> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # That Very Blue Day - URL: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/colum-mccann-9-11-25-years-later/ - Published: 2026-09-05T16:00:55.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-05T16:00:54.000Z - Description: What it meant to me, and to the broader ‘us’ - Author: Colum McCann - Tags: #911-anniversary-issue, 9/11, History, Looking Back, Looking Forward, #september-11-25th-anniversary-remembrance We don’t need an anniversary for things we can’t forget. The memory of 9/11 still rattles the soul of New York. The miracle of it is not that we survived it — it is more that we are still living it, 25 years after the fact. Everyone has a 9/11 story. Whether you were in Brooklyn or Bangkok or Belfast, it doesn’t really matter. We all remember where we were and who we used to be. After a while we expect our stories to distill themselves and fade, so that one single narrative takes over. Take the Vietnam War, for instance: It has largely resolved itself as an arrogance that shifted us into a sexual and cultural revolution. Take the crash of 2008: The bankers screwed us and still made their great midtown escape. Even the pandemic seems already largely resolved in our imaginations: We got through the stunning miasma of it all, a little wounded but still intact. But with 9/11, the stories keep coming and the narrative keeps shifting. This is part of the city’s beauty and part of its mystery too. The universality of the experience is astonishing — possibly the first real-world event that was experienced more or less simultaneously by everyone, but never more profoundly so than in this gorgeous rubbish heap of a city that supposedly never sleeps. We were all there. The stories become part of public events: readings, concerts, rallies, policies. They get told, to rapt attention, at dinner parties. Even those who were not near New York or Pennsylvania or Washington, D.C., have a story to tell. But it’s difficult to find a single thread that knits this historic landscape together. Did it ruin us? Have we repaired? Did we become weepy and self-conscious? Did it show our resolve? Did 9/11 meld into a grief machine? Did it become an excuse for further savagery? Have we memorialized it properly? Is [the Falling Man](https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a48031/the-falling-man-tom-junod/?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) still falling? Have we looked after the first responders? Have we acknowledged the pain outside our own borders? Are we prepared for another disaster in this current commonwealth of despair? It is near-impossible to pinpoint how New York processes the memory of what occurred on and after that very blue day. There are so many facets that still keep spinning. > New York has always been a city of the timeless now, where there is no order and there is no end, where day meets night with the ease of a street corner nod, and the idea of tomorrow is not worth much in the face of today, and however far you got yesterday will hardly mean a damn next week. On the morning of 9/11, my wife’s father, Roger Hawke, was on the 57th floor of the North Tower.He was at his desk when the building shook violently. The windowpanes wobbled. He tried to stand but couldn’t. Outside he saw a rain of the most extraordinary things: papers, concrete, shards of glass. He stumbled out into the hallway and toward the stairwell. The stairs were already filled with people. Smoke and dust filled the air but there was very little shouting or screaming. A line of people went calmly to the right of the stairwell, making space on the left for the injured to be carried down, or for the first responders to ascend. Rumors went around that a second plane had crashed into Two World Trade Center. Soon the stairs were jammed. The smoke was dense and the floors were treacherous from the emergency sprinklers. A half hour went by. Roger had descended to the 30th floor. Another half hour and he was on the 15th. After 80 minutes coming down the stairs, he heard a huge crash. He, and everyone around him, knew that Number Two had fallen. Everything went pitch black. The electricity was out. All he could do, he said, was think about his family. All around him the fire and police responders were showing him the way, using flashlights. He stumbled down through the darkness and eventually got to the mezzanine. A woman in front of him fell and cried that she could go no further. He helped drag her a few yards through the pools of water and then her coworkers took over. “When I stepped out,” he later told us, “it was like I had stepped into a morning snowstorm. It was a blinding white dust-light. Church Street. Trinity. Everything was utterly changed, destroyed. The firemen were shouting. The sirens were going off. To be honest it was difficult to know whether I was alive or not.” Alive he was. As were many others. He spent the next few hours walking through the dazed city, walking uptown to be greeted by his 4-year-old granddaughter, Isabella, who, when she smelled his clothes, thought he was burning. When I explained to her that there had been a fire downtown, she looked up at me and — out of the mouths of babes — said: “No, he’s burning from the inside out.” He took off his shoes, still covered in dirt and debris from the attack, and placed them by the door. He threw his other clothes away. For a couple of weeks the shoes sat by the door and then my wife, Allison, decided to put them carefully in a box and keep them. I asked her why. “Because in those shoes,” she said, “he walked out.” A couple of years later she donated the shoes to the 9/11 Museum. I have walked past the museum many times, but I never ventured through the revolving doors where remnants of the original structure still stand. I know the museum is, in itself, a work of art, but I still can’t, after 25 years, bring myself to see those shoes. It is not that I’m overly sensitive, or that I want to forget, or that I am steeped in avoidance or anxiety or anger. The idea of how 9/11 was co-opted and turned into so many small Hiroshimas around the world still bothers me, yes, but I am confused by my refusal to visit the place where so much history is contained. I prefer to walk around outside and salute the ghost of Philippe Petit, the tightrope walker, who spanned the towers in 1974\. Yet even that confuses me. Does the memory of the man in the air span the emptiness of what once was? And how do I deal with the neon merchandise and the ringing cash registers and the tactless industry now surrounding the downtown streets? Did 9/11 grow up and become yet another hedge fund manager? What should I think about the political manipulation of a genuinely tragic event? I have only one answer in these times that are diseased with certainty: I don’t know. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/20/8c/208caa48-0e58-40ee-862f-e5f1276ae3d0/content/images/2026/09/IL.2010.2.2_0.jpg) The shoes Roger Hawke wore as he evacuated his office on the 54th floor of the North Tower. Credit: The 9/11 Memorial Museum, courtesy of Allison Hawke and Colum McCann New York has always been a city of the timeless now, where there is no order and there is no end, where day meets night with the ease of a street corner nod, and the idea of tomorrow is not worth much in the face of today, and however far you got yesterday will hardly mean a damn next week. It has always been a city interested in changing itself and reinventing. It sticks a rude tongue in the ear of the past. But what is there to do when we don’t quite know what to do? And how do we go forward when time has frozen us still? There is no doubt that the museum and the environs are a brilliantly conceived memorial. The reflecting pools are an antidote to the eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg. The new building (I find it hard to call it the “Freedom Tower”) is iconic. Many of the downtown streets — and indeed in all the boroughs — have been renamed to salute the heroes of the disaster. Hundreds of new street signs insert an oblique history into our daily walkabouts. New parks have been built. Downtown has become residential. It is OK to see a baby stroller turning the corner toward you. In many ways the city has matured. But perhaps maturity is not always such a beneficial thing. The French writer Simone de Beauvoir once said that there is something in the air of New York that makes sleep useless. It might have been true for the latter half of the 20th century, but a sense of quiescence has entered the city’s landscape in the past couple of decades. New York is a city that has begun taking naps. The bars that used to stay open until three or four now often close at one or two, or even earlier. If you venture out onto Broadway after a show there are not quite so many places open on the avenue as there used to be. Many of the diners are shuttered. Try finding a killer milkshake at four in the morning. Or a burger to stave off that oncoming hangover. Even the New York bodegas seem to believe in a little early-morning lie-down. Did the years that followed 9/11 instill a sort of lethargy? Or is it just a culture-wide dormancy? Is it more the effect of the pandemic? Sometimes it feels like New York has been usurped by cities like Tokyo or Singapore, where the 24-hour eyes-wide-open ethos still prevails. And while 9/11 is certainly not responsible for curbing the city’s wilder instincts, it does mark a waterline. Not only that, and against the sometimes-sentimental narrative, the city probably didn’t become a gentler, more empathetic place after the towers came down. The massive — and growing — disparity between the stacked-box glass design of Warren Street and the crumbling structures along Beekman Avenue in the Bronx, for example, is almost beyond language. Five miles and a whole universe. It’s not that our city is just not affordable these days; it might not even be sustainable. This wealth gap is not necessarily a direct and immediate result of 9/11, of course, but the fall of the towers meant the fall of so much else, not just in New York but in the wider culture. When big things fall, they shatter into fragments. They crash down and scatter over a very large landscape. It was apparent, even one day after the attacks, that so much of the world could — and would — feel the impact. Three thousand lives disintegrated into the air in New York, and nobody could have known it for certain then, but hundreds of thousands of other lives would hang in the balance — what is happening today in Iran and Gaza was built up in layers, a series of rigged and misguided brawls. How quickly the United States went from stunned victim to the torturer with the hoods. A slick machine grew out of the rubble and not just in the political arena, but in the commercial arena and even on occasion in the artistic realm. The cash registers of memory were totaling it all up. The TV shows. The miniseries. The bad poems diseased with sentimentality, the political one-upmanship, the clamor for a hundred other ways to describe the word *freedom*. One of the great shames of 9/11 was the way the New York firefighters, the police officers, the EMTs, the recovery workers, the nurses and the doctors were cast aside and forgotten. Jetliner after jetliner was flown into their lives when they were initially ignored and abandoned. That has changed in recent years with the World Trade Center Health Program and the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund. [Enrollment in the World Trade Center Health Program](https://www.cdc.gov/wtc/pdfs/statistics/20260331%5FExternal%5FQuarterlyProgramSummary.pdf?ref=vitalcitynyc.org) is now, in 2026, at over 150,000, with 94,000 responders and 58,000 survivors. But who knows how many unreported still have respiratory illnesses and mental health issues that can be directly attributed to the falling towers? God bless the Jon Stewarts of the world. The actor and comedian has long advocated for 9/11 victims and first responders. In talking about the firefighters and the cops and the medics, he told Congress forcefully: “They responded in five seconds. They did their jobs with courage, grace, tenacity, humility.” Stewart then challenged us all to take his challenge of civil responsibility in the same way. One still hopes that, on occasion, the center holds. The Canadian poet Anne Carson once famously wrote: “A wound *gives off its own light / surgeons say. / If all the lamps in the house were turned out / you could dress this wound / by what shines from it.”* Zohran Mamdani — the zoot within the bureaucratic suit — has brought a promise of renewal to New York. Perhaps he can wipe a little bit of the sleep out of the corner of the city’s eye. There has been a petition circulated in recent months by certain family members that he should stay away from this year’s day of remembrance. But 9/11 has never been about red and blue: It is still and always will be a purple scar that we all share together. Mamdani has vowed to “proudly honor the families, the survivors, the first responders forever impacted by that horrific terror attack by standing alongside them at this year’s 9/11 commemoration, reaffirming that we will never forget the solemn day felt by all of us who call this city home and, frankly, by all of us who called this country home.” — I have heard that there is a granite and concrete staircase in the 9/11 Museum. It was originally a series of outdoor stairs that connected Vesey Street and the WTC plaza. Now it is indoors and flanked by an escalator. It is called the Survivor Staircase. I think about my father-in-law and how, on that fateful day, he walked out. His memory is fading slightly now as he enters his 90s, but not the feeling, and he still recalls slipping in the shoes as he came down the stairs. There are nights that he wakes and remembers the faces of those young men and women — firefighters and police — who walked past him. “It still brings tears to my eyes,” he told me. “It always will. It was the faces of the firemen as they climbed the stairs to help us. They were going up the stairs as we went down. It rips me up to think of them. They came to rescue us.” We are all survivors in a way. And we survive because of our stories. A lot of things can be taken from us, but not those stories. Perhaps it is time — after 25 years — for me to go back and revisit those shoes.