Tower Stories

by Damon DiMarco

  Finally, the team I was talking to loaded up and headed out. I remember seeing them climb onto the fire truck. They didn’t know where they were going. But they smiled and waved and everyone on that street cheered them as they drove off.

  By now it was almost three o’clock in the afternoon, and I figured I’d be needed more in the office. I had a long walk ahead of me, so I decided to start.

  Was I tired? I don’t know. I had sat down for a while. I hadn’t really eaten anything. But I was charged. Charged, but calm. Fully cognizant. Everything was very clear.

  I was walking north on 3rd Avenue when I saw this man walking ahead of me in jeans and a T-shirt. On his left leg, from about the middle of the thigh down, his jeans were ripped. Gone. He had a big bandage across his leg above his knee and blood was seeping through it.

  I asked him, “Can I talk to you for a moment?” He said, “Sure,” and I found out what happened.

  He was a livery driver who delivered supplies for the mayor’s office. He’d been at City Hall; his truck had been out on Broadway when the planes went into the Towers. He’d watched them. People had started screaming and running as the buildings fell. He ran with them. But the power of the falling buildings had caused all the windows along Broadway—around John Street and Church Street—to explode.

  Somebody had screamed, “Everybody get down!” And everybody had. Then the shrapnel and smoke washed over them. The driver said it was like a flood of water, but it wasn’t like water falling down, more like water falling up, seeping up toward everyone on the streets.

  After the major stress of the impact passed, the driver said that people started checking each other out. There was an elderly couple near him, so he started helping the old woman, who thought she’d hurt a bone in her hip. The elderly man was helping his wife when, suddenly, the old man looked at the driver and said, “Your leg. Are you okay?”

  The driver looked down at this huge gash in his leg. He hadn’t known what caused it. Glass? Or metal? Something. The wound had torn his jeans leg off and right through the flesh so you could see his bone. Here he was, helping these other people out. Now someone was telling him, “No, you need to get in the ambulance first. You’re bleeding.”

  They got him in an ambulance and he went directly over to St. Vincent’s Hospital. I was trying to get a gauge on how the hospital was treating the severity of incoming victims, so I asked this driver if he’d been treated immediately.

  He said, “Yes. I went right in and they put twenty-two stitches in my leg.” Four hours later, here he was, walking down the street.

  Under normal circumstances, you know, if there had been an accidental fire or an explosion and someone had sustained that sort of injury—they would have been kept in the hospital. But apparently no one had the facilities and the resources to do that. The driver’s injury was deemed “walkable,” which is all that anyone could do at the time. There were no cabs or trains running.

  And that’s what a lot of the crisis centers I saw were about. People had these injuries that weren’t completely life-threatening, so they left them to recover in relative quiet.

  This driver … he was walking down the street, kind of in a daze but laughing as he told me his story.

  I said, “Well, where are you going now?”

  He had no clue. He lived in Brooklyn but he had no idea how he was going to get home.

  At 8th Street, I found that the N/R subway lines were running so long as you were headed north. I boarded a train, took it up to 42nd Street, and went to the Times office. The energy at the paper was palpable as I walked in.

  The old warhorses at the Times always bemoan that nowadays the place is so placid and tranquil. They don’t have the rat-tat-tat of typewriters anymore; you don’t have to yell into your telephone in a noisy newsroom. They pine for those days that have been replaced by computers and soft, digital phones. But that day, I got a feeling for what it must have been like in earlier years. People were yelling for copy. The noise level was pitched way above the norm. There were maps spread out and everyone was so focused, directing each other. People from the Metro desk were debriefing people like me. Now this was a news agency in full swing.

  Before I headed up to the office, I had called in my interviews. Usually they have one news assistant on the Metro desk who answers the phones and handles copy. That day, there were eleven of them manning the phones, tracking the reporters, taking transcriptions from staff who called in. Similarly, the National desk usually has one news assistant. That day, they had eight.

  It was “rally the troops and carry on now, no matter what.” Everyone was there. Management had even called in people who used to work at the Times six months previous. Reporters from Culture—people like my friend Jesse—had been dispatched to the Trade Center site to cover stories.

  In all, I thought it was an amazingly generous performance on behalf of the paper.

  For the next two weeks, I was in the office from nine in the morning until nine at night or beyond. They brought in food, and thus began my “Times diet.” We were given three meals a day. Bagels in the morning, sandwiches for lunch. Greek salad and cookies and some sort of chicken thing for dinner—all catered. In the end, it became a kind of joke. Most of the employees at the Times are stockholders in the company, so two and a half weeks into this feeding plan, people were like, “As a stockholder in the company, I think we can cut out the free catering now.”

  But that first week, it was necessary. So many places weren’t open, and people were too busy to get something to eat on their own. I think there was also an emotional component. Everything was in such an uproar, you had to stop once in a while and have someone tell you, “Okay. It’s lunchtime now.” You needed to have consistency.

  There’s a hard core to journalists who’ve worked their way up the ladder to write for the New York Times. These people live for their work. Things like food and sleep kind of fall by the wayside during times like the attack. People became very tight. You’re working together, spending twelve hours a day together, eating your meals with each other. And so much information is passing back and forth. In the following days, documents would come in containing sixteen terrorists’ names. Another document came in with nineteen more.

  The days that followed the Towers’ collapse saw Lower Manhattan papered with homemade posters and flyers begging for information that would lead to the whereabouts of missing persons.

  Meanwhile, I was working on the National desk. That first week, flights weren’t going anywhere. The breaking stories in Florida were on a national scale. We were calling our reporters in Atlanta and Houston and telling them, “Just get in your car and drive. We don’t know where you’re going yet, just drive in the direction of Florida. That’s where the story is.”

  We were trying to coordinate information from the FBI and other sources, trying to figure out who these terrorists were and what their connections were to each other, to the organizations who may have endowed them.31 Meanwhile, we were also trying to figure out who’d been killed in the attacks.

  The advent of all the posters and missing flyers that were seen all over the city? I’d been dispatched one day to go down to the Armory and collect as many of those flyers as possible so that we could start a list of the missing.

  I’d been holding myself together, maintaining objectivity, trying to do two jobs at once. Then, one day in the newsroom, all at once I just … stopped.

  I looked down. In one hand, I had a fax listing the bank account numbers, the addresses, the frequent flyer numbers, and the social security numbers of nineteen dead terrorists. In the other, I had the photographs, job descriptions, names, and family breakdowns of eight dead civilians. It was overwhelming.

  I walked away for a little bit. I didn’t cry—and I do that, I cry a lot. That wouldn’t have been unusual. I just didn’t have any tears at that moment. I was beyond them, I think.

  This whole thing has stripped this country down to its fundamental operating
procedures. The terrorist attack happened, and we found ourselves asking new questions. Do baseball games need to happen? No, we can do without. Football games? No. The stock market? No. Do we need the flag? No. Transportation? Not so much. Not so much as we’d thought, at any rate.

  Do we need a president? Yes. Do we need firemen? Yes. Policemen? Yes. We needed to hear from Rudy Giuliani. We need direction.

  But the attacks also stripped us down on an individual level, relegating us to a personalized basic operating procedure. Emotions, for instance. Do I need them right now? No. Do I need to get this work done? Yeah. Do I need to talk to people? Yeah. Do I need to eat food? Yeah. Sleep? A little, yes. When I can.

  I realized so much about myself through this process by having all the extraneous layers stripped away, all the social formalities, all the fears. All of the luxuries of life that we take for granted. They were suddenly gone.

  In some ways, I really don’t miss them.

  UPDATE

  After seven years with the New York Times, Anna began writing for a host of other outlets including Forbes, the Fiscal Times, the Washington Post, and USA Today. She attended Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, where she concentrated on business and economics and served as a fellow at the Columbia Journalism Review. She is currently a finance and investments reporter for CNN Business specializing in real estate, investments, and cryptocurrency markets.

  30 Westchester County lies in the heart of the Hudson River Valley, directly north of New York City. It can be reached within minutes by train from Grand Central Station in Manhattan. The county’s southernmost tip, which includes towns like Yonkers and Mount Vernon, touches the northern border of the Bronx. Westchester is filled with historic sites, rolling acreage, golf courses, parks, beaches, and quaint towns. It is a popular, upscale suburb for people who work in Manhattan.

  31 In the days that followed September 11, many terrorists involved with the hijacking of the four airliners were traced to Florida flight schools and other locations in the state where they had planned their tactics and trained themselves.

  JESSE LUNIN-PACK

  Jesse Lunin-Pack, twenty-eight, is a native New Yorker. He works for an investment banking firm that used to be based in the World Financial Center, just west of the World Trade Center. He witnessed the attacks and the mass exodus from downtown Manhattan mere minutes after the first plane hit the North Tower.

  I USED TO WORK across West Street and I loved working downtown; it made you feel like you were in the middle of everything. I could look out my office window, and right there was the World Trade Center.

  My apartment’s in Midtown, so every morning I’d take the E train to the World Trade Center station, then walk from the station into the mall underneath. I’d either head out onto the plaza or walk through the lobby of the North Tower—up an escalator to the bridge, which took you to the World Financial Center. My standard morning commute.

  I was running a little late on September 11 and I was very annoyed that someone had moved my polling place without bothering to tell me.32 When I got to my initial polling place, the voter registration people told me, “Sorry, you can’t vote here” and sent me to the new place. Aggravating. But I got my vote in and hopped the train and made it down to the World Trade Center subway station.

  I got off the train and walked through the turnstiles. There was a row of glass doors at the south end of the station which let you into the underground mall, do you remember? And as I was approaching those doors, every one of them opened at the same instant and a wall of people came streaming out with everyone talking loudly about a bomb.

  They were rushing—I wouldn’t say it was abject panic with people running for their lives, but they were certainly moving with purpose and if I didn’t move with them, I might have gotten trampled.

  I’ve lived in New York City my entire life, lived through bomb threats and scares. I’ve worked for Jewish agencies and organizations where we had to evacuate our buildings. So it wasn’t the first time I’d confronted a situation like that.

  I remained calm, thinking, every other time [someone’s talked about a bomb], it’s been a false alarm. I’m sure it’s a false alarm this time, too. See? There’s enough people moving in one direction. I’ll just move along with them.

  I didn’t want to get trapped underground if something bad was really going on. As I turned and moved away from those doors, I saw the first possible exit over to my left: a staircase up to the street. I moved toward it.

  Everyone was being helpful to one another. There was a woman with a baby carriage who was struggling, So two people grabbed the front of her carriage with the baby inside and helped lift it up. I’m sure if anyone knew what was actually going on, we would have told her to take the kid and leave the carriage. But nobody knew yet.

  The reality of the situation hit me while I was on that staircase. We were moving slowly and there were a lot of people crowding behind me. But when each person ahead of me got to the top of the stairs, they started screaming. Not good.

  Some of us started urging people, “Keep moving. Please. Don’t stop when you get to the top. We all need to get outta here.” Having no idea of what was at the top of the stairs, we prepared ourselves to run for cover.

  I got to the top of the stairs and looked up. I don’t remember if I screamed or not, but I know I had that same sentiment, the feeling of wanting to scream.

  I saw the North Tower on fire. And then I saw the confetti—for lack of a better word—falling down all over the place, a blizzard of paper.

  Then I looked closer and saw that larger things were falling, too, and it became clear pretty quickly that these were people jumping. Or falling.

  I moved away from the staircase and headed east, toward the corner. Came up on Vesey Street, which ran along the northern edge of the World Trade Center plaza. I don’t know how far down the block I was, but I was closer to Church Street.

  My thoughts went right back to ’93. Okay, I thought, a bomb caused this. But the damage I’d seen was so high up on the tower, it had to have been a really big bomb.

  I moved to the corner and found a colleague of mine, who was looking up in disbelief. We conferred. Near to us, there was a pay phone with a long line of people waiting to use it, and I overheard one of the people say, “No, no. It wasn’t a bomb, it was an airplane.”

  “… I asked, ‘What kind of airplane?’ The guy in line for the phone said, ‘A little corporate jet.’ Right, I thought. A little corporate jet that must’ve been packed with explosives to make a hole that big.”

  Which didn’t make sense to me. I remembered that an airplane had once hit the Empire State Building, but that had been in the middle of a storm. So I asked, “What kind of airplane?”

  The guy in line for the phone said, “A little corporate jet.”

  Right, I thought. A little corporate jet that must’ve been packed with explosives to make a hole that big.

  But the man kept talking and said he’d seen the tail of the plane as it entered the building, and I accepted this. It made sense enough at the time.

  We stood there watching more and more people fall. Luckily, my view of the plaza itself was blocked by 7 World Trade, so I didn’t see the bodies hit the ground. A friend of mine from business school, who had been in 7 World Trade, later described walking out of that building like this: “It was like a meat truck had overturned on the street because there was hamburger everywhere.”

  The people falling was a horrible thing to see, but it didn’t affect me much at the time. I was already in shock and besides, I’d worked on an ambulance corps for four years in college. You teach yourself to become immune. I think that instinct must have kicked in.

  My colleague and I still maintained this fantasy of getting back to our office, but at that point we decided to move away because the first fire trucks were beginning to arrive.

  It’s odd. I remember still being able to rationalize: Okay, there’s a big fire up th
ere and that’s horrible. But we’ve all seen building fires before and the fire department is here and they’ll take care of it.

  I’m saying that the situation had not yet progressed to something none of us could fathom.

  We started walking north. We were walking in the middle of the street because there were a lot of other people moving north, too. We didn’t get very far, maybe not even one or two blocks up Church Street, when there was an explosion behind us. I turned around and saw a fireball coming out at me.

  That’s the image that I haven’t been able to get rid of, more so than the people jumping: the image of the second Tower getting hit. You’ve seen the video footage of the plane going into the South Tower? I’m sure you have. That’s what I’m talking about.

  The plane was traveling from south to north when it hit and I was just north of the building, So all the debris and plume from that explosion shot out over where I was standing. The exit wound of the building, for lack of a better word.

  If there was ever a moment of utter pandemonium, that was it. Everyone started running. No one knew what was going on.

  To give you an idea of how close I was, I felt the heat on my face from the fireball coming at us. At first, I thought, there’s no way I could’ve felt that heat. It’s too far away. But my colleague mentioned the same thing later on. It was real.

  I started to run. Didn’t know where I was going, mind you, but I knew I wanted to move away. A piece of concrete larger than a cinder block hit the ground about ten feet in front of me, big enough that, if it had hit me, I wouldn’t be talking to you right now.