we were about to donate might still have a good deal of alcohol in it. We were numb and we [...]
TWO MONTHS AGO I DECIDED TO VISIT NY WITH MY SON ROMAIN. NY HAS A SO BIG VITALITY AND A SO BEAUTIFUL COSMOPOLITAIN PEOPLE THAT I THINK IT IS A VERY GOOD EXAMPLE OF LIFE FOR MY SON. AND IT IS !!!! WE VISITED MANY PLACES OF NY AND OF COURSE THE TWINS. AT THE TOP A PHOTOGRAPHER IN A [...]
From 1965, when the World Trade Center was in its planning stages, until 1972, Edith Iglauer was a frequent visitor to the construction site of the World Trade Center, researching an article about the building’s foundation, known as "The Big Bathtub." The article, 'The Biggest Foundation', appeared in the New Yorker on November 4th, 1972. In 1993 she wrote a [...]
And again they are dancing on the roof. And again they hand out candies in the street. And the level of their joy rises in proportion to the number of casualties reported. And the grandpa who dreamed about peace, I mean dreamed until yesterday, kisses his grandaughter during her sleep, in the hope that her dreams will come true. Didi [...]
So it began at the dry cleaners, at five past nine, when someone said a plane had hit the World Trade Center, and Chris, the Jamaican tailor, turned from his sewing machine in the front window and said, "Two. Two planes have hit the towers. Both of them." The dry cleaner is Le Kang, an Asian name, and the woman [...]
The story unfolded quickly, but with the usual peculiar sense that we are always on the verge of being at the end of the event. We always think that what we can fathom is all there is to fathom. Like during a blackout, when our first thought is always, "Oh! My lights are off." For all of us yesterday, following [...]
All of us who were in Manhattan on September 11th have our own harrowing, freakish and scary stories to tell, but of all the stories I heard directly that day, my neighbor Jennifer's story takes the cake: Jennifer was on the 92nd floor of 2 World Trade Center on Tuesday morning. She looked out her window and saw a plane [...]
At Thomas Street, about six blocks North of the World Trade Center, the nature of the crowd on the street changed. There was more urgency and less mirth, more police shouting, and amidst the crowd was a guy who had been on the 81st floor on Two World Trade Center when the plane hit. It was just after ten AM. [...]
