Tower Stories

by Damon DiMarco

  40 2002.

  MIKE X

  Mike X refuses to give his last name. He says he’s worked on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange for fifteen years, and he was in the World Trade Center immediately before the attack on September 11. From the Towers, he walked to work at the Exchange in a state of shock and witnessed the shutdown of the American economy.

  This interview was conducted in a popular Wall Street area bar.

  MY NAME’S MIKE. No, I’m not giving you my fucking last name. That’s it. Just Mike. All right?

  I’m a trader on the Exchange floor. I’m not going to tell you what company I work for and what sector I handle. Suffice it to say, we’re the two-dollar broker on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, all right?

  You know what? Turn that thing off till I get good and drunk.

  I live in Jersey, and I’d take the PATH train into the Trade Center every day. I’d walk through all the stores and the galleries underground. And every day I went into the Trinity Church cemetery, walking my regular route from the Trade Center to the Stock Exchange.

  So. This day, the eleventh. I heard a noise and looked up. Couldn’t see what was going on ’cause of all the buildings on Broadway. Thought maybe it was just another transformer blew.41 So I kept walking.

  I came down Wall Street. Saw people pointing up, so I looked up. Said, “Holy shit.” There’s this big plume of smoke, and I was like, “What the hell’s goin’ on now?”

  Kept walkin’ down Wall Street. Now the plume’s getting closer. I’m on Broad and Wall. Turned around, and paper started comin’ down outta the air. You know, papers from the World Trade Center, papers like woulda been on somebody’s desk. Spit out of computers. They’re all burned ’round the edges.

  Again, I think, holy shit. This ain’t … ya know. This ain’t normal.

  Three minutes. Three fucking minutes earlier, I would have been right under it all.

  Everybody ran into the Exchange. I get in there, and the first thing I hear is some guy sayin’, “Yeah, some twin-engine plane hit the Trade Center.”

  Everybody’s gathering around the TVs we got on the trading floor. I’m, like, “No. That’s not a twin-engine plane. A Cessna would have just bounced off those buildings.”

  Jesus Christ. Confusion. Mayhem and confusion. The market never opened that day. The head of the Exchange announced, “Trading will be delayed until we can figure out what’s going on.” Then, as things developed, he said, “We’re not opening at all.”

  I’m on my floor, got nothing to do, so I call my parents and friends. Everybody. Tell ’em I’m all right. Then the first Tower came down.

  The Exchange building started shaking. There’s these huge glass windows all around the Stock Exchange, and they started rattling. Lights started flickering. That’s when I thought, wow. This is it. They got us, too.

  Everybody tried running out but that was stupid, you couldn’t get out. No matter how many fire drills you have. Nobody could get out.

  The foreign markets had opened. England was open, Europe was still open. But after the second plane hit, all the news services stopped broadcasting. A lot of them were headquartered in the Trade Center, right?

  After that, we got all our news from the TVs on the floor. We got our financial information, all our information from the networks just like the rest of yous.

  That whole week, we didn’t open. There wasn’t a lot … nothing to … you know? No work. So you sit at home with all this news. The TV was always on in my apartment. Phone was ringing. I got the damage report little by little from friends. Not about damage to the Towers, that stuff was pretty obvious—you could see the smoke plume real clear from my place in Hoboken. And not damage to the nation—who cares about that?

  I don’t mean it like that.

  What I mean is—as it turns out—I lost six buddies in all. Six good buddies. They were in there when the buildings came down. That, to me, is damage.

  That whole week. Fuck it.

  Where’s the bartender?

  We went back to work the first day of trading, which was last Monday, September 17, 2001. It was … I don’t know. Somber. You know?

  Usually you feel this great rush of adrenaline being in the Exchange. Now nobody wanted to be there.

  All sell orders that day. It was expected.

  I’m a phone clerk. I take orders from the outside customers, give them to a broker to execute. That day? Ninety percent sell orders. And anything that had to do with recreation got crushed: Disney. Kodak. Travel stocks. Crushed. It made sense to me. The airlines? Jesus, who wants to fly after what happened? Who wants to take a cruise? Hotel stocks? Crushed.

  The second day went pretty much the same as the first. So did the third day. And the fourth. That whole week, we all just watched. Numb. The market plummeted. Then it held. Plummeted again. Rallied a little. Plummeted further, and rallied once more. But it was definitely a downward slide. It just kept slipping down. Fighting like a wounded animal. But we handled it.

  Give you a good example. I got this chain email circulated on October 2, 2001. Pretty much said it all, you know?

  It said:

  “If you bought $1,000 worth of Nortel stock one year ago, it would now be worth $49.

  “If you bought $1,000 worth of Budweiser (the beer, not the stock) one year ago, drank all the beer, and traded in the cans for the nickel deposit, you would have $79.

  “It’s time to start drinking heavily.”

  It turned around first time last Friday. It tried to rally serious. That’s what we wanted. Rallied ’em a little bit. Then this week. We rallied ’em up 400 points. Down about 16 percent overall by then, but hey—only 16 percent. I mean, only 16 percent. Come on. Let’s give ourselves a little hand, huh?

  These experts on the news … they call themselves experts. I got other names for them. They’re saying this is the worst slip since the Depression. Well, yes and no.

  A lot of stocks are undervalued right now, shouldn’t be tradin’ where they are, but nobody has the confidence to step up and buy ’em. Middle America isn’t going to do it. Not yet. No, no.

  As a point of perspective? I saw the crash of ’87. Let me tell you: ’87 was a panic. This was [a] lot more orderly. Unless you work down there, I don’t know how to explain it to you. People were just more … prepared.

  For instance, we didn’t have the computers, the electronic capability back in ’87 that we have nowadays. Nowadays, the computers stop the market before it slips down too far. Cooler heads prevail. You don’t want a mob mentality out there on the floor, let me tell you.

  You gotta let people digest the news, you know? Disseminate the news. Cooler heads. That’s what happened this time. In my opinion, the Exchange acted exactly perfect.

  Sure, trading’ll be back up. I know it will. How long will it take? Shit, if I knew that I’d be a billionaire. It’s all about consumer confidence. And if I knew what that was, I’d be a billionaire. Right now, I wouldn’t say it’s business as usual. It’s still very tough.

  Hey, grab that guy, wouldja? I want another beer.

  I saw a lot of people lose their shit that day. Old guys on the Exchange with their heads in their hands, crying. I got scared.

  And now? I don’t take the PATH train no more. I take the ferry out from Hoboken. Still.

  Twice a day I gotta walk past those Towers. Sorry. That place. The Towers are gone. Twice a day. It’ll never be business as usual again. And it’s sickening. Seeing what happened. Sickening.

  I personally lost six buddies, I tell you that? Maybe another thirty people I knew from, “Hey, how you doin’?”

  You deal with that. You go on. Do what you can do. Like, I’m a big New York sports fan, so I got Rangers season tickets, Giants season tickets. I go to all the games. Try to live my life as much as normal.

  But no, I won’t ever forget this and I don’t want to. You forget and you know what happens? It happens again.

  UPDATE

&nb
sp; The September 11 attacks made a significant economic impact on the United States economy. The Federal Reserve temporarily reduced its contact with banks due to the failure of switching equipment in the lower New York financial district.42

  The stock markets re-opened on September 17, 2001, after the longest closure since the Great Depression in 1929. On that day, the Dow Jones Industrial Average stock market index plummeted 684 points, or 7.1 percent, to 8,920, its largest-ever one-day point decline. By the end of the week—at close of business on September 21, 2001—the Dow Jones had fallen a total of 1,369.7 points (14.3 percent), making it the largest one-week point drop in history. U.S. stocks lost $1.2 trillion in value for the week.

  As of 2005, Wall and Broad Streets near the New York Stock Exchange remained barricaded and guarded to prevent a physical attack upon the building.

  On February 14, 2007, the Dow Jones hit a new high of 12,700.

  41 Mike did not bother to qualify this, So I asked, “How often did you hear transformers blow downtown?” He looked at me with open hostility and said, “They blow, man. They blow.”

  42 See the interview with Kevin Killian of Verizon.

  DR. WALTER GERASIMOWICZ

  Dr. Walter Gerasimowicz, forty-nine, worked as the director of advisory services for Lehman Brothers beginning in the autumn of 1995.

  I HAVE A bone disease called Albright’s syndrome, which is also called polyostotic fibrous dysplasia. It’s a very rare condition which most physicians never see; as a matter of fact, it’s so rare that it’s not even funded as an orphaned disease by the government for research purposes.

  What Albright’s amounts to, is that I have portions of normal bone and portions of bone which are somewhat fibrous, non-crystalline. They bend, they deform, they break. I’m most impacted on my left side, particularly in my left femur, hip, and back. I’m permanently on crutches.

  On that morning, I went into my office, which is on the 28th floor of 1 World Financial Center, directly across the street from the World Trade Center. My office faces West Street, with a direct view of the Towers. I’d say the distance is fifty meters at most, probably closer to thirty.

  I heard the first impact, and people started to rush toward the east side of our building to watch the Towers burn. Initially, we were uncertain as to what had happened, whether it was a bomb or some other explosion. Then we were told, by word of mouth, that a plane had struck the building. We were told by security people to stay put. At this point, there were quite a few people in the offices watching what was occurring. In addition, some of us had televisions in our offices, on which we’d watch the financial news networks. We used these to grab the news as it broke.

  I was surprised because there was a great deal of chaos in my office. People running, people screaming, people horrified. No one knew exactly what had occurred—I think that many people thought that perhaps a pilot had gotten sick or had a heart attack. But we were all watching this … and then the real horror began as people began to leap from the Towers to their deaths. You could see them as they climbed out of the windows and onto the ledges. Then—falling or leaping. It wasn’t one or two, it was scores of people. I was literally in a state of shock for the next two weeks.

  I got on the phone to one of my colleagues, Doreen Benson. She was traveling in Florida. I told her to turn on the television and she did, so we were speaking and watching the coverage on the television simultaneously.

  She said, “Walter, leave. Leave now!”

  And I immediately did. People were screaming and running past my office in tears. Then we saw the next plane fly in and hit, exploding. At that point, we knew this was no accident. Total pandemonium broke loose with everyone heading for the stairwells. The situation was obviously too dangerous to get on elevators and we didn’t know, by the way, if our own building was under attack.

  Now, as I said, I’m on crutches. And as I started to head toward the stairwell, I was filled with mixed emotions. Should I wait? There were hundreds of people trying to run past me. Should I hold them up or should I begin the long, tedious process of getting down those stairs? I value my self-preservation, but I wondered how that would impact a greater number of people.

  As it turns out, when I got to the stairwell, people came to me with assistance. I’ll give you their names, because it’s something I’ll never forget: Mark Stevenson, Steve Campbell, Richard Feldman, Richard Cuomo, Alan Reichman.

  These men. Despite that no one knew what was going on and we could all be in grave, immediate danger, they refused to leave me at any point.

  I said, “Go. I’ll get down. I’ll be all right. Just go.”

  But they refused.

  I was using one crutch and the banister of the stairwell to descend. I gave my other crutch to another colleague who was headed past us down the steps. His name is Mark Soloman. I told him, “Just leave it at the bottom of the staircase, I’ll retrieve it when I get there.”

  So there I was with these men, going down the steps with people rushing past us. We were trying to tell everyone, “Go around! Go around!” Obviously, it was taking me a lot longer to use the stairs than anyone else.

  Again and again, I told the men who were with me to go ahead. Again, they refused.

  When we got to the main level—the street level—there were two paths to take, two stairwells. The gentleman who’d taken my second crutch had taken one of those paths but no one knew which way he’d gone. So we just chose one, and we never found the crutch that day. We must’ve chosen the stairwell that Mark didn’t. Thus, I ended up with one stick.

  What’s kind of interesting about that crutch—the one that I’d given up to Mark—it was used to hold the door open in the other stairwell. It allowed everyone who passed that way to run right out of the building. My colleagues found it there three weeks later when they were allowed back into the building to inspect the damages. It was still propping open that door. So it served a noble purpose, I think.

  Once we got down to the street level, I put my arm on the shoulder of Mark Stevenson. Mark is the manager for the New York office. So I had my crutch under my left shoulder and Mark under my right. We turned and headed west toward the Hudson River, passing the Gateway building. We were basically between 2 World and 1 World. We’d walked about a hundred meters or so to where there were some benches and I sat down temporarily—I had to, I was exhausted.

  Pandemonium ensued all around us: emergency people were rushing in; thousands of office workers were rushing out. Boats swooped in from the Hudson River to dock at rescue stops.

  We were only two to three hundred yards west of the Towers, facing them, watching both burn. At the same time, we saw more and more people jumping from both Towers. Time was more or less surreal.

  And at some point the first Tower went down. It just … it went down. It was absolutely horrible.

  Everyone started running but in my case, with my mobility so limited, I continued walking toward the river. Alan and the others flagged down emergency personnel, who pulled up in this sort of golf cart—like a flatbed electric cart. Alan and Richard Cuomo and I got in. We were taken down to the Hudson River, where the boats were waiting. The other men who’d been in my company left the area immediately on foot.

  The boat landing was pandemonium as well, because many boats were using makeshift docks and, in many cases, the boat decks didn’t come up level to the ground. People were so desperate to get on board that they tried jumping onto the decks from the dockside. Some broke their legs as they landed. Some fell into the water.

  I didn’t know how I would be able to get aboard, but luckily one boat had a platform that folded out from the back and became flush with the ground. With Alan’s help, I was able to begin boarding.

  At this point, Rich Cuomo turned around and went back to find our colleagues. He wanted to tell them there were boats available to take them to safety. Unbeknownst to any of us, the rest of the men from my company had begun to head north, walking up the West Side in or
der to get away from the disaster.

  As the boat I was boarding opened up that back platform, hundreds of people tried to stampede aboard. Alan stood more or less in front of me, acting as a buffer, and I held onto the rail with all my might; I would have been knocked down otherwise. We waited for everyone to pass.

  There were people covered from head to foot with ash, many were in a state of shock. People were crying, running, panicking. Others filed past with absolutely no expression, as if in a trance.

  After the melee had passed me, Alan helped me onto the main body of the boat, to a place where I could sit down. And as I sat there, facing the boat’s aft, facing the Towers, I saw the second one go down. It happened so fast. Within seconds, all of us and all of Lower Manhattan were consumed by an opaque black cloud of ash, dust, and soot. You couldn’t see the Battery at all.43

  One of the rescue workers on the boat was standing next to me, crying. He said, “My God. I’m here trying to help everyone else, and my family is down there. I live there.”

  We all tried to call our loved ones on our cell phones but, of course, we couldn’t get through for hours.

  Ultimately, our rescue boat left and crossed the river. It was like a war zone evacuation. The people of Lower Manhattan were ferried across the river and dumped in different places. In my case, we ended up in Hoboken. Alan Reichman was still with me, and he helped me off the boat; now I was using him as my crutch.

  We ended up getting on a train that took us to the most northerly point in New Jersey, and then we crossed over into New York State, where Alan’s home is. From there, we were able to grab a taxi. I live in Manhattan, but there was no way for me to get back into New York City for a number of days. All the bridges, the tunnels, everything was shut down. So I stayed with Alan’s family.