At about 8:55am, Joe called me at my desk from his car to say that the Trade Center was on fire. I worked on the 37th floor of a building in midtown Manhattan, about 4 miles north of WTC. I didn’t get a direct view of ground zero until I made it to New Jersey in the early evening.
After speaking with Joe briefly, I talked to others on the floor. The large conference room on our floor had a large TV and just about everyone who had arrived at the office already was in watching as the the second plane hit the tower.
I called home and told my wife what was happening. As the first plane looked like it hit right where our friend Kamran worked, she packed the kids in the car and headed over to his house, to be with his wife, Jennifer. As it turned out, the first plane hit a few floors above Kamran’s. After running through burning hallways with falling ceilings, he made it down 83 flights of stairs and was about 100 feet out when WTC 2 fell. Of course, several hours went by before news of his escape made it home.
Shortly after the WTC 2 collapsed, there was an alarm sounded on the 35th floor of my building. While it turned out to be a false alarm, most of us decided that it was time to leave the building.
After walking down the stairs, we gathered outside and discussed plans. Some people wanted to head toward Central Park (to be away from buildings). I took a smaller group that wanted to get away from the center of the city. We headed east and slightly north, ending up around Lexington in the low 50s. We found a hotel with a ground floor restaurant and got a table. We ate breakfast, hung out for a few hours and eventually ordered lunch. In the meantime, a couple of people in our group had met up with friends and family. After lunch, we split up to try to get home.
I decided to stop by the office first so that I could tell my wife my plans, which boiled down to: Try everything possible to get home. I walked with a co-worker down to Port Authority, which was closed and had lots of people milling about. From there we walked over to the ferry to Weehawken. The dock’s at about 42nd street, but the line extended up to 51st. I later learned that a second line extended down to the low 30s. Rather than waiting the estimated 8 hours to get to a place where I understood that no one would be able to get in to pick me up, I headed back to the office again.
When I got back, I met up with another co-worker, Leonid, who’d been hammering the New Jersey Transit web site and had gotten some indication that there might be some emergency transportation at Penn Station. We took the subway there and arrived at the PATH station around 5pm, about 5 minutes before they opened for the first time since the attack. Leonid and I split up and he headed off to try his luck with LIRR.
The PATH skipped all of the New York stops, but made all of the Jersey stops. I got off at Newark and caught the Raritan line train which I knew had a stop that was about a 20 minute walk from where I’d parked to catch the bus in the morning. As it turned out, there were police at the train station who were offering rides, so I rode over to my truck, drove home, and called over to Jennifer’s at around 7:30pm.
Then I spent the next hour calling people who’d left messages asking whether I was ok. I finished up around the time that my wife got home with the kids. I poured myself a scotch and started decompressing.
In the aftermath, I’ve learned that my old office in 4 WTC was destroyed and the one before that, in 3 World Financial Center, will be unusable for a long time. I’ve been extremely fortunate to have been able to contact a good number of the people that I know who might have been directly affected and learned that everyone that I know escaped direct harm.
I wrote this summary up shortly after events unfolded.
One of my favorite side stories was that I rode in the front seat of the police car on the way from the train station to the bus stop. When we got there, one of the guys in the back said, “Hey, my door won’t open” and the officer who was driving got a big ol’ grin on his face and said “They’re designed that way.” 🙂
As probably everybody does, I remember that day like it was yesterday. Your wife called to let us know you were ok. I’m glad to read about your story that day. Being there had to be life changing.
Being there was pretty intense in a lot of ways. One persistent memory is that in New York F’ing City people were GOOD to one another. Genuinely. I can’t remember all of the examples that I encountered, but people pulled together that day. I sometimes think that maybe there’s hope for humanity after all.