Tower Stories

by Damon DiMarco

  All I could think was, I’m so sorry you have to experience this. I’m so sorry I have to tell you what’s going on. I mean, I had never experienced this. Nobody’d ever experienced this. And there she was, eleven years old and about to go through it, fumbling and terrified like the rest of us.

  I think I said something like, “It’s okay, honey. A plane’s run into the World Trade Center, that’s all. Come on.” And we went outside.

  Jake: Her school’s right there. When we walked out the door, we looked up and saw the blizzard coming down, the people jumping out the windows, everything. I don’t think she actually saw any of the bodies because there was paper and debris flying everywhere. I hope she didn’t see anything.

  We walked north. By this time it was too crowded to even consider using the bicycle. There was this van parked in the middle of the street with its doors wide open and the radio blaring. The president was on, and he was telling the nation about what’s going on in New York City, describing for the whole country what was going on right where we were, and that was surreal. This huge crowd of people had massed around this van and was standing quietly, trying to listen, trying to figure out what happened while this chaos was exploding all around us.

  To me, it was one of those moments in history you only read about. That’s when I realized this was big. This was huge.

  Jake: We got home, and I picked up the camera again. I was standing out on the street, filming, when the first building collapsed.

  Sean: On Greenwich Street, we’re fifteen blocks away. You could see everything.

  Jake: The first building collapsed and I thought back to ’93; we were here in the city when that first bomb went off. Nobody expected a collapse to happen then, and nobody expected one to happen now. But a little while later, the second Tower came down. I don’t now how to describe that to you.

  Our apartment is on the street level, so we watched this steady crowd of people stream right past our windows. Then, suddenly, this guy who was totally covered in dust pressed himself against the glass of our living room pane. He was all white from the dust; you could only make out his eyes. He pressed a badge up against the window and shouted out that he was from the FBI. I wouldn’t know an FBI badge from anything, but I let the guy in.

  He wanted to use our bathroom to wash off, and we said, “Sure. It’s over there.”

  As he was walking toward the bathroom, he said, “This is the saddest day in American history.” He went into the bathroom and closed the door.

  We were waiting out here for him to finish up. He took a long time. We stood here and listened while he started weeping in our bathroom.

  Jake: There were lots of FBI guys in town that day for some sort of UN conference. When the guy came out of the bathroom, I said, “Do you want to use the phone? I don’t think it’s working but you’re welcome to try.”

  He looked at me and said, “My office was in the Tower. It’s gone. It’s all gone. I don’t know who to call.”

  The poor guy didn’t know what to do. And he was, you know, a federal officer. Eventually he decided to go back to his hotel, which was someplace in Midtown, I think. He said, “I guess I’ll just go back to the hotel and see who shows up.” He didn’t know what had happened to his colleagues. He had no idea what became of them.

  Jake: Sean’s a real estate broker, and later that afternoon, she walked down towards the Towers for an apartment showing, thinking that her clients would keep their time slot.

  Sean: I was supposed to be closing an apartment at one o’clock on Broadway and Warren. The eleventh was supposed to be our final walk-through before signing the papers. When Jake left to get Madeline, I started heading down Greenwich to make the appointment.

  When you walk down Greenwich, the first thing you come to is the Smith Barney Travelers building. That’s the tall building about three blocks down, with the neon umbrella logo. Everyone who worked in that building had spilled out on the street, a herd of people whose median age was thirty or forty years old. Every ear had a cell phone jammed in it, and every head had turned in the direction of the Towers. Everyone was talking. And I thought, oh my God. They’re talking to people who are up in the buildings, their friends who work there and got trapped.

  It was frightening.

  I cut over to Hudson Street. These are blocks that I walk every day of my life, but this was so different from any other day. I don’t know if anyone else you’ve interviewed described this to you, but you’d be walking along, things would seem normal. Then, all of a sudden, for some unexplained reason a group of people would panic and start running, even though nothing new had happened. You felt an electric fear that worked itself through whole crowds on a whim.

  Jake: Right. For instance, at 5:30 that afternoon, when 7 World Trade collapsed, there was all this panic. People were screaming, “The building’s collapsing! The building’s collapsing!” We were sitting here, having watched the Towers collapse, thinking, why are you panicking now? I think people react in different ways.

  Sean: We weren’t filled with panic when we saw the planes hit. I guess we just thought, okay, life is gonna go on. Those Towers are gonna burn, but life is gonna go on.

  Anyway, as I walked closer and closer to the scene, I started feeling those little pockets of panic hit. And when I got down to the building on Warren Street where I was supposed to show the apartment, the superintendent was there sweeping out the lobby as if it were any other day.

  I didn’t see my client anywhere and I thought, well, she may not show. I’d better go up and check the apartment so that, at the closing, I can vouch for the fact that it was in good shape. This is how you’re thinking!

  So I went up to the apartment and everything looked fine, everything worked. I lowered the shades to hide the view. Then I went back down and waited a bit longer, but the client didn’t show. So I thought, I’d better go find a phone. But every pay phone had huge lines of people snaking away from it.

  That’s when I felt the air change. I felt little particles. Then I heard a roar. I looked down Broadway and saw that brown cloud you’ve seen in all the reels, with people running full tilt up the street in front of it. My first thought was bio-terrorism because of the brown quality of the air.

  When I first heard the noise, I thought the terrorists had hit something else, like the Woolworth Building. I was surrounded by so many buildings directly in front of me, I couldn’t see the Trade Center.

  Jake: On the videotape I shot, I have the aftermath of walking down there. There was like a … snow everywhere. Army vehicles drove by. People covered their faces with handkerchiefs, napkins, shirts, anything. When the Towers collapsed, everything was like living in a dream, a dream where you kept thinking, we’re going to wake up. Any moment now, we’re going to wake up. But of course we never did.

  Sean: I decided to head north and get back home. My biggest concern, strangely enough, was that I didn’t want to get trampled to death by the mob. I went down a side street to get away from everyone and I thought, I know this area really well, I used to live here. I’ll be smarter than them, I’ll go down Thomas Street. No one’s gonna go down Thomas. Which is when I saw the McDonald’s.

  There were two sets of workers: the workers outside and the workers inside. The workers outside were hollering, “Come on! Go!” Like they were in the path of a bomb or something. And the workers inside were just as adamant. “We can’t leave, we can’t just leave!”

  Their friends outside screamed, “Get out of there!” But these few guys inside hung in, they wanted to stay. I guess they were going to work that day no matter what.

  Jake: That was just like the guys who were here working on our place. They’re Chinese and they don’t speak any English. Lew, their Taiwanese foreman, was crying. They were all in such shock.

  We all huddled in this empty room where we had a TV and nothing else. We sat on the bare floor.

  Sean: Yeah, how come our cable continued to work? We never lost our cable throughout
the whole thing.

  Jake: I don’t know, ask the cable company. But we all sat in there and Sean went out to get sandwiches.

  Sean: I thought, the only thing I can do for people is feed them. So I took Lew with me to this cruddy little deli a block away and said, “We’d better get supplies.” We loaded up with anything I could think of. Things we might have to eat for the next three or four days.

  Jake: We didn’t know what was going to happen next, you know? For a long time, part of the stress was wondering, when is the other shoe going to drop? So we stocked up and there we were, all of us in that room. Five or six Chinese guys—

  Sean: No. More than that.

  Jake: Maybe. Five, six guys and Lew—who spoke a little English, the only one of all of them who did, really. Everybody was stunned. As it turns out, they didn’t eat anything.

  Sean: They only ate potato chips.

  Jake: They didn’t want to eat. We all watched the news. Nobody knew what to do.

  Sean: We were getting ready to have them stay with us, if that was what needed to happen. For all we knew, they would live with us. We didn’t know where people would go.

  Jake: That was sort of an error in translation. For a while, they thought they had to stay. Those guys are so used to their jobs. Eventually, we just told them to go home. We weren’t kicking them out, you understand. But we made it clear to them, “You certainly don’t have to work today. Go home to your families. Make sure everyone’s okay.”

  Sean: For our old neighbor, Marcella, September 11 was a double whammy. She’d just found out she had brain cancer. Being so close to the Towers on Warren Street, they were eventually displaced from their home. So she had to deal with brain cancer and being a refugee.

  Jake: What are the chances of that?

  Sean: Their skylight had begun to leak a day before the World Trade Center. By the time they found anyone to fix it, like a month later, their whole floor was warped. Everything was ruined. Water just came pouring in.

  She had surgery, she’s fine now. But … wow.

  Jake: We took Marcella and her husband, Foster, in right after the attack. They needed a place to stay. Foster’s suffering from severe colon cancer. While they were staying with us, he had to walk north nearly every day to get his chemo treatments. The military stopped him every time he passed the checkpoint, and he had to keep explaining to the authorities who he was, where he was staying, why he was staying there, and what he was going to do. Talk about determination, the poor guy.

  Jake and Sean’s eleven-year-old daughter, Madeline, entered the room and added her recollections to the conversation.

  Madeline: When I first heard the noise, it was a loud boom and there was a whirling sound outside my math class. The windows faced out toward the West Side highway. We couldn’t see the Towers, but we saw people running with their hands over their heads. Then teachers started running into the classroom and shouting things.

  The first teacher said that a car had hit the World Trade Center, but we all thought that was strange. A car had made all that noise? Uh-uh. Then another teacher came in and said that no, it was a plane that had hit. That seemed a little weird, too, but it seemed … I don’t know. More right. Finally, our principal’s voice came on the overhead loudspeaker. She said we should all stay calm.

  Our teacher tried to get us back to work on adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing fractions. It was a really easy assignment because it was only the fourth day of school. But then parents started running into the classroom. The gym teacher came on over the loudspeaker and told everyone to go down to the cafeteria. So we did.

  Everyone was just waiting for their parents to come. A lot of kids couldn’t get in touch with their parents at their offices, so they went home with friends and their friends’ parents. My dad was already in the cafeteria when we got there, and he took me home.

  When we got back to my house and were standing in the door, I saw my old fifth-grade teacher walk by with some of the students from her class. She was holding onto their little hands and walking north.

  I said, “Hi,” and she said, “Hi,” but she kept walking. I guess she had a lot on her mind.

  Jake: Were you scared?

  Madeline: [pause] Yeah.

  Jake: You were?

  Madeline: Yeah.

  Jake: What do you think about the move to the new school, to where you are now?

  Madeline: [shrugs] I was only in the other school for four days, anyway. We didn’t really get used to it. It’s still my school at the new place because the building’s not the school, the people are, and they’re all the same. The teachers and the students. Except that some students never came back. Like this one kid got so scared, he never came back.

  Jake: But all of your textbooks are still in the old school, right?

  Madeline: Except for the math ones. We had those with us when we left.

  Jake: They’ve been working on Spanish without textbooks.

  Madeline: Some kids that day had stuffed things into their lockers for the afternoon. Like, our lunches were in there. I heard that they broke open our lockers to get the lunches out.

  Sean: I hope so.

  Madeline: I had one of my favorite books in there, too. I had my writing notebook, which I’d decorated nicely. But then I had to use another one that they gave us. Some of my friends had cell phones in their lockers, but the cell phone company gave them new ones.

  Sean: Do you guys talk about all this much at school now?

  Madeline: No. But things are a little different. We got to go see a free performance of Beauty and the Beast, and we got to go see a lot of old silent films where a live band plays along with the film. We used to go to Chelsea Piers Amusement Park about every week and a half to do rock climbing, soccer, basketball, and the batting cages. I don’t think about it much anymore.

  Jake: From what I’ve seen, two camps of people, parents, and teachers have formed in the neighborhood. There’s the people who want to move ahead and the people who want to dwell on the incident.

  A lot of people want to get back in the school, get back into things, get back into living life. Other people are panicked for any number of reasons. They focus on the schools not being safe, because the air quality’s not good. As far as that goes, I have to think, well, this is New York City. How good was the air quality before all this happened?

  I mean, look—you can worry about the air quality. There’s an argument there. But at the same time, during this crisis, people were sitting around watching other things happen to our children which were just as detrimental. Sean and I feel that it’s more important, psychologically, for people—certainly for the kids—to get back into some sort of normal routine.

  Obviously, you want to acknowledge what happened. You have to—how can you not? But at the same time, why dwell on it? Because really, in the end, what can you do?

  Madeline: I do want to go back to my school, because the school we’re at is scary. We’re sharing space with teenagers and high schoolers, and some kids were mugged across the street in a park just the other day. Plus, I play the clarinet. Right now in music class we have to be taught alongside the saxophones and flutes. The class is split in half, so we only get twenty minutes to work on something. When we go back, we’ll be able to have our own time.

  Jake: When do you go back?

  Sean: The twenty-second of January.40

  Madeline: We missed a lot of school days the week after the attack happened. And while they’re moving stuff back into the school, we’re going to miss another, like, three days. That’s what they tell us. I don’t know whether we’re going to make up the time at the end or what.

  Sean: I’m sure they’ll figure something out.

  Jake: Maybe they’ll just say, “Okay. We can forget about it.” Would that be all right with you?

  Sean: [smiling] Yeah.

  UPDATE

  When I caught up with the Turner Family, Jake Turner told me this:

  In the
fall of 2006, Madeline and the family hosted an exchange student from Argentina. The exchange student wanted to take in some sights, especially the legendary views from the top of the Empire State Building. Even though Madeline had grown up in New York (or perhaps because of it), she had never been to the Empire State Building. So, mere days after the fifth anniversary of September 11, the two girls made an excursion to 350 5th Avenue.

  The trip ended badly. Shortly after making it to the top, Madeline experienced a severe, uncharacteristic panic attack and became so incapacitated that help had to be summoned. She was escorted back to ground level, where her condition stabilized very quickly. Shortly thereafter, somewhat embarrassed, Madeline called Sean to report the incident. Sean, in turn, called Jake, who found the situation unfortunately logical.

  “She’d never been up in a building that high,” he said simply. He thought about it for a long moment, and then added: “I still think about that day. About what happened, sure, and everything that followed. To the people above and the people below. Not long after 9/11, I went out and bought bio/chem attack suits for everyone in the family. For protection, you know? Just in case. They were awfully expensive, but I didn’t want to be caught unprepared the next time around.

  “Mostly, whenever I think of the eleventh, I think of Madeline. She was so young when it happened, and it was such a shame that she had to see it. That day was the death of her innocence. No parent wants to watch that die in their child.

  “When the innocence goes away, what else is left? Where do you go from there?”

  38 The Turners’ former address on Warren Street was three blocks from the Trade Center.

  39 In the New York City public school system, “IS” stands for “Intermediate School.”