12 years ago today, where were you? archived

I do remember how good the weather was that day. The sky was crystal clear, no clouds, it was one of those spectacular September days where the temperature was perfect.

Worked on Williams St during that time. On that I day I had to register my son for school in my district as he was living with his mom, but not in school. That was also the day I became custodial parent to my son. Had his mom handled her business correctly, that day could have turned out very different for me and my family.

After school dropoff I headed to Madison for a yoga class. The radio news reporter was describing what sounded at first like an accident involving a small private plane. Through the class, something felt off, and I finally realized that I had not heard a train go by for more than an hour. Church bells began tolling, and I heard from someone on the street that the first tower had collapsed.

I was in Philadelphia in school...up until three weeks before the attacks, I worked on the corner of Rector Street and West Street in lower Manhattan. To celebrate my last day of work, we went to the bar at the top of the WTC (called The Greatest Bar on Earth). I had lunch so many times in the WTC courtyard and spent countless hours in the shops in the basement of the towers. I used to look up at the towers every time I sat there for lunch and thought how lucky we were to get to experience it all the time while tourists might see the towers once or twice in their lifetimes. One of my former colleagues died of a heart attack from running away from the smoke and debris. Another former colleague who was standing in front of the building was almost struck by a tire from one of the airplanes that hit the WTC.

God bless the souls who died on that terrible day and may we never forget.

I was home (a planned day off) so not
in my office on Nassau St. Watching the.today show when they showed first.plane hit. My husband was headed into work at.WTC - he.was on the.last path train in. He called me from Hoboken to ask what was going on? .He continued in anyway and I had no contact.with him till that.evening as he.wandered.Manhattan trying to figure.out how to get.home.

I had just walked into the reception area for the conference room in my building where I was about to start the second day of a two-day meeting with lots of people in from out of state. The receptionist said that a plane had hit one of the towers. Like many others, we all thought it was probably a small plane and an accident. Then we heard about the second plane and then realized "It can't be an accident" and "terrorists". But our meeting was proceeding. I was the "scribe" so had my laptop on and connected to the company network and started receiving news broadcast emails. Then I forwarded one to my husband who was in his office in SoHo and I asked him if he knew about it. He replied that he was watching it, but nobody in his office had TV or radio so they didn't know anything about the Pentagon or other planes. (At that time, there were rumors about more planes, IIRC, and we didn't yet know about the one that went down in Pennsylvania.) His office was on the south side of the building and had a clear view of the towers so they saw it all. Then he emailed me that the first tower had fallen and I shared that with my fellow meeting participants. Then we all piled out of the conference room and watched the TV coverage that had been routed to the security monitors in the hallways. At some point everyone was told that they could leave if they wished and I had gotten a phone call from Seth Boyden, where my children were students, telling me that children could be picked up but staff would remain to supervise them as long as necessary after school. The children had not been told much and when I picked them up they said that they had heard about a "bad accident" in NY that might make some of the parents late for pickup. They all interpreted that to be a train or car accident, apparently. We had a number of friends and acquaintances who worked in the WTC, and I knew that there were many more from SO/M and I was sure that there would be hundreds (or more) lost. But, thankfully, our two towns were mostly spared. One factor that I think helped save some people was that the school district had changed the elementary school start times for several of the schools to 8:45 and it was only the second week of school, so parents were still trying to work out their morning routines and many were still "on their way" to work at the time. Also, the Mayoral primary was happening in NYC (as it always does on the second Tuesday of September) so that made some New Yorkers late. If it had happened even a half hour later, I'm sure that the toll would have been much, much worse.

My baby granddaughter was teething, and had kept my son up during the night. So he was late for work, and I was on my way to his house to take care of the baby. If he hadn't been late for work, he would have been in the WTC, and maybe he wouldn't be here today.

sac said:

One factor that I think helped save some people was that the school district had changed the elementary school start times for several of the schools to 8:45 and it was only the second week of school, so parents were still trying to work out their morning routines and many were still "on their way" to work at the time.

This is exactly why my husband wasn't yet in his office at 120 Wall. He made it as far as Hoboken when the 2nd plane hit and the trains to the city were halted, so he got right back on the train back to Maplewood.

hans said:

I do remember how good the weather was that day. The sky was crystal clear, no clouds, it was one of those spectacular September days where the temperature was perfect.

I remember walking back from Kings to the shop that morning and thinking what a beautiful day it was. I always think of that day when the weather is the same as it was that day. I also remember starting to cry a few mornings later because it had been raining and I thought of all the people working at the site in the rain.

Mr. Lizziecat was driving to work on Staten Island. He got off the turnpike at the Goethal's bridge,
and saw the smoke from the towers. Cars were backed up at the entrance to the bridge, so Mr. Lizziecat turned around and came home. He didn't know what had happened until he got home.

I was working in an outpatient pediatric HIV clinic at University Hospital, waiting for the patients to begin arriving. There was a tv on in the waiting room. We talked about the small plane that had previously hit a tower and we figured it was the same. Some of us went to the rooftop of the parking garage where we could see fire and smoke. Then I was calling families to tell them not to come in. Then we all prepared for the expected influx of wounded people. We donated blood. We helped prepare for decontamination and triage. We prepared to stay in the hospital for an extended time. We organized supplies. We waited and waited and waited but no one came. Eventually we understood why no one was coming. I got a call from Seth Boyden where my daughter was in her first week of kindergarten. Then I went home to be with her and wait for my spouse to come home from Staten Island.

You know, I was having a pretty hard day this afternoon. Vendor mistakes, hardware failures, staff errors that cause problems for customers or cost me money, and then talking to a customer to explain a problem that we caused and taking the brunt of the frustruation.

Then I read this thread.

I'm OK. It is nice to get grounded every now and then.

Later, Da George

I was just coming above ground on Broadway and Spring Street. I was among a small group who noticed a big plume of black smoke coming from one of the towers.

Every detail after that is crystal clear, but you all already know how it ends.

I was watching the news and saw the first plane hit, then the second. It was horrifying. I was crying so hard my husband was angry with me. I think I was a bit hysterical, and I was trying to explain to him why I was crying. I kept saying but those people, those people above the line, they're not going to make it out.

We immediately picked up our kids (6 & 8) from their schools and drove to family 300 miles away in case the planes had released toxic chemicals. Our mistake was listening to the radio for six hours straight, which our kids heard too. We expected the roads to be jammed packed but they were ghostly quiet. We stayed with family for 36 hours and returned.

On the way north I worried about all of the people I'd worked with for ten years who were at American Express in the World Trade Center. I'd been on my way to a meeting there years before during the first terror attack. My clients called to tell me to stay away. This time having seen the horrible footage, I thought about my clients, who were also my friends. I knew one of them had a baby in the daycare center in one of the towers. I worried about them. She told me later that she heard the plane hit when she was dropping off her baby, so she grabbed a second baby and tucked the baby under arm, and pushing her baby in the stroller, ran out heading toward the East River. She rushed out with staff members who grabbed children and ran, and a stranger who'd come into the daycare center to help when she realized the building had been hit. They all ran together away from the building and afterwards my client/friend realized one of her baby's shoes was missing. She still has the one shoe that remained, and on the sole of this shoe is the word, ANGEL. I'm not religious at all, agnostic at best, but I do like the symbolism.

All of my copywriting work came from American Express and silly me, I thought they'd be back in business within a couple of months. It was much longer and the department I worked through, Creative Media, an in-house creative agency, was disbanded about 10 months after 9/11. My family's income dropped 80% on 9/11, but because so many people lost loved ones, I felt I could not bemoan our financial crisis. It was, however, a turning point in my freelance business and in our family dynamics.

I had just started a load in the dishwasher, and was about to turn off the little TV in our kitchen and head upstairs to my office, when those images started flashing across its screen... Leaving it on, I rushed to the family room to watch the big set there. Needless to say, I did no work that day...

-s.

I was at the South Mountain Annex, waiting for Barnes & Noble to deliver books for a Book Fair. Wondering why they were late. Went to the library to watch news on tv, gathered up my kids (will never forget hugging a sobbing parent who came to pick up her kids; she had not been able to reach her brother who worked in Tower 1, luckily he was safe) and came home.

My brother was on a plane on EWR tarmac which was halted. We always wondered whether any terrorists might have been on that plane, as they returned plane back to the terminal, everyone deplaned and left airport. He met my sister-in-law at my house, and we spent the rest of the day watching the news coverage.

Well today has been a tough day for me, every 9/11 is. By shortly after 9am we were in the park near Park Ave South watching it all happen. It wasn't long before there were thousands of people trudging north, covered in soot & dust, and people getting off at the subway stop (it was the last stop south, everything further south shut down) - trying to get down to the site to look for their family, friends. One young woman fell to her knees in front of me sobbing, while we're staring at the burning towers - that her sister is on one of the upper floors.

Later in the afternoon we sat shell shocked in the office. Food was brought in. We listed the missing. So many of us couldn't get home and went to the drug store to buy a toothbrush or whatever and looked for couches to sleep on.

The phone lines were basically un usable, I had my kids to watch out for. I was so concerned about making sure there was child care for my kids. I was frantic until I knew they were safe & sound.

The next days were a haze. The South Mountain Reservation look out is a short distance from my house (walkable) -- thousands of candles, letters, pictures, flowers were placed there. There were telescopes set up to view lower Manhattan, but the dust and smoke rose for days.

I went to the look out this morning during a break and lit a candle. For everyone, all of us, whose lives were so altered.

It's a tender spot that won't go away.

I was on the 67th floor of the south tower. I was running down the stairs when the plane hit us. I was running out, at the direction of very brave firerighters, under falling, flaming debris. I was seeing a burned landscape on the plaza between the towers. I was in the fulton street station when the south tower collapsed and filled the station with debris. I was calling my mom to tell her I was still alive.

Today, however, I am a thankful, blessed and lucky person who got to experience motherhood and marriage since that day. Today, I'm reflective and sad for all the families that didn't have the same chance.

My cousin Dennis had lost his Dad a few days earlier. We had the church services etc. and
Dennis was supposed to return to his job.......employed by one of the financial services in the Towers.
He decided to use an extra mourning day. He would have been in the Towers otherwise

I was living in downtown Brooklyn at the time. My partner and I had had a massive fight the night before - to this day, I can't recall what it was about. The morning of Sept 11th she went to work early at a major financial institution blocks from WTC. I heard her get up, but I said nothing. We did not speak that morning.

I was working from home at the time and was on the phone with my boss when he asked me if a plane hit the WTC. I went to watch on the TV and immediately my heart sank. I knew my partner was not in that building but I was still in a panic. I called her cell and she said that she was ok then the phone cut off. I couldn't get through again. It was several hours later when she walked in our door covered in ash.

I'd always heard the adage: never go to bed angry. But from then on I truly lived it. I never let a fight keep me from saying "good night", "goodbye" and "I love you".

My friend had just left Cantor Fitzgerald the week before for a new job. His entire team perished that day.

I was working in the Trenton area, when the homescreen on the computers lit up with images from New York. I was caring for my dad, a decorated WWII air corps veteran, and he was here and I was there. My cousin e-mailed me (he was at work at Roche) and I told him I couldn't get through to my father. He called him, and my dad called me. You had to have known what a work-ethic he had to understand the impact of his first words to me. He said "Come home now---take Rt 206, because I think they are going to close the Turnpike." The drive was longer than usual (or seemed that way) and I was listening to music, because if I listened to the radio, I never would have been able to make the drive. As I made the turn onto 22 East from the Somerville circle, I was struck by what I perceived as storm clouds in that perfect azure sky. It took me a few beats to realize that was the white plume of departed souls that defiled the sky that day.

I was a (brand new) freshman in college in Boston. No one knew each other well enough to provide quite the right level of comfort after the attacks, and a lot of us were from the tri-state area, so stress levels were so high. My dad was in DC and my brother in NYC, and no one could get in touch. One girl down the hall had a boyfriend who had just joined the army reserves a week before the attacks, and she was freaking out because she knew he would be deployed somewhere, soon.

Mostly I remember the enormity of how everything changed that day. Nothing really scary had happened to our generation yet, the economy was great, and we were just stepping out into the world on our own. It felt foreboding, to say the least.

This is nothing compared to the stories upthread, of course. So many close calls....

Hahaha said:

I'd always heard the adage: never go to bed angry. But from then on I truly lived it. I never let a fight keep me from saying "good night", "goodbye" and "I love you".

That's one of the biggest lessons I learned from that day, too: I make sure that I tell my loved ones that I love them, regularly and often. You just never know if you'll see the other person again. Kind of morbid, but, well, yeah.

I was a junior in Columbia High School. While sitting in homeroom, we all watched the 2nd plane hit together. We then sat in stunned silence until the bell rang.

We were on vacation for a few days on eastern long island. Did not have tv or radio on. Just enjoying the ocean, it was so quiet and peaceful and the weather was so lovely at the beach. At 12:30 pm I went back into the room and turned on ESPN to get the baseball scores. I was surprised to see Peter Jennings so I double-checked that I was on ESPN channel. He was very solemn and there was a split screen which showed billowing smoke. I thought there must be a horrible fire in Manhattan and I looked for the twin towers to orient myself in the skyline. And then I heard him say the unbelievable.

Hahaha said:

My friend had just left Cantor Fitzgerald the week before for a new job. His entire team perished that day.

My friend started at CF a week before 9/11. She was emailing with another friend of ours that morning about how she didn't like being up there because the building swayed. Needless to say, she didn't make it out. Two other friends didn't make it out either. They were all so young with so much life. It's a sad, sad day.

...and the quiet---the absolute quiet as the skies were silenced. It was eerie, and then awaking in the depths of night to hear the military planes---moving troops and supplies.

Yes, calli, it was soooo quite. And then was it 10 days or so later when planes began flying again. I remember a jet out of Newark flying over my house being very scary the first few times.

I was on maternity leave. My baby was less than 3 weeks old.
My office was in WFC2 - and the only thing that separated me from the twin towers was 6 lanes of the west side highway.
Hubby would have been at work at the time across from the SI ferry, but his boss changed his sked from 7-4 to 10-6 for just that day. I am thankful everyday for that call.
I kept calling everyone in my office to try and reach them. It was days until I heard they all were OK.
In the end, it was one of hubby's friends - a FF that had the day off - that didn't come home.