9/11 from the Inside

It does not show where I used to work, except for a crucifix-shaped piece of its structure preserved as it was found.

Shortly after 8:46 AM on September 11, 2001, I became aware of a terrible event outside our very windows, a plane somehow had collided with the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Deadly billows of black smoke streamed from the breach. Inside the sealed, city-unto-itself environment of the World Trade Center, from my vantage point 40 floors up in the South Tower, I remember feeling a curious detachment mingled with a sense of unbelief. I had no TV, only hearsay and the evidence before my eyes. Soon, things were falling from the unrelenting smoke. Dear merciful God, were those bodies?

At 9:03 AM, I heard and felt the impact of the second plane. There was a perceptible shake throughout this monstrous structure, and the lights went out. I was able to evacuate safely, and when 2 World Trade Center slid unbelievably to earth, I was half a mile away, caught under a blanket of silvery-gray dust that obscured the tops of buildings and filled the streets with panic.

In over 40 years of traveling in New York City, in subways, and on buses, on foot and by car, throughout all its boroughs, it was the first time I felt truly unsafe. It did not enter my imagination that so overwhelming an architectural presence as the World Trade Center, so thoroughly protective that even the sound of what I didn't know was a second deadly airliner, did not frighten me, because I was convinced that this building had truly been meant to endure.

But then the lights went out, and something was clearly wrong, maybe debris had somehow struck us from the other tower, and the best course was to leave until the situation was straightened out. Surely we'd return, as through smoke conditions and a previous bombing, we always had.

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Today, I returned to the site, now known to the world as Ground Zero. I return every day, in fact, because my workplace is now across the street.

Ground Zero. The place from which you begin. From a dictionary published long before these defining events comes the ominous definition of the term: "The point of detonation of a nuclear weapon."

Today, I took my normal route to work, which includes riding the Staten Island Ferry into Manhattan. I live in New Jersey now, but in 2001, I lived in Staten Island, and was standing outside the Manhattan ferry terminal when the first tower, my tower, collapsed. I didn't take the ferry home that day, there was too much confusion and too many people. I walked across the Manhattan Bridge instead, part of the march of refugees, moving away from who knew what other dangers.

Today, I walked through the narrow, canyon-like streets of downtown, passing clutches of firemen and policemen, their trucks and patrol cars parked everywhere, giving more and more protection the closer you came to where the towers once stood.

I crossed over West Street, and soon I was on Liberty Street, one of the streets that bordered the South Tower of the World Trade Center. I stopped to look across at the emptiness. To anyone who worked there, lost a loved one there, passed through its oversize portals regularly, that piece of sky that you look at is never empty.

Because you remember sunny days on Liberty Street, when throngs would come and go through those huge revolving doors, when the firemen would stand outside their "house" across the street, greeting passersby, while skateboarders clacked noisily down the steps leading into the plaza that surrounded the building, and tourists craned their necks to see the top of what for a time were the world's tallest buildings.

During my 14 years there, I worked on every shift. On the second shift, in the late afternoon, I had to be careful as I entered the building not be literally swept up in the flow of the crowds who would be leaving at that time. Likewise, on the third shift, as on that fateful September 11, I made sure to go down and purchase my bagel from the street cart before 7 AM because after that, the commuter horde arriving would make it considerably more difficult. Standing in front of the looming tower late at night, clutching my car service voucher and waiting for my numbered car to arrive, I would watch the nighttime pedestrians, full of after-work dinners, or Friday night let-loose booze, ties loosened, steps unhurried.

Before there was a War on Terror, before Ground Zero became a common phrase and a must-see for the tourists I observe in wide-eyed packs every single day, and before 9/11 became a date all too casually tossed off in American conversation, there was a big, frenetic, oversized, iconic place where I worked, where on stormy days I could take the subway to a stop right underneath the building, and never worry about not having an umbrella, where I could get anything I needed just by taking the elevator down to the lobby, and from which I could go just about anywhere, a place with its own zip code, a gargantuan structure that creaked and swayed and was a spectacular lightning rod on stormy days and glinted like a boxy jewel in sunlight.

A place whose last day, like those of the many precious souls lost to us in this singular tragedy, probably hadn't even been contemplated.