On September 11, 2001, I was in graduate school working on my Masters of Fine Art in painting at Parsons in lower Manhattan. I had been living in New York City for 5 years and had an apartment in the East Village close to where I went to school.
I got up early that morning and was out the door by 8:40AM for the 10 minute walk to school, as I had to make it to class for a 9AM seminar. The weather was gloriously sunny with clear cloudless blue skies and I walked quickly, moving west on East 12th Street, my mind full of everything that I had to do that day. After a few minutes of walking I heard a loud boom-like crashing sound, which I distractedly dismissed as I often heard loud sounds living in the city. A minute later, as I approached the corner of University Place and 12th Street, I saw every pedestrian standing still and looking up into the sky at something. My first distracted thought was, "Oh great, now I'm going to have to walk through a parade to get to class.". As I reached the corner I turned south to see what everyone was staring at, and what I saw took my breath away. There was a huge gaping black hole in the side of the North Tower of the World Trade Center, about 1.5 miles to the south. I asked the man in a suit next to me what happened and he had no idea, he looked at his watch and said, "Its not even 9AM, hopefully not too many people are in there yet."
I continued walking the two remaining blocks to school, looking back over my shoulder at the heavily smoking building. Papers were pouring out of the black hole, fluttering in the clear sunlight.
When I got to school my close friend Brad greeted me, he had been walking to school from the West Village, he knew what had happened. He had seen an airliner flying down 6th Avenue, so low that he had clearly seen faces in the windows looking out at him. He knew that it had hit the tower.
We turned the radio on to try to get some information, but all we heard were confused reports that a small plane had hit the building, so a bunch of us ran up to the school's roof to watch for ourselves.
We stood there for a few minutes on the roof just staring at the huge black hole in the smoking North Tower, barely talking, having no words. Then suddenly, without warning, we watched as a massive fireball explosion bloomed out engulfing half of the other Tower, South World Trade Center. Those moments are fuzzy for me, I remember one friend saying "Oh, God." and I remember that everything around me, the brilliant blue sky, the yellow gold billowing smokey fireball, seemed to be crisp and sparklingly clear. From our perspective we had not even see the second plane approaching.
Then our building's security guard came up and told us that we could not be on the roof, so we all ran down to the street. We stood on University Place just below 14th Street, at this point all traffic had stopped so we stood in the middle of the street with the gathering crowd. One girl in our MFA program started filming with her video camera. Brad and I were desperate for information, so we ran into a bar close by where they had a television. A news caster on the television reported that a passenger plane had also hit the Pentagon and that there was another plane believed to still be in the air, Brad turned to me and said, "It must be an attack.", and we hugged each other.
We stood on the street for a while just staring at the smoking buildings. Everyone was staring, and talking, unable to look away. Someone pulled up with a car on 14th Street and opened the car doors with the radio on so that people could gather around and hear the news.
We heard bits and pieces, that firefighters were in there, that they were thinking of rescuing people off of the roof with helicopters, that people were jumping. I was horribly mesmerized by the sight of the massive smoking buildings, from our perspective we could see into the holes, it was glowing red hot like a kiln or like I remembered a glass blowing furnace. It looked so hot, we wondered how they were ever going to put those fires out.
Then, gracefully, the South Tower swayed, and then it started getting shorter, it took a moment for me to realize that it was collapsing down on itself, pancaking floor to floor in what felt like slow motion.
For a few minutes all we could see was smoke, and then as the smoke cleared a stranger next to me asked me, "Where is the other tower?", like he thought that he just couldn't see it, and I said, "I think it fell down.", and it felt like one of the most surreal moments of my life.
After that, I did not want to be there on the street watching any more, I was struggling to comprehend the destruction. Even though I had just watched it happen, the tallest buildings on our island falling down felt incomprehensible to me, I remember thinking that it would feel the same as if aliens had landed on top of the World Trade Center. It felt that unbelievable. I wanted to sit down, I wanted to be inside. So Brad and I went back into school and listened to the radio with some of our classmates in our studios. We were sitting there listening to the radio report a little while later when the North Tower fell. All I could think about were how many people must have been in those buildings. And then, all I could think about was getting to Frank.
Frank and I had started dating 4 months earlier and he worked at a painting studio across town on 14th Street in the Meatpacking District. One of our teachers, myself and Brad decided to go out to find our loved ones, we got ready not knowing what it would be like outside. Outside on 14th street there were masses of people walking slowly. We worked our way west along 14th Street, it was surprisingly calm everywhere we looked, the tide of people mostly walking north through Manhattan away from where the towers had fallen. Each face that we saw looked shocked and stricken, as I'm sure our faces looked. Clusters of people were gathered around cars listening to the radio, it felt like everyone was together, strangers were friends. Fire trucks and cars drove slowly past covered in ash, we walked past Saint Vincents hospital with 50 gurnies and staff waiting outside.
I found Frank at his work, listening to the radio with his coworkers. Frank told me that he had been on his way to work on the subway beneath the towers when the first plane hit. A woman had gotten into his subway car screaming that she had just seen a passenger plane hit the World Trade Center, everyone on the train had stared at her and thought that she was crazy. Then the walkie-talkie of a cop standing near by started talking about the towers, and the cop quickly got off at the next stop. Once Frank got above ground a few stops later at 14th Street he knew that the woman had not been crazy.
Frank and I wandered around the West Village, making our way slowly over to Brad's apartment to be with friends. Every church that we passed had their doors wide open, with impromptu services of lamentation and mourning. At one beautiful church we decided to go inside, we sat in a pew for a while, the dark and the quiet were calming and I felt strangely numb. Frank prayed on his knees.
We spent that afternoon at Brad's house, his boyfriend loved to cook and he cooked for hours for their big gathered group of friends. One of their friends arrived all dusty, she had walked up from close to the World Trade Center where she worked. We all listened as she described her journey, she had seen the bodies falling, she told us things that I wish I could forget.
That afternoon we watched television news broadcasts about the event for the first time. We learned about the flight that had crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. The phone lines in Manhattan had been overloaded, but once phone service was restored we called all of our parents and family not in New York. Every hour or so we went up on the roof of the building to look again at the smoking plume billowing up so far into the sky at the south of our island. That was when I first began to smell it, an acrid smell, something like burnt hair and tires, a really bad smell.
It was not until that afternoon that Frank mentioned that his cousin Matthew had recently taken a job with a financial company in the North Tower of the World Trade Center, it was just a short term computer job, and he probably wasn't at work yet so early in the morning. All of us assured him that yes his cousin probably had not been at work yet, but Frank was very quiet.
The horror of September 11th also did come with blessings, on the other
side now with ten more years of perspective I can see that in many ways
that day was a day that we woke up to life like never before, we were able to see what was right in front of us with vivid clarity.
I don't believe that all of that clarity has been lost over time. That was the gift of that day.
Everyone has their September 11th story, this is only mine, I would love to hear yours too. I believe that in sharing our experience we can come through to healing and understand in a deeper way. I took all of these pictures while we were traveling in Portland Oregon in 2009, their solemnity seemed to fit perfectly here.
I am offering this wood mounted print of my painting Conquest.
With thanks to you all for making my first year of blogging such a rich experience.
