A quarter-century ago, on the Tuesday morning of September 11, 2001, I took a late commuter train from Westchester to the Manhattan Institute’s offices. Around Spuyten Duyvil, the flip phones—those old Nokias and Motorolas—started ringing, followed by nervous murmuring. “A plane hit the World Trade Center,” someone said. The train slowed, then continued on. I felt a sense of dread: Could it really be an accident? By the time I arrived at Grand Central Terminal, the second plane had struck, and everyone knew it wasn’t—New York City was under attack. Police were everywhere, and the trains were shutting down. Mine was one of the last to complete its run.
Our offices were just up the street from Grand Central, and only David DesRosiers, then MI’s vice president (now publisher of RealClearPolitics), and a couple of other colleagues, heading out, were still there. DesRosiers had a television on. “They’re dropping planes on us,” he said grimly. We watched the footage of the towers burning. The coverage was nervous and uncertain: How many planes were still in the air and unaccounted for? Then came reports that the Pentagon had been hit as well, and the scale of what was happening became apparent. Television commentators were already speculating that Islamist terrorists were to blame.
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The possibility was not far-fetched. Just a week earlier, at our monthly City Journal editorial meeting, the conversation had turned to Islamist radicalism. Myron Magnet, then the editor, described a recent cab ride in Manhattan. The driver, a Muslim, had been listening to a fiery radio broadcast—presumably in Arabic—and seemed angry. Magnet wondered what was being preached in some mosques, and how poorly assimilated the driver and others like him might be. Some of our writers—Sol Stern, Peter Reinharz, and Stefan Kanfer—shared similar observations, and we recalled the failed 1993 attempt by Islamist terrorists to bring down the World Trade Center. We decided that we should publish something on Islamist radicalism. We did not imagine that it would soon become a central theme of our lives.
Then the first tower collapsed. DesRosiers and I were in an office with a window overlooking Vanderbilt Avenue. We saw a crowd break into a run, with a police officer waving people forward and shouting, “Move—there’s a poison gas cloud!” We decided that we had to leave, fast. But there were no trains, no working phones, and cabs were scarce. So we joined the stream of New Yorkers heading north on foot. Looking south, we could see a plume of smoke filling the sky on what had begun as a beautiful late-summer day.
DesRosiers and I walked from Midtown through Harlem to the Bronx. Our destination was the Jolly Tinker, an Irish pub where DesRosiers had worked—and imbibed—as a Fordham University student. About four hours after we set out, we squeezed into the packed bar and used the landline, relieved to tell our wives that we were safe.
After the immediate shock of the day subsided, anger took hold of me, as it did so many others, over the murder of thousands of innocent people and over the blow struck against America. Myron Magnet knew that the issue we had nearly finished had been overtaken by events. I had just completed an essay on the urban blight of car alarms, which now seemed absurdly trivial. So we started over. The issue that resulted—featuring Victor Davis Hanson in his City Journal debut, on the brave firefighters and cops who entered the burning buildings, Steven Malanga on a plan to rebuild the city, Heather Mac Donald on fighting terrorism, and much more—was cathartic to work on and still stands up as one of our best.
The years ahead were fraught, filled with war and terror and then financial upheaval. My own experience of 9/11 has stayed with me vividly, though, unlike so many others, I lost nothing and no one that day. What I remember is the sense that history hadn’t ended and that the peaceful assumptions of a prosperous decade had been swept away. We didn’t know then what would come next. We knew only that the city—and the country—had entered a different age.
