What we experienced that day and how the media processed it
For those of us who were here, a certain kind of morning brings it all back. A big blue sky with the first hint of autumn prickling our skin.
Some of us dream about that day. I know I do. Airplanes crashing into buildings.
We can’t forget…
Furious dust storms hurtling down the canyons of Wall Street before bursting out into the harbor. A man who an hour earlier had been choosing a tie now somersaulting from the heavens, that tie flapping. Cyclones of office paper swirling up into the sky, hundreds of floating white sheets, mixing in the crisp air with the wails of sirens — first a few, then dozens, then hundreds, seemingly rising from every street in the city.
And smoke, towering oily black plumes. During the interregnum when the towers burned but still stood, mortally wounded, they were like two 110-story chimneys fed by the very fires of hell.
N.R. (Sonny) Kleinfield, a writer at The New York Times, summed it all up in one of the greatest and most succinct newspaper leads in history.
“It kept getting worse.”
No four words were ever more truly written. We could barely grasp what we had just witnessed, much less anticipate what was coming next. A plane had hit the World Trade Center. Was it an accident? Was it a small plane? Was it —
The second plane hits. We are under attack. Are there more? Are people getting out? Will the fires be ex—
The South Tower falls. The roar shakes the city. It seems to echo on and on for minutes. Up and up balloons the monstrous cloud of dust and people. Finally, we find our brains catch up with events — we know suddenly with absolute certainty that the North Tower will fall, too. It already seems to be off-kilter. Firefighters scramble to escape; hundreds don’t make it.
Even when our own fighter jets shriek overhead, we aren’t sure — is it over?
By the time 7 World Trade Center collapses at dusk after burning all day, imploding into itself as if in a controlled demolition, we are inured; we barely pay attention. Any other day, any other year, perhaps, it would have been a huge story, something to talk about for weeks on end, but not on this day, this big blue day with the first hint of autumn prickling our skin.
I lived in a sixth-floor apartment on the border of Cobble Hill and Red Hook in Brooklyn with my wife and son, then 18 months old, our view a panorama stretching from Staten Island to Lower Manhattan and the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges. I gazed at it some mornings at 3 a.m. when my little son wouldn’t sleep.
Then that view turned against us forever.
It was Primary Day. I was a new staff editor at The Times, due in the newsroom in the early afternoon. I turned on NY1 News to check the weather as I put one leg into my pants. The screen showed the World Trade Center with smoke pouring out of a gash in the North Tower. I stared — was this live? Pat Kiernan, the anchor then and now, was “tap dancing,” in television parlance — ad-libbing while trying to figure out what was going on.
My brain worked slowly. It occurred to me that I had a view of Lower Manhattan and so, one leg still in my pants, I shuffled over to the window and looked out. Sheets of office paper flapped by the glass. The smoke from the tower was a growing upside-down triangle slowly filling the sky. And sirens.
Funny assumptions filled my head. Of course no one was in the building; everyone got out. Of course the firefighters were on hand and would soon have this thing under control. At first, I only saw smoke. Then orange flames licking at the base of the plume. Then more flames, shooting higher.
It kept getting worse.
I picked up my son, Dean, and stood him on the windowsill as we watched the spectacle. We were too far to see one of the true horrors of that day, the people jumping; I’d see photographs later. I knew I should leave for work, I really had to get going, but something told me I should stick around at home for a few minutes.
I saw the jet out of the corner of my eye. It zoomed across the harbor from the south, crazy fast. Growing up in Brooklyn, I was used to the sight of jets flying behind the skyscrapers of Manhattan. But this jet was suddenly in front of them. And then it was gone in a billowing, ascending mushroom cloud of orange, followed seconds later by a deafening whooosshhh! The windows rattled.
“Holy shit!” I yelled, grabbing my hair with both hands, a gesture my son, clearly frightened, reflexively imitated. “A remote-controlled plane just hit the World Trade Center.”
“What hit?” said my wife, Helene, rushing to the window, her eyes wide. “What? What is it?”
Yes, that’s what I said. A remote-controlled plane just hit the World Trade Center. Where did that come from? Could my brain simply not accept that I’d just seen a hundred people die in a flash? Did it need an explanation that defied what my eyes had just undeniably witnessed?
I’ve never understood why I said that.
To viscerally experience the confusion and terror of the day as it happened, to see it unfold in real time — especially the opening, incomprehensible moments — you can watch entire morning broadcasts on YouTube. I do this occasionally for reasons I can’t explain.
NY1 News came out of a commercial and, after a “This Day in New York History” segment, threw to a live shot from the top of the Empire State Building showing smoke pouring out of the South Tower and blowing almost horizontally to the east, toward my apartment. This is what I saw as I pulled on my pant leg. It’s 8:50 a.m. and 63 degrees. A remarkably youthful Pat Kiernan explains there’s a three-alarm fire in the building due to “some kind of explosion.”
The calls start coming in — early crowdsourcing. One man says an “enormous tire” crashed to the ground in front of him, but doesn’t say anything about a jet. Then Kiernan tells him he’s been told by the assignment desk that it was, in fact, a plane. Another caller says with confidence it was “a single-engine propeller plane.”
And then, as we watch, as Kiernan does his best — he’s begun to salt various stats about the buildings such as their age and height into his commentary, facts that are likely being fed into his ear — a second explosion blows out the side of the South Tower. For a few minutes, no one knows why.
On NBC, Channel 4, the local news station, cut into “The Today Show” with a shot of the burning first tower and a highly agitated caller with a thick New York City accent unequivocally saying it had been a big jet. Moments later, a shot from the station’s helicopter shows the second explosion — there is an audible gasp in the television studio — but, again, no one initially realizes it was another plane.
Obvious, yes, but also unbelievable.
Then Janice Huff, one of the station’s meteorologists, calls in. She’s watching the events unfold on television at home but her eyes are better than those of her colleagues in the studio. “There was another plane,” she says, calm and cool, a total pro. I’ve always liked Huff — she’s been in my living room thousands of times — but if I ever meet her, it’s the professionalism and clarity she provided on Sept. 11 that I’ll thank her for.
Dazed survivors, ghost-white with pulverized cement, traipsing wordlessly across the Williamsburg Bridge as I inched across in the opposite direction in a borrowed station wagon with two crying women in the backseat who’d asked for a ride into Manhattan to get their children from school…
Midtown deserted…
The acrid and weirdly earthy smell biting our nostrils…
My buddy Dan, working as an architect, who stepped onto Seventh Avenue when the office was closed in early afternoon and looked down to the point of diminishing urban perspective where the towers once stood, and saw only smoke and sky…
Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, asked about the casualty numbers, knowing as “Sonny” Kleinfield did that the day’s shocks required no more than a few words, saying only, “More than we can bear.”
The successes of his first term had been overshadowed by the shames of the second (not to mention many more shames since), crimes against men with names like Diallo and Louima, but for a few minutes at least, he got it right. He was in charge, even if he wasn’t — no one was, really. But at least he acted the part. Behind him, his police and fire commissioners looked on, stunned and seemingly struck dumb.
I worked in the newsroom all night. Sometime around 3 a.m., my wife called me, crying. She couldn’t sleep and was looking out the window.
“They’re gone,” she said. “They’re really gone.”
