You are currently browsing the stories about the “World Trade Center” neighborhood.
It was not any ordinary day when I left home on September 11th. I was coming off a two-week vacation and feeling on top of my game and on top of the world. I had a new state of mind, a new attitude. I was refreshed and all aglow. I had used my vacation time to rejuvenate and replenish body, [...]
I was working at my job in the World Financial Center, just across the street from the two seemingly constant World Trade Towers when the first plane hit. Feeling and hearing the force of the impact, my co-workers and I initially thought the first plane was a freakish accident as we ran to and from the huge conference room [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
"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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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. [...]
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