You are currently browsing stories tagged with “9/11 and its aftershocks.”
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 [...]
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 [...]
The other day I was walking down 11th Street in the West Village past the recently shut down St. Vincent's Hospital building when something in the alcove on the corner of 7th Avenue caught my eye: a pile of stuffed animals laying in a heap: a teddy bear massacre. St. Vincent's used to be a source of life, [...]
I don’t tell people about Jon very often. I want people to get to know me, not feel sorry for me. Last week I was at a friend's anniversary party and a man who must have been on speed or something like it, talked about the planes hitting the towers. He said that he could see them from his apartment. [...]
I stared at them dressing each other with tutus and flower headbands, giggling, unaware and being in the moment. “I’ll be right back girls. I love you sweetie.” I signaled to my friend Michelle to come to the door out of their earshot. “What else should I get? I mean can I get you anything?” My gut felt sour and [...]
1. March 25th, 2001 Basketball City Chelsea Piers There Were Horses A pick up game at Basketball city. Cold Sunday afternoon. The academy awards that night. Dreading them. Miserable but psyched about the game. We ended up playing four on four full court. On the other team were the guys I play with in my league, on my team was [...]
It was a lousy and bleak first Sunday in May. I walked into City Hall Park, in my neighborhood, and Richard the gardener greeted me and introduced me to the other volunteers. “Can I pull out the tulips?” I said to Richard. “ My knees are in bad shape and I'm afraid of making them worse by kneeling on them.” [...]
December 2001. Like every other New Yorker, it still feels like the towers just fell. Bush said spend, Bloomberg called upon you to stimulate the economy. Niketown, Your Town. The makeshift commercial plays in your head as you peruse the store; it is after all one of your favorite places. Just do it. Besides, it’ll motivate your fitness students when [...]
I went out with my friend Dylan last night. We met in 2003 on the internet. Tried dating, but were better friends than anything. He was the first person I met when I moved back to New York and looking to date. I had left because my husband was killed in the World Trade Center. Dylan and I went out [...]
I am standing on the F train platform, my toes just over the yellow line. I lean toward the darkness of the train tunnel. In the distance I can see the faint, low-lit squares of train windows passing through the darkness. Then there is the hollow rumble of the F train approaching from in between stops and the shine of [...]
These pictures were taken from Spring Street and Lafayette Street. And some from "before..."
Aspiring poets learn, early on, the value of concrete imagery; of replacing metaphorically huge words with small sensory explosions which blow the reader into reality. Allen Ginsberg didn't write "live life," he wrote of those "who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston seeking jazz or sex or soup." Sylvia Plath didn't say, "I mourn the dead," but rather, "Thirty years [...]
Photographs by Alexej Steinhardt and Thomas Beller Click here for more information about the 360 One VR When not in use however, the attachment comes with a plastic jar that screws over the mirror ball, to protect it. The plastic jar makes it look downright lethal, weird, and mad-scientistish, and I was a little concerned about wandering around the streets [...]
A flaming sunset in western Cambodia, in the middle of 1972. I was coming back from my uncle's house. I was about 500 meters from my house, when there were suddenly terrific sounds, like thunderclaps, "Boom! Boom! Boom!" Immediately, I saw the spark and the firelight emerging into the flaming sky. I was very frightened and scared and ran very [...]
Day three 1,300 cruise missiles and bombs hit Baghdad. At work I have to use the freight elevator to bring my bicycle into the office. The elevator’s operated by an older Eastern European man with a deeply lined face and thinning hair. He dresses in the company uniform and a pair of beaten Air Jordans. It’s always seemed to me [...]
I took a taxi to the peace rally. My driver was a Puerto Rican guy playing loud salsa music. There was no partition. Some post cards were taped to his dash. He sat in the driver's seat with pride of ownership. It was his cab, I was his guest. He had the window down and an elbow out the window, [...]
The cold wreaked transformation: bone chilling and serious, the kind that keeps people home, yet here we were, all of us, shivering, waving signs, gleeful. Maybe half a million, and if the media says otherwise don’t believe it. Half a million! Could we really stop a war? At times like this, people change. I saw possible proof by the curb. [...]
The View From the Seventieth Floor by Sandy Gelpieryn Death Masks at Ground Zero by Kendra Hurley The Numbers by Bryan Charles The View From Silver Lake Park by Gabrielle Walter Don't Look Back by Kevin McLeod Scenes From The Brooklyn Bridge by Jim Merlis The View From Long Island Part Ii by Adam Baer Ob Gyn Wtc by [...]
1. Well, that’s it, Noppi, I’m up early again, I can’t sleep. My throat is killing me and I’m coughing. I think it’s the smoke because everyone else has it too. The subways are quiet. People bump into each other and don’t apologize. A woman slips in through the closing doors and takes the seat beside me. Opens her newspaper, [...]
Another September as bright as a dime. Another morning of clear air, another day of hearing shrieking jets and watching strangers acting strange in the streets. Another day of firefighters in their FDNY T-shirts and brotherhoods of policemen in their dress blues, this time like old war veterans dressed up for the parade, assuming a public identity that seemed to [...]
I am a skeptic when it comes to psychics like John Edward, the hunky television charlatan, who claims he is able to communicate with “The Other Side.” When I have a premonition I tend to deny it. I denied one in late August of last year when I was seven months pregnant. While organizing my wallet, I paused on two [...]
I am not a firefighter, police officer or paramedic, but when a nurse at the Red Cross barricade mistook me for one and asked, "Are you coming?" I said, "Yes." That was 8:45 P.M. on September 11th. What followed was a two-day odyssey at Ground Zero. I worked with many good-willed people on bucket brigades and setting up triages. I [...]
He rushed into the Starbucks on 87th Street and Lexington Avenue, camera in one hand, laptop in the other, holding them up high, like they were platters of food. He wore an FDNY baseball cap on backwards, and a light green, somewhat military looking vest over a blue shirt. He moved among the tables very quickly with the spry agility [...]
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