Sunniest of Mornings, Grimmest of Days

In August 2001, I was fresh out of college, living with four roommates in a converted TriBeCa loft that offered a panoramic view of lower Manhattan and the World Trade Center, standing proudly just eight blocks away.

I found the apartment on Church and Chambers Streets through dumb luck. A friend of my brother’s was moving out and needed someone to take her place to live with four very cool and attractive women who would be moving out just weeks after she did.

I had scored a jackpot: the perfect first apartment. I was living in the city where I’d grown up, working as an intern for a production company that paid little and offered no promise of full-time employment. The new roommates who replaced the old ones were a lot like me: 22, starting their adult lives, with no idea about next steps. But we’d forget our anxieties when we’d go up to the building’s roof to drink beer and take in the stillness of the late-night cityscape, hear the occasional passing taxi, and behold those indomitable Twin Towers rising above us, often half-concealed by overcast skies, with only the glints of office lights still visible through the clouds.

At 8:46 a.m. on September 11, 2001, I was in the apartment, running late for work, when an airplane flew right above our building, shaking it and everything around us, before crashing into the North Tower. It felt and sounded like a missile hitting its target at full bore. I raced out into the living room. The impact had left a gaping hole in the top of the tower. I watched the fire and smoke billow out of the crater and tried to process what just happened. Maybe a helicopter had lost control? Someone took a fighter jet from the Intrepid on a joyride? I called my boss to tell him that something had flown into the World Trade Center and that I would try to make it in once things settled down.

Two of my roommates, Em and Stef, stood now in the living room, too, half-awake and confused. We turned on the TV, looking for updates, then went up to the roof to get a better view. Emergency vehicles of all kinds were racing south against northbound traffic on Church Street. Office workers still carrying their computer bags or briefcases stood uneasily on the sidewalks, watching the scene unfold. I remember looking at the flames and wondering whether firefighters had any chance of putting out a blaze that high up.

Some construction workers on the roof of an adjacent building waved us over. They pointed to a basketball-sized hole in the roof caused by a chunk of broken concrete. They said it was shrapnel caused by the plane’s impact, sending it flying several blocks over here from the North Tower.

Our cell phones weren’t working but the landline was, so we called our families. My parents, then in Europe, told me to stay in the apartment for as long as I could. I reached my brother, who was studying near Washington Square Park. He was fine.

Em, Stef and I reconvened in the living room to watch the news, still clueless as to what had flown into the North Tower, when we heard it—dreadful, shrill, and fast. Then we saw it, a hideous inferno that fanned out in every direction.

“They’re doing it again! They’re doing it again!” Stef screamed.

The fireball hung in the air for what felt like minutes, mutating itself from orange to black smoke. On the street below came the sound of screaming and wailing. People were running north on Church. Cops had set up a checkpoint on Chambers. Emergency vehicles kept racing down toward the site.

We could now smell the acrid smoke, a scent that endured in our living room and walls and clothes for what felt like months afterward. We flipped through news channels and debated what to do. We couldn’t stay here for long. I’d be able to take refuge in my childhood apartment uptown, but Em and Stef were both new to the city from the Bay Area. All they had was a friend from college who lived in Midtown and worked for a finance firm whose offices were located near World Trade.

I was watching a helicopter circling the North Tower when I noticed the top of the South Tower start to buckle. Then it started coming down.

The three of us ran out of the apartment and into the back stairwell, waiting, it seemed, for our building’s turn to collapse. We stood there for minutes. It was quiet. No screams from outside. I only heard our collective breathing. We went down to the lobby. Outside, the air was thick with ash and soot. Then came a light tapping of long fingernails against the glass of the front doors.

It was a woman, middle-aged, dressed in black work clothes. We let her in and with Stef’s water bottle poured water in her hands so she could wash off the soot from outside. She was hyperventilating. She needed to call her family in Long Island. I brought her upstairs to use the landline while Em and Stef brought passersby into the lobby to wash ash out of their eyes. A cop told Em and Stef we had to vacate the building immediately.

We packed our backpacks with clothes. We left without bothering to close our living room windows.

Outside, it was mayhem. Everyone was sprinting, and soon we were, too. Cops yelled at us to keep moving. Someone behind us called out, “package bomb!” and we ran faster. We made it to the Canal Street checkpoint, where I squeezed past a tall man on a bike holding a professional-grade camcorder high up toward the sky, blocking the flow of human traffic. We stopped running at West Houston. I promised to walk Stef and Em to their friend’s place in Hell’s Kitchen. Once they were settled, I would make my own way home.

When we reached Chelsea, we met two teenagers who had managed to sneak out of their high school, even as the headmaster put everyone on emergency lockdown. They asked us if they could use our cell phones to call their families, but it was no use—no cell service.

Nearly an hour into our pilgrimage north, we reached Times Square, where the sidewalks were choked with onlookers, their heads craned up at the jumbo screens and the news tickers. We learned that the North Tower had collapsed now, too. Both were gone, in a matter of hours. We kept moving north with everyone else.

We picked up bottles of wine and whiskey for Em and Stef’s friend, and we were relieved to learn from her doorman, when we arrived, that she was expecting us.

Their friend, who I will call Grace, let us in, and we all set to work on the whiskey and sharing our eyewitness accounts. Grace had been at work in her office (not in the World Trade Center, but nearby when the first plane hit. She did not wait for company permission to leave. She grabbed her purse, ran down 20 flights of stairs to the lobby, and entered the nearest sporting goods store. Pointing at a store clerk watching the news on TV, she said, “I’m a size 6 women’s, and I have a credit card. Give me whatever running shoes you have and let me get the hell out of here.”

The whiskey didn’t last long. Grace offered me a sofa to sleep on; I thanked her and declined. Em and Stef were safe, drunk, and sheltered, about as good an outcome as anyone could want on this day.

Walking east through Central Park, I noticed the day’s weather for the first time: a spotless sky, sunny and warm. On the grasses and in the playgrounds families were at play, parents and toddlers seemingly oblivious to the events. There were no iPhones, so news wasn’t as instantaneous. But word must have spread around by then.

I watched a family in Heckscher Playground. A young boy no older than three sat in the sand. His parents stood behind him, hands on hips, smiling. I wanted to approach them and ask if they knew what had just happened. It took only a second to banish the thought. My ears were ringing. My adrenaline was raging. I would look and sound insane. Besides, they needed to take in these last few moments of normalcy before it escaped them for good.

So I continued my walk toward home, where I hoped to find my brother. Soon that family would also leave the idyll of Central Park and journey home through an unfamiliar city.