You are currently browsing stories tagged with “10 years later.”
Friday, September 9, 2011. My friend and neighbor Judy the Therapist and I ponder the upcoming 10th anniversary of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks. On that terrible day, Judy and a young couple from my building had just picked up the morning paper at a news stand around the corner; they saw the first plane hit. Another friend [...]
“Uptown or Downtown? UPTOWN OR DOWNTOWN??” Mark sputtered, drowning out the Oasis tape in my little red Honda, as he downshifted to take the curve. My spiral-permed hair fluttered in the breeze as I flicked a Marlboro Light out the window. We had just popped out of the Holland Tunnel - Manhattan side - and had to choose our destination, [...]
I stumbled bleary-eyed out of my building still hours before the sun would rise over the East River. Allen Street was black and still. The bars were closed and the morning rush hadn’t yet begun. The homeless slept soundly in the street-median park. Waiting in her car in front of my building was Maggie, 40ish with a bowl cut and [...]
I’d just spent a month back in Kentucky, trying it on like an old outfit to see if it still fit. I was unemployed, unattached, poor, frustrated, and I wanted to make sure living in the most complicated, and challenging, city in the world was still worth it. I contemplated this as the plane bisected the isle of Manhattan. For [...]
In 2002 we published Before & After: Stories from New York; a collection of stories in two halves - the first taking place in the city before the 9/11 attacks, the second being comprised of testimonials from the day itself and its immediate aftermath. Recently, we asked for submissions for the site, to explore the evolution of emotions which surround [...]
My mother doesn’t get why I have to be here for the anniversary of September 11th. In late August of this year, I was leaving our family beach house at the Jersey Shore and Mom asked if I was planning a return visit in September. “Yeah, I’ll be back,” I said. “Probably the third weekend, definitely not the weekend of [...]
September 10th, 2001. 6:30 PM. The corner of 11th Street and Fifth Avenue. The weather is glorious. The air is crisp. The sky, tranquil. I am walking downtown en route to a trendy West Village bistro. As I approach the corner of East 10th Street I come to an abrupt stop ... “I never realized how clearly you can see [...]
September 2010 Dear Jon, They want to build a mosque where you were murdered. I want to do the right thing. So I’m having a debate in my head taking on the two sides. What would you want I wonder. See, that’s the hard thing. I’d think after knowing you for such a long time, it would be easy to [...]
I met Mychal Judge in the spring of 1985 when my boyfriend, Javier, and I decided to get married. As a lapsed Catholic, estranged from the Church for over a decade, I was tormented with guilt and worry, yet I wanted to have a church wedding without having to account for prior errant ways—our daughter, for example—or making any commitments [...]
When I got the email from Sir Beller about revisiting 9/11, my thought was to delete it. After double-checking, I can say I'm proud of the piece I wrote, “October 2001,” only because I just reported what I saw and didn’t try to make sense of it. Had I gone the “this is how I experienced it,” route like so [...]
The phone rang behind a closed door and a door slammed open, frantic shuffling and the t.v. went on. "You guys get in here!" one of the girls yelled. We left our beds so fast we were still half asleep, wiping our eyes as we watched a black dot on the t.v. screen crash into the second tower. Stunned silence [...]
I was born in Manhattan, have lived there most of my life, but my last look at the twin towers of the World Trade Center was from the front deck of a Staten Island ferry moving through the dark waters after a Staten Island Yankees night game, July, 2001. I’d boarded the boat alone, was somehow all alone on the [...]
Dear American people Dear NYK people Ten years ago I wrote my emotion published on this web place. Ten years after, my emotion and compassion is still strong! Ten years after, one thing is very clear: we must be united to struggle against enemies of freedom. We must be all together finding solutions for economic problems and avoiding extrémisme in [...]
10 years ago today, 9/11/01, I had not yet read E.B. White’s 1949 essay “Here is New York,” which includes the following passage: “The sublest change in New York is something people don’t speak much about but that is in everyone’s mind. The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no [...]
An Update to my April 2002 story, The Visit. For me, a native Manhattanite who has never in my 72 years been off the island for more than two consecutive months, normalcy has never returned since 9.11. There's a permanent emptiness in the skyline - the towers missing from the views from the Throgg's Neck Bridge, from Ellis Island and [...]
The thing that intrigues me about photographs is not the spontaneity in which they’re taken, nor the way they freeze time, but the fact that in the split second when the shutter snaps, one doesn’t know which moments will become meaningful until much later. Capturing chance moments and random events, we can’t know the value of an image until life [...]
