It was pandemonium.
Panicked tenants rushed out the front circular door, half-dressed, some fearfully asking questions, others in tears.
Through the floor-to-ceiling glass windows of the lobby, I could see people shouting and running wild—jumping over the hedges and racing toward the Hudson.
Terrified mothers pushing baby carriages were everywhere, uncertain about what to do next.
Firefighters swarmed around the complex, overwhelmed and confused themselves.
Residents were practically assaulting our petrified doorman, Felipe, asking about evacuation plans for the building.
“You’ve got to get out!” was his brisk command. “Evacuate. Walk south.”
A woman I’d never seen before (or since) was lying on the lobby floor next to the couch, her face covered in blood. I dashed back upstairs to grab some paper towels, Band-Aids, and bottled water, but when I got back downstairs, the woman was gone.
I ran back up the stairs again and knocked on Pearl’s door. She opened it looking shaken, very pale, and somewhat in shock.
“We’ve got to go now,” she said, locking up her door and leaving her apartment without her purse, just her house keys clutched in her hand. She wasn’t dressed warmly enough, in a sleeveless, salmon-colored blouse and gray tweed skirt, but she probably figured she’d be returning home soon.
“Granny,” I said, “you go downstairs and wait for me by the front desk. I’ll be right down. I just have to get Katie and my cell phone. Wait for me!”
“All right,” she answered absently, “but hurry.”
As she walked down the hall to the elevator, she looked so frail, and yet so brave. My heart broke at just the sight of her. Here she was, nearly ninety, not in the greatest of spirits or health and having to face something like this.
When I got back inside my apartment, I turned off the lights and TV and put a few blank checks in my wallet. I scooped Katie up, frantically hitching her to her red leash, and then rushed to the elevator. Having already been out for a walk just a few hours earlier, she dragged behind me, resistant to my disrupting her nap schedule.
When I got down to the front desk, Granny was gone.
“Felipe,” I asked nervously, “where’s Pearl?” And he pointed out toward the back door, just behind his desk. “She just walked away,” he said, accosted on all sides by other tenants.
Why in the world would Granny leave without me? I rushed out back behind our building, and carefully surveyed the walkway in both directions, searching furiously, but Pearl was gone.
As we headed south on the Esplanade, Katie was a stalwart little soldier. She walked obediently beside me, though she was clearly petrified by the loud noises and wild stampede of people swarming around us. She had always hated loud sounds—and this was the worst. But with an anxious look in her eye, her head swinging from side to side, she plowed on, limping slightly due to arthritis.
“Dad, I’m afraid!” she seemed to tell me with those worried brown eyes. “Please, I can’t walk. Let’s go home.”
“Katie, no, no, we can’t go back. Come on, you can do it. Let’s go!”
After a few more minutes, I stopped and just picked Katie up in my arms, staring up at the burning Towers, watching those poor souls trapped inside, many of them huddled at the windows, gasping for air.
I noticed a young child nearby, naively looking up at this burning inferno and remarking to his mom, “Look, Mommy, birds!” His mom shielded his eyes, for those “birds” were actually people jumping out of the smoke-filled windows.
Horrified, I turned away.
And then, just a few moments later, at 9:59 a.m., as we continued trudging south, I felt a ferocious vibration, a horrible kind of ominous rumble. The South Tower had collapsed, toppling to the ground like an accordion, though I had no idea what was happening at the time.
We were suddenly in a total blackout—with thick black dust and debris raining down on us. I would later read that 2,000 tons of asbestos and 424,000 tons of concrete were used to build the Twin Towers, and half of it now came crashing down, the air laden with toxins.
The formerly sunny sky was instantly blackened by this thunderstorm of suffocating soot and ash. You could feel the heat of the explosion on your face. I was coughing and couldn’t see anything in front of me.
Standing there in silence, surrounded by hundreds of others, I had no idea what to do next. I bent down to check on Katie and panicked when I saw that she had fallen over and was choking, unable to breathe.
I frantically brushed away the black soot from her face and picked her up in my arms, shouting to a firefighter coming toward us. I pulled him by his arm as he tried to rush by me. “Please, please, stop! I need your help. My dog isn’t breathing.”
His face was dripping with sweat as he bent down and took a quick look at Katie. “Her nose is packed with soot,” he said—and then blasted water into her nose using a pressurized water bottle he had in his hand, telling me it would force her to expel the dust. And it worked! She immediately sprang to life again, stood up, and climbed into my arms.
“Thank you!” I told him, incredibly grateful and relieved, but he was already gone.
At this moment, in the midst of the utter chaos and confusion, I oddly enough felt taken care of, even comforted, for nothing but kindness prevailed.
People held hands and offered bottles of water, tissues, and wet towels. I saw younger people holding onto the arms of seniors, guiding them patiently away from the explosion. Without any pushing, neighbors young and old, with babies and dogs, trooped south, where police boats were waiting to evacuate everyone to New Jersey.
Firefighters passed around dust masks for the elderly and children, but there weren’t enough for everyone. An older woman next to me was coughing badly, so I took off my shirt, poured water over it, and gave it to her. “Cover your face and breathe through it,” I told her, relieved to be cool in just a T-shirt.
And then, at 10:28 a.m., another implosion began, the same horrible noise as before, as astonishingly, the North Tower collapsed.
“Down, down, down!” shouted a nearby policeman, screeching at the top of his lungs. “Get on the ground, now, everybody, stomach down!” And we threw ourselves onto the pavement, covering our heads, buried in dust. Katie was under my chest, protected, breathing heavily as she cowered beneath me, now shivering. “Shhhhh, Shhhhh,” I told her, holding her in place. “It’s okay.”
But it wasn’t okay at all. The world was collapsing around us, crushing our beautiful neighborhood, killing our residents, and forever changing our lives—and the world.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The Escape
A few minutes later, I got up off the ground and brushed myself off. Most of the people around me had blackened faces and everybody looked stunned, or worse. Now my only thought was of Granny.
Where was she? It would be futile trying to find her in this cloud of black dust, but I dreaded the thought of her being trapped in the dark, alone and afraid.
As I would later find out, after Pearl wandered off down the walkway, she was approached by an incredibly kind, very pretty woman named Lee—a financial planner in her fifties who lived in our building. Blond-haired with brilliant blue eyes and a warm sisterly air, Lee had a large retinue of elderly women friends that she watched over. She recognized Pearl, but they had never met.
“Pearl,” Lee remembers, “was standing in the middle of an open area walking around in a circle, dazed, looking up at the Towers.”
“Would you like to come sit with us?” Lee asked, hospitably pointing to a bench of her women friends.
“Sure, thanks,” answered Pearl, shivering in the breeze despite the warmth of the day. She was grateful that one of the women offered her a black cardigan.
Soon, with hundreds of people running south on the Esplanade, the police instructed the women around Pearl and Lee to likewise begin moving the quarter-mile distance toward the southern tip of the Battery where
police boats were waiting. But, exhausted and frightened, Pearl had no desire to go anywhere, as she was searching furiously for me and Katie.
“Please,” she told Lee. “Just leave me here and go ahead. I can’t go. I’m waiting for someone.”
But Lee gently persuaded Pearl to get up and start walking, “slowly, very slowly,” said Lee, “because I could see that Pearl wasn’t very strong.”
When the first Tower fell, Pearl cried out, gripping Lee’s arm in panic, choking on the dust. “Just close your eyes and breathe through this,” said Lee calmly, putting a stray jacket she’d found over Pearl’s head. She then led Pearl half-blindly to the railing by the water to steady her.
“Down, down, down!” shouted the police, ordering everyone to lie next to a stone wall flat on their stomachs with their hands over their heads. There could be another attack, another nearby building might fall, or there could be a gas explosion.
Getting down on the ground was impossible for Pearl and she refused to do it. But she hadn’t counted on the persistent Lee, who enlisted the help of a young man. He gladly lifted Pearl in his arms and gently placed her down next to Lee.
So there they were, these brand-new friends, huddled on the cement together. “Her frail little hands were ice-cold the entire time,” recalled Lee, “and she never loosened her grip on her house keys, clenching them in her right hand while she held my hand with her left. I kept talking to keep her busy.”
And then the second Tower collapsed. “It felt like an earthquake and I just hugged Pearl close, keeping my arms around her. To keep her distracted, I asked, ‘Pearl, what’s your middle name?’”
And that’s when Granny’s inimitable wit returned. “I don’t have one. I guess we were too poor to get one!” And Pearl broke into a laugh. For months after that, Lee and Pearl would always joke about this moment.
A few minutes later, Lee and Pearl were up again, walking slowly through the mayhem toward the South Cove marina, where police boats were waiting. Although it was ordinarily a short five-minute walk away, the distance seemed much greater to Granny, who had no inclination to continue.
“Pearl kept telling me to leave her,” said Lee, “that she was an old woman and was going to die anyway, but I just ignored that and got some water, splashing it in her face.”
Lee noticed an injured fireman being loaded onto a police boat headed toward Jersey City, and overheard someone saying that there was room for just a few more civilians. The motorboat was already packed to its capacity with twenty-five passengers. “Listen,” she told the captain, “there’s an eighty-nine-year-old woman with me, and if you don’t get her on this boat, she’s not going to make it.”
“Okay, get her, and we’ll take her.”
Lee had two young men nearby hoist Pearl onto the boat, literally lifting her off the ground in an instant.
“Leave me alone!” Pearl hollered, nearly hysterical. “I’m not going.” But Lee persisted, and watched Pearl being lifted up over the rail.
“Pearl,” Lee shouted, “I’ll get the next boat and find you over there,” but Pearl continued screaming, refusing to be separated from her new friend.
“Take me off!” she commanded, her former strength suddenly in evidence. “If she’s not coming, neither am I! I can’t make it without her. Take me off!”
Even the police were impressed with this gutsy woman who wasn’t going anywhere, terrorists or no terrorists.
The boat waited, everybody made a little extra room, and Lee was ushered aboard. And this group of strangers, huddled together, sped off toward the safety of the Jersey shore, the bumpy water jostling Pearl around as Lee held onto her with both hands.
“Lee,” Pearl whispered, completely out of breath, “I need to find my friend Glenn.”
Meanwhile, I resisted the prospect of evacuating Battery Park City until the last possible moment, holding out hope that we might somehow be able to return home.
Katie and I sat on the grass in front of the Museum of Jewish Heritage, a starkly modern glass-and-granite structure located about a half mile from our building. From this perch, I watched the stream of people boarding the boats and moving away toward the opposite shore, scouting for Pearl but never seeing her.
As I sat there, I stroked Katie’s stomach absently.
“You’ve got to get on one of those boats,” a policeman ordered, not for the first time.
I finally surrendered and moved forward toward the river’s edge, approaching the police speedboat that was bobbing unsteadily in the water. I handed Katie over to a passenger already on board, and then jumped on myself. Katie’s ears were flying in the wind and her face was smudged and blackened. I held her in my arms as we pulled away, leaving the ravaged Manhattan skyline behind.
When we got to the Jersey side of the Hudson River, I searched, yet again, for Pearl, asking everyone I recognized from our building if they had seen her. But nobody had. Katie was desperately thirsty and a Red Cross volunteer gave me a styrofoam cup filled with water. She greedily gulped it down.
Determined to find a hotel, I began walking west toward the Doubletree Suites, which was about a mile away. Katie was limping badly, but we had to forge ahead. Although I was hoping to get a room for the night, that was impossible. Hundreds of displaced residents were already camped out in the hotel lobby when we got there.
With nowhere to sleep that night and no clothes (much less any dog food or supplies), I called my close friend and longtime editor, Ed, naively hoping he might be able to drive into Jersey and pick us up. Of course, with all the Manhattan tunnels and bridges closed down, this rescue plan was impossible.
“But I have some very close friends who live close by,” Ed told me. “Let me call them and see if they’ll put you and Katie up for the night.”
And within minutes, Ed called me back with the good news. So Katie and I were on the move again, walking a half a mile to a safe retreat.
If there’s any redeeming value in disaster, it’s seeing what happens when people bond together—offering help, sharing resources, and making new friends. I was touched when Ed’s friends, Barbara and Charlie (he had narrowly escaped himself a few hours earlier that day from the North Tower), greeted us at their door with open arms. Their two Labs, Spice and Dune, lumbering on their heels, were curious about me and the new blond-haired intruder.
Katie was exhausted and disoriented. She took a quick sniff at the huge dogs and then walked right past them, her nose drawing her toward the kitchen, where she stole food from their bowls.
“Katie!” I scolded, “that’s bad manners.” But all was well. Spice and Dune were more interested in snooping at Katie’s posterior than protecting their food. And although these two large dogs dwarfed her, she was, as usual, unfazed. Soon, she was lying in a heap on the wooden floor, sound asleep. I slipped out to a nearby store to buy a toothbrush and some other necessities.
That night, as I huddled with my new friends around the TV watching endless replays of the horrendous news of the day, I felt grateful to be alive, thankful to have a place to sleep.
Twelve hours earlier, all had been well in Battery Park City. It had started out as a beautiful summer day. And now, the sun was setting on a neighborhood that would never be the same, the comfort of home gone.
Just before going to sleep, I called John on my cell phone.
“I lost Granny,” I told him worriedly, explaining how she had disappeared, “and I don’t know what to do.”
“We’ll figure it out,” he told me with certainty, steady as always.
“Just take the ferry back to Manhattan tomorrow, and Ryan and I will pick you up. You and Katie can stay with us. It will be just like old days—we’ll be together again!”
For the first time that entire, dreadful day, I was crying. I guess it was John’s familiar voice and that down-to-earth logic that got to me.
That night, as I fell into a sound sleep with Katie pressed up against me, I felt so much better, knowing that I was going ho
me again.
The next day, John and Ryan were waiting at the dock on the Manhattan side of the Hudson as Katie and I got off the ferry boat at Pier 79 near West 39th Street.
“Katie girl!” Ryan shouted, bending down, “COME!” Katie gleefully bounded into his arms, covering his face with wet kisses.
“Whoa, whoa, girl,” he giggled. He took her red leash out of my hand and led her into a taxi, with John and me following.
We headed up to John’s new seven-room apartment on West 57th Street, a sprawling well-decorated home far more glamorous than his previous place in our building.
The question on all of our minds was: Where was Granny? It was all I could think about. Although Pearl had often talked about her New Jersey relatives, I was drawing a complete blank on their names and had never had their phone number. For the next three days, John and I were stumped. But at last, it was John who pulled from his memory the name. “I did a computer search for Pearl’s nephew. It’s a very common last name, but I started calling around, and I’ve found him!”
I practically grabbed that number out of his hand and immediately called. “Granny! Is that you?!”
“It’s Granny all right—thank God it’s you,” sighed Pearl, who sounded exhausted. She explained that Lee and others from our neighborhood had stayed with her for hours that day until they finally parted that evening. Lee went home with her daughter and left Pearl in the very capable hands of a married couple who lived in our building. They had kindly taken Pearl that first night to stay with their relatives in New Jersey. The following night Pearl was driven by them to her own relative’s house in nearby Montclair, though she wasn’t very happy about it.
“I tried to find you, Glenn… but everything went wrong,” she said sadly, her voice trailing off. “Are you okay? What happened to you? How’s my girl?” I filled Pearl in on everything and told her how sorry I was that I had lost her.
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