9/11 Remembered: A Personal Recollection

I was not in or near the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. My connections to the still unfathomable events of that day are next to nil, for which I have never stopped being grateful, as the lingering effects — from the nearly 3,000 premature deaths, to the torturous illnesses that have robbed thousands of first responders of their strength — are too painful to behold.

With the exception of my knowing one guy who lived to tell his harrowing tale, and knowing one person who was supposed to be there but wasn’t, because she was sitting shiva for her father instead, my connection to the attacks is, blessedly, not really any kind of connection at all. But, as a twist on the saying from an old television series goes, “There are eight million stories in the Naked City. This is one of them.”

Community journalism is the norm now. It seems everyone I meet either is or was a reporter, editor, publisher, freelance writer or blogger, or dabbled in some form of writing or another, but in 2001, we didn’t really know what a blog was, and so the news media was still relatively driven by legitimate newspapers. From 2000-2010, I was an editorial assistant at The Bay News, the then-flagship paper of Courier-Life Publications, which used to be located at 1733 Sheepshead Bay Road.

By all accounts, September 11, 2001 was an unusual day for me since I had gotten into work early that day, briefly overcoming my lifelong struggle with habitual lateness. I woke up pre-dawn and — motivated  by the brilliant weather forecast and a drive to get ahead of my weighty workload — I showered, dressed, and rode my bike the seven or eight minutes it took me to get to the office, up Shore Parkway to Sheepshead Bay Road.

I was thinking about work as I rode there. Tuesday. Tuesday meant late pages. I collated my work on Friday before the editor came in — sometimes after he came in, which would elicit all kinds of headaches and arguments about paperclips, hospital corners (I was a bit of a neat freak, which most would agree is something of an understatement), and “What were you doing all this time?!” After I collated my work for the six papers (The Bay News, Kings Courier, Flatbush Life, Canarsie Digest, Bay Ridge Courier and Brooklyn Graphic), and all the writers and reporters handed in their work — or a “list,” an IOU of stories that would eventually be handed in, so he knew to save space — he would proceed on to the onerous task of putting the half dozen newspapers together.

From the time between Friday, after the paper was put together, and Tuesday, the ad spaces sometimes changed. Sometimes there were new ads, which were promised by the salesperson to run in that particular issue of the paper, and sometimes old ads dropped out. Sometimes ads changed size. Sometimes stories needed to be pulled. And sometimes stories needed to be added, because there would be breaking news.

By the time I arrived at the drab, one-story, gray brick building, United Airlines Flight 93 had just taken off from Newark International Airport and Flight 175, which had departed from Logan International Airport at 8:14 a.m., had just been hijacked.

Two days prior, I had gone to Staten Island with my dad for a father/daughter field trip. It was a lovely outing, still fresh in my mind by the time the following Tuesday had rolled around. I was 25 and we thought it would be fun to tour some of the borough’s cultural offerings — the Staten Island Zoo, the Staten Island Institute of Arts and Sciences, and the Conference House. Amazingly, we did it all in one day.

September 9, 2001 was a day not unlike September 11, 2001 — peaceful, gleaming and cloudless… so sunny that we had to squint at one another.

I hopped on the train to meet my dad in Park Slope, and we got off at Whitehall Street-South Ferry, where we walked to catch the Staten Island Ferry. As we made our voyage across the Hudson, the eternal kid in me stayed near the back of the ferry so I was able to marvel at New York’s uniquely wondrous skyline. “I never tire of looking at this,” I recall saying to my dad, my Boadicean-like hair flapping about all crazy-like in the wind coming up off the river.

The nearly identical towers stood apart from it all. They were what your eyes couldn’t help but fall upon and, while they were abhorred by so many for their stark modernity and conspicuousness in an otherwise seamless sea of skyscrapers, I loved them. They imbued me with a strong sense of civic pride and fist-pumping patriotism. The person you roll your eyes at, who brazenly walks down the street in a “These Colors Don’t Run” t-shirt, and stands, hand-over-heart, singing “God Bless America” during a ballgame’s Seventh-Inning Stretch? That’s me. Unapologetically.

After I walked into the office a few minutes before 9 a.m., I threw my stuff on my desk and made my way to the ladies room to wash my face. The world had already changed, but we didn’t have a radio or TV in there, nor did we have internet on our computers yet, and so I had no idea what had happened while I rode my bike up the placid stretch of Shore Parkway.

There was a woman who worked there for a number of years — Carol — who is just the nicest, friendliest lady you’d ever want to meet. Always cheerful, always with a kind word to everyone she encounters, always with a sweet and infectious smile on her face, and so, as I walked up the hallway toward the facilities, and saw her, head down, with the gravest expression I had ever seen on the face of anyone, ever… I had to ask, to see if everything was OK.

Startled, she looked up at me: “You didn’t hear?”

As soon as she said that, I will never forget how — now terrified — I backed up against the wall, torn between not wanting to hear whatever the horrible news was, and needing to know as soon as possible. What happened??? Imagining what the worse news ever could possibly be, my skin felt like it was on fire all of a sudden, as my initial fear was that the president had been assassinated. What can possibly be worse than that, I wondered?

“A plane just flew into the World Trade Center,” Carol continued.

Jesus, I thought, trying to absorb the news… I just saw it two days ago, as if my seeing it would have made a difference, or prevented it from happening.

Carol had me follow her into a nearby office, a large room with an already full staff banging away on their keyboards and talking into headsets. A lone portable radio stood on a black file cabinet in the back of the room, and at the moment we were listening, trying to figure out what was going on amid the din of salespeople chatting with customers on the phone, it was announced that a second plane attacked, this time crashing into the South Tower.

Everything after that became a blur of random moments and non-sequential sound bites… My mind was no longer my own, and its thoughts and reactions were dictated by the terror that proceeded to unfold in New York, Shanksville and Washington, DC for the remainder of the day.

At one point, I remember a fuming co-worker storming into the office moments later shouting, “Those bastards! They finally did it,” not really understanding what all her talk of bin Laden was about. I was certainly familiar with terrorism, having read so much about suicide bombings in Israel, but it seemed so out of context for me here in Brooklyn that, even after the second plane slammed into the South Tower, I still didn’t connect it with terrorism, or al Qaeda, or bin Laden. I really didn’t have a clue.

A little while later, desperate to find a television, I walked over to the corner of Voorhies Avenue where there stood a 24-hour mini market (a cell phone store is there now). The Pakistani man who ran the store with his wife was transfixed to the television behind the counter. I stood and I watched the unbelievable images from the other side of the counter, not believing for a second what I was seeing. I just couldn’t believe it. It was too big to absorb — how could such a thing even be?! — and moments later, as we both watched the smoldering South Tower with our jaws agape, it just… disintegrated.

No words.

What just happened?

Dumbfounded, a few moments later — it could have been 10 seconds or 10 minutes, I couldn’t even tell — I incredulously asked the store-owner, “Did that just happen??? Did I really just see that?!” I wanted so badly to delude myself and, more or less, remained speechless for the remainder of the day. A few co-workers and myself shortly thereafter found ourselves, along with three or four others, in Night Light Café, also on Sheepshead Bay Road, around 10:15.

From the mind of an habitually late person, I told myself, as we all watched the news on a wall-mounted TV screen, “The planes hit before and just around 9…maybe people didn’t really get to work yet? Maybe no one died? Maybe Windows on the World wasn’t open yet? Maybe, maybe, maybe…” I was too consumed with catatonia to comprehend the enormity of what I hoped I wasn’t really seeing. All I knew was, there were no more twin towers…there was just a single, standing, badly damaged tower. There was hope.

Alas, it was not to be.

While  my co-workers and people from the neighborhood stood in Night Light and cried at the horrible images being broadcast, I stood there too stunned to speak as the North Tower crumbled. At first I thought it was perhaps an instant replay of the South Tower’s demise, but after the initial atomic-sized gust of debris cleared a little, I could see there were no towers left.

They were there just two days ago. This can’t be! I just saw them…

I didn’t know what to think anymore. I had no idea what was happening. Are we under attack?

Back in the newsroom, we went from one or two people being there to a full, raucous staff, and after talk — which I had kept out of, as I was still nursing my shock — of how the paper was going to cover this with a Brooklyn angle, reporters and photographers were dispatched to the farthest reaches of the borough to get all the news they were able to get.

The papers, which had all been put together on Friday, now had to be completely taken apart. Six newspapers needed to be filled with news on the attacks, and they all needed to go to bed the following day to make it to the newsstand by Thursday morning. From around noon to six-seven-ish, we all toiled. I was not a writer or a reporter, so I didn’t write any news stories, and had I been asked to by the editor, I’m fairly certain I would not have been able to create a lede more compelling than, “What the f—k happened today?!”

And so it began…

Reporters Steve Witt and Tom Tracy, and photographers Paul Martinka and Steve Solomonson… and probably more, but I honestly cannot recall… scattered about taking photos, interviewing people, and in the pre-digital age we actually had to wait for the photos to be developed. They shot images of people, covered head to toe in dust, walking across the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges, and Paul, who my colleagues and I agreed is probably the best photographer we would ever know in our lifetimes, brought back one image of a debris-covered street, which will haunt me forever. The only words that might manifest in ones’ mind upon seeing his image of a completely desolate street, covered in pancake-thick debris, are “Hell On Earth,” and, in fact, I think that might have been the headline that week of the Bay Ridge Courier, where the photo ran on the front page.

Feeling fairly useless in the midst of office frenzy, my lone task of the day consisted of manning the fax machine and typing up an endless stream of press releases pouring in from politicians at all levels and various government agencies, mostly expressing shock over the attacks, condolences to those who lost a loved one, and requesting that New Yorkers donate blood. I never saw my former co-workers before, or since, work with the speed, focus, determination and sheer awesomeness that they exhibited that day. It was amazing and, corny as it sounds, I remember how proud I felt of the amazing job they did.

A bunch of us went to Wheeler’s that night and there was really little to say. After a few beers, I of course wanted to break the necks of the schmucks who did this to our city, our country and our people. Some of our rather blasé group, who seemed unphased by the unbelievable horror, broke apart and all that remained were three of us… the three who were most proud of our American-ness. Even though one of us had actually not yet even obtained American citizenship, she was more American than the Super Bowl, World Series, Daytona, hotdogs, firecrackers, block parties, and Brooklyn accents, all rolled into one.

We drove to Brooklyn Heights, got something to eat, and later on tried to cross the Brooklyn Bridge. The city was closed. A female office manning the entrance to the bridge’s walkway wouldn’t let us over and, disheartened as I was, I accepted it and thanked her for doing a fine job. Feeling quite emboldened, I had actually thought I could have helped with the rescue and recovery effort. In my heart, I genuinely wanted to.

Instead, we walked to the promenade and looked across the East River, seeing the destruction, albeit from afar, in person for the first time. Tough as I like to think I am, not shedding a tear was out of the question. We stood and gazed at the still-strong plume of smoke pumping out of the scorched ruins of Ground Zero, and I quietly hoped and prayed that an unpleasant, ugly justice would befall the sick, soulless beasts who tore thousands of lives apart that day.