The evacuation of the towers and nearby areas had been calm at first, then anxious, and then urgent. When asked who the heroes were, emergency services policeman Mark DeMarco, who’d been at Ground Zero, replied, “I said, ‘The people who were in the towers, who actually initiated the rescue before the police or fire department got there.’ I said, ‘They initiated it, they started it, they were helping each other.’ I said, ‘Everybody who was helping each other,’ I said, ‘to me they were all heroes.’ And in hindsight, when we came walking out of the building, there wasn’t any panic, there wasn’t anybody running.”
Michael Noble, a big, calm-looking midwesterner who’d risen to become a senior executive at Morgan Stanley, was on the sixty-sixth floor of the south tower when the first airplane hit the north tower. One of his coworkers who’d seen the plane fly right at him and remembered the 1993 attack on the towers ran out of a private dining room shouting, “They’re back.” Noble and several of his coworkers decided on their own initiative to evacuate and took the elevator down to the forty-fourth floor, only to find that the elevators had been closed and someone with a bullhorn from Port Authority—the agency that ran the buildings—was telling people to go back to their offices. “I just started down the stairs for no particular reason. It just seemed at the time that it was a good idea to get out of the building. So I went into the stairwell, and the stairs were crowded. People were two abreast, someone on every stair going down calmly, and I remember thinking as I was going down—there was a woman who was overweight in front of me and having a hard time—and remember at this time there’s no emergency in our building—and I remember thinking: what do you do here? Do you move around her? She was now backing up quite a few people and I guess to her credit she just kind of moved aside, she was tired, she was out of breath, and she moved aside and people just kept going down and past her, as did I.” On the nineteenth floor, there was another call for people to return to their offices, but he calculated how long it would take to return versus leave and decided to continue. The people who heeded the call to return and got into elevators mostly died, because the burning jet fuel from the plane that would shortly thereafter crash into the south tower turned the elevator shafts into infernos.
Noble continued, “So I go to my normal exit from the lobby and the signs are up saying use the revolving door, and there was so much debris that I couldn’t budge the revolving doors. So I go to the other doors, where there’s signs saying don’t use these, and there was a young woman there and debris, and I’m getting ready to shove open this door when a huge chunk of debris falls from the sky right in front of us. I assume it was part of the building’s facade, and both of us were kind of taken aback by that but we knew we had to get out, so I remember grabbing her hand and saying, ‘Let’s go.’ We pushed out and we ran across away from the building, south toward Liberty Street, and she ran off in a different direction. . . . There was a parking lot for a Greek Orthodox church, and that’s where I went. As I looked around, every car was on fire. It looked like a war zone. I remember looking down, and this was before I looked back up at the building, and there was an arm, severed at the elbow, with a wedding ring on, the same type of wedding ring as my own, and that shocked me a little bit to see a body part, and as I looked around there were body parts pretty well all around and lots of clumps of flesh, just blood and goo, not recognizable as a body part. I saw things that day that no civilian should see. . . . So I started walking up what I think was called the West Side Highway, and of course it was hard not to be looking up . . . and I looked up and saw this speck in the sky and it caught my attention and it was a man who had jumped. I remember his arms and his legs just trying to grab at air and I watched him fall and I remember thinking, How can I help this man? Is there some way I can communicate with him as he is about to die? I don’t know . . . it’s what I thought. And for the last fifteen floors he fell I watched and tried to hold his hand, to be somehow in communication with him.” He wished afterward that he had retrieved that wedding ring for the widow. For the next few days, he joined other senior management people in his firm, making phone calls to employees’ homes to try to track down who had survived and where people were. Morgan Stanley had recently merged with Dean Witter, but before the crisis the two communities had remained distrustful. Afterward, Noble says, “It was open arms, how can we help, anything you need is yours.”
John Abruzzo, a paraplegic accountant who worked on the sixty-ninth floor of the north tower, was carried down all those flights of stairs to safety by ten of his coworkers in relays, using an evacuation chair designed to skid down the stairs that had been provided after the earlier attack. Zaheer Jaffery, a polio survivor from Pakistan, worked on the sixty-fifth floor of one of the towers and remembers the long journey down the stairs: “We had to stop several times during our descent because of injured people being brought down. For example, you would hear, ‘move to the right, move to the right’ and everybody would move to the right, so that the injured could be taken down. And this happened, three, four times. People in a groove and then they had to reposition themselves. And people would actually: ‘No, no, you first.’ I couldn’t believe it, that at this point people would actually say, ‘No, no, please take my place.’ It was uncanny.” Eventually he got to the bottom of the stairs. “I was walking, very, very slow by now because I could barely walk. In the concourse level I was going so slow that two or three times people offered to carry me and I said, ‘No, no, maybe someone else needs help.’ You know the water was this much, up to my ankles, and it was slimy and slippery. My shoes were new and they were slipping. And by that time I knew that it was very serious because people were actually now beginning to run and you could hear the volunteers saying, ‘Get out of the building before it falls. Get out of the building before it falls.’ ” One of the firefighters in Jules and Gedeon Naudet’s documentary about 9/11 recalls people saying to the ascending firefighters, “What are you doing? Get out!”
John Guilfoy, a young man who’d been a college athlete, recalled, “I remember looking back as I started running, and the thickest smoke was right where it was, you know, a few blocks away, and thinking that, like, whoever’s going to be in that is just going to die. There’s no way you could—you’re going to suffocate, and it was coming at us. I remember just running, people screaming. I was somewhat calm, and I was a little bit faster than my colleagues, so I had to stop and slow up a little bit and wait for them to make sure we didn’t lose each other.” He spoke of slowing down as though it was an ordinary, sensible thing to do—but to keep pace, in flight from imminent danger, not even with family or beloved friends but with coworkers is not what we imagine we ourselves or those around us would do. It exemplifies the extremes of altruism and solidarity in disaster. A young immigrant from Pakistan, Usman Farman, was also running from the cloud when he fell down. A Hasidic Jewish man came up to him, took into his hand the pendant with an Arabic prayer on it that Farman wore, and then “with a deep Brooklyn accent he said ‘Brother if you don’t mind, there is a cloud of glass coming at us. Grab my hand, let’s get the hell out of here.’ He was the last person I would ever have thought to help me. If it weren’t for him, I probably would have been engulfed in shattered glass and debris.”
Errol Anderson, a recruiter with the New York City fire department, was caught outside in that dust storm. “For a couple of minutes I heard nothing. I thought I was either dead and was in another world, or I was the only one alive. I became nervous and panicky, not knowing what to do, because I couldn’t see. . . . About four or five minutes later, while I was still trying to find my way around, I heard the voice of a young lady. She was crying and saying, ‘Please, Lord, don’t let me die. Don’t let me die.’ I was so happy to hear this lady’s voice. I said, ‘Keep talking, keep talking, I’m a firefighter, I’ll find you by the response of where you are.’ Eventually we met up with each other and basically we ran into each other’s arms without even knowing it.” She held on to his be
lt, and eventually several other people joined as a human chain, which he delivered to the Brooklyn Bridge before returning to the site of the collapses. The Brooklyn Bridge became a pedestrian route, and a river of people poured for hours to the other side. New Yorkers were well served by their everyday practices of walking the city, mingling with strangers, and feeling at home in public. It is hard to imagine many of the more suburbanized and privatized American cities responding with such resilience, resourcefulness, and public-spiritedness, and so the everyday qualities of true urbanism may too be survival skills in crisis. The denizens of many other cities may have even had difficulty imagining that a mass evacuation could be conducted on foot, that the human body that seemed so frail under attack could nevertheless cover several miles or more to safety and to home.
A thirty-five-year-old financier named Adam Mayblum escaped with several coworkers from the eighty-seventh floor of the north tower, just a few floors below the airplane. In an account widely circulated on the Internet, he wrote about their descent down the staircases as things around them fell apart: “We could not see at all. I recommended that everyone place a hand on the shoulder of the person in front of them and call out if they hit an obstacle so others would know to avoid it. They did. It worked perfectly.” Later in his e-mail account, he added, “They failed in terrorizing us. We were calm. If you want to kill us, leave us alone because we will do it by ourselves. If you want to make us stronger, attack and we unite. This is the ultimate failure of terrorism against the United States. The very moment the first plane was hijacked, democracy won.” Maria Georgiana Lopez Zambrano, who was born in Colombia and went blind after emigrating to the United States, had a newsstand at 90 Church Street. Nearly sixty when the catastrophe began, she felt shaking and heard rumblings and distressed people, and while she was still confused about what had transpired, two women, strangers to each other and to her, each took one of her arms and walked her north to safety in Greenwich Village and then paused. One lived in New Jersey, the other in Connecticut, and they were torn beween desire to get home and reluctance to abandon Zambrano. “They say, ‘No, I don’t let you go by yourself. We still here together. We help you.’ ” Eventually a woman from Queens who recognized Zambrano joined them and took her to her door there by foot and by taxi, and the other women proceeded on to their families.
Fireman Stanley Trojanowski had tried to put out the fires that had started in some cars—leaking jet fuel and the cascade of papers on fire had ignited many vehicles. “A couple of young kids, maybe in their teens or maybe their early twenties, tried to help me get the line from under all the debris to get some water on the fires. They were just civilians. There were a lot of cops sitting there dazed, all full of debris. I couldn’t get their attention.” Many policemen and women and firefighters were valiant that day, but so were the others in the crowd. Joe Blozis, an investigator for the police department, recalls, “Something else that I won’t forget is that the civilians, the pedestrians on the streets and sidewalks, were actually directing traffic to help us get through. Not only us, but all emergency vehicles. Streams of people, lines of people, were stopping other pedestrians and clearing trafficways to get the emergency vehicles in. If it weren’t for the pedestrians doing this, it would have been a nightmare getting emergency vehicles down to that site.” A private security director, Ralph Blasi, said, “I have the greatest admiration for the private security officers, guys who are making around twenty-five thousand dollars a year. We had often asked security guards, prior to 9/11, what they would do if a bomb went off and they saw a couple of dead bodies. The consensus was always that they would run. But on September 11, I had sixty guards working with me and not one ran.” The owners and workers in small businesses around the epicenter pulled people inside for safety and breathable air when the collapses happened.
Ada Rosario-Dolch was the principal of Leadership High School, a block away. That morning she was concerned about her sister who worked in the towers, but “I can honestly say that one of the first miracles was that I didn’t think about my sister again for the rest of the day. She worked at Cantor Fitzgerald and she did die in the World Trade Center that day, but at the time all I could think about was the kids.” It’s an extraordinary thing to say—that one’s sister died, and that it was a miracle not to think of her until later. Rosario-Dolch continues, “I had two girls in wheelchairs. . . . I asked the elevator operators to go upstairs and get them, because I knew exactly where they were. When they brought them down I told all of them, ‘Start going toward Battery Park. Meet me at the corner.’ I then told my A.P. [assistant principal] to go up to the fourteenth floor and start the evacuation, floor by floor. I wanted everybody out, custodial workers, kitchen workers, everybody. I mean, these people were phenomenal. Nobody panicked. . . . We got everybody out and we went to Battery Park. . . . We knew the problem was north. We needed to go south. The two head security officers from the American Stock Exchange made sure that the street was clear and open, so that as the kids walked out they could walk out freely toward Battery Park. I waited by the exit door, and as each kid came out, I told them, ‘You hold hands. This is like kindergarden. Find a partner. Don’t be alone. This is a good time to make a friend.’ ” All her students were successfully evacuated. In many cases, teachers took students home or evacuated on the boats with them to New Jersey and Staten Island. Parents were terrified when their children could not be located, but no students were harmed (except by inhaling the toxic air).
Many people were caught between the destruction and the water’s edge, and hundreds of thousands were evacuated by water. Three hundred thousand is a moderate estimate. Ferries whose captains spotted the smoke or collapse turned around to dump their passengers out of harm’s way, and then their captains and crew made fast repeat trips to haul away everyone they could. A historic-fireboat crew heard the Coast Guard call for all available boats and took 150 people, twice their normal load. All kinds of boats were involved, cruise ships and pleasure boats, water taxis, sailboats, municipal tankers, ferries, yachts, and tugs, some responding to the Coast Guard, many on their own initiative. A forty-one-year-old policeman named Peter Moog remembers, “One of our harbor boats pulled in, and I knew a guy on it, Keith Duvall. He said, ‘Grab a sledgehammer. We’ll break into one of those yachts and take it.’ There were about a thousand people there, all waiting to get the hell off the island. Keith and I broke into a boat. I said, ‘Rich people always leave the keys in the boat.’ So we ended up finding the keys and Keith got the boat started. I think he made about ten trips back and forth to Jersey with this big boat, taking about a hundred people a trip.”
Many boats pulled up alongside the waterfronts, but there were no docks calibrated to their heights: people had to jump or climb on board. A fireman on one of the city’s fireboats remembers, “People were just diving onto the boat. We were trying to catch them, trying to help them get on. Mothers and nannies with infants in their arms were dropping the children down to us. At one point we had four or five of them wrapped in little blankets, and we put them in bunks down in the crew quarters. I put four of the babies in one bunk, like little peanuts lined up in a row.” They helped the mothers and nannies into the boat, hauled out one jumper who missed and landed in the water, and had to go in after another woman who’d fallen in and was too exhausted to haul herself out. A waterfront metalworker who went on board a ferry to help says, “Everyone did what they needed to do. No one had to tell anyone what to do. The mechanics who usually repair the boats hopped on boats to work as crew mates.” And of his own experience he recalled, “I only had time to act. I didn’t have time to react.”
Ellen Meyers, who founded the nonprofit Teachers Network, was just getting off the subway at Canal Street when she saw the first plane hit. She became one of the first batch of people heading south while the thousands were streaming north, because her eighty-year-old mother lived in Battery Park City. She ran into an old friend named Jim, and the two joined forces.
They got to her mother and were inside a utility room with fifty other people when they heard the second tower collapse. Meyers recalls that her mother said, “ ‘Maybe by now I have a river view.’ So I’m laughing. Jim says, ‘I haven’t lived with HIV for twenty years to die right now.’ I’m laughing more. He’s laughing. We are laughing hysterically, and what goes through my mind is, ‘There’s no other two people I’d rather be with at this moment.’ And that’s my thought. I said, ‘Okay. This is it. But boy, am I glad I’m with Jim and my mother.’ I’m a person who likes company, and I realize, even in death I want to have company, you know, in that moment. I said, ‘Well, this is it, and I want to go with them.’ It feels okay. It feels okay.” They lived, uninjured, packed her mother onto one of the boats, then got on boats themselves, and as soon as they docked went back to helping out.
Marcia Goffin, an executive in her fifties who worked in a law firm next to the towers, formed a series of emotional bonds as she moved through the calamity. She came running out of her building hand in hand with her assistant, Anne, and joined a small crowd trying to protect from the sea of runners a man who was down and bleeding, until a policeman took on the task and told them all to “get out of here.” She didn’t see anyone being trampled: “It seemed like a steady surge. People kept coming and coming and coming.” She comforted a stricken man shaking in the subway, put her hands on his shoulder and made sure he was okay to move on. He told her, “I just ran down eighty flights and I’m alive.” You could imagine that caregiving was particularly in her nature if it were not that so many people were doing the same that apocalyptic morning. She took the subway herself before the system was shut down and felt intensely connected with the other people on the car, though she never saw any of them again. She then got on a bus and sat down next to an African American woman with whom she held hands for much of the ride uptown, and when the two women and all the other riders were kicked off the bus—it was going back downtown, Goffin surmised, to evacuate more people—she brought the woman home with her to her Upper East Side apartment to rest and regroup and figure out how to go farther north to her own home. After a few hours the stranger left. Fleeting emotional connections were typical of this and many disasters, though there are exceptions—not only friendships but marriages would be launched amid the ruins of the towers in the months that followed.
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