Tower Stories

by Damon DiMarco

  The day of Michael’s memorial, I decided to take the ferry with my children from Hoboken to Ground Zero. As we were going over, I talked to a ferry worker who told me about all the boats that came to help people get away from the area on September 11.

  He said, “It was an incredible scene. People with private boats and anything that could float were pulling up and taking survivors to New Jersey.”

  We landed and walked over to Broadway.

  Members of the FDNY mass outside of Trinity Church in preparation to enter Ground Zero and dig for survivors—and their brother firemen—shortly after the Towers fell.

  I had made the decision that morning not to take my camera. The devastation at the site was overwhelming. At that time, thousands of bodies were still missing, but many individuals hadn’t been declared dead yet. And I thought, they’re here at Ground Zero. Buried in the gray dust.

  That dust was everywhere—it was on the leaves of the plants, on the trees, in the flowerbeds that lined the streets, on the buildings. We walked past window washers who were busy trying to clean the façade of a building scheduled to open that week. I stood in silence, wanting to touch the dust but at the same time feeling it was somehow sacred.

  We went to Ladder 3 on 13th Street, which was Michael’s company. Thirteen men died from that firehouse. Twelve of them worked there, and one man had been there waiting for an assignment. I felt compelled to talk to Michael’s firemen friends. I know how close these men are; they’re like a family unto themselves. I wanted them to know that it was good they were alive.

  From there, we took a cab to the Church of St. Ignatius Loyola.96 The cab driver asked which side of the street the church was on. I said I didn’t know. But as we went over a small rise in the road, we saw hundreds of uniformed firefighters standing in rows on Park Avenue. I said to my children, “This is going to be big.”

  We got out of the cab, crossed the street, and a fireman asked if we were family. He told us to stand to the right side of the church entrance and assured us that seats were being reserved for family. The bagpipers were there. A man with an American bald eagle perched on his arm was standing on the street.

  The church was huge, and every seat was filled. I didn’t know who many of these people were—family, firemen, others. Carroll is an Irish name, so we have a large extended family. The women in the family tend to live till their nineties; Michael’s grandmother died in her nineties. This was the first death I could remember in a long time. The first, and certainly the most unexpected.

  There were several eulogies. Keith Gessner, a long-time friend of Michael’s, spoke along with Robert Burmeister, a friend from Ladder Company 3. There were representatives from the mayor’s and governor’s offices. Michael’s brother, Billy, spoke; Billy is also a New York City firefighter. He spoke eloquently about Michael and his love for his wife, Nancy, and their two children: Brendan, six, and Olivia, two.

  There wasn’t a dry eye throughout the entire ceremony. After a while, I stopped blotting the tears and just let them fall. All around, these big burly firemen had tears running down their faces.

  The processional hymn was “Be Not Afraid,” and we sang “Amazing Grace” and prayed. The recessional hymn was “On Eagle’s Wings.”

  As we left the church, a fire truck pulled up. The family lined up behind it and firemen lined the street, standing at attention, saluting us as we walked behind the fire truck down Park Avenue.

  There was so much confusion in my mind, between the public events and the personal fact that I was at “little Michael’s” funeral. Michael, the little boy in pajamas who used to watch Saturday morning cartoons when I slept over on the couch at this parents’ house.

  Last week, Michael’s body was recovered from the scene. This is a good thing. Without a body, we all clung to the hope that somehow he would be found safe—many people clung to that hope.

  Some families are still hoping that their loved ones might be found someplace, that they’re unconscious in some hospital somewhere—that they’ll wake up, realize they’ve been missed, and come home.

  It’s so very sad.

  Early on, I told Michael’s brother, Billy, “Bill, even now, I keep thinking that they’ll find him alive.”

  He said, “Jean. That’s not going to happen.”

  At least now they can bury him. There’ll be a grave and a place his family can go, a place his children can visit. That’s very important in the grieving process.

  UPDATE

  In the final assessment of the attack on the World Trade Center, 343 New York City firemen, 23 New York City policemen, and 37 Port Authority police officers were killed.

  96 Located on Park Avenue at 84th Street.

  JOHN McGRATH

  John McGrath, thirty, started his law practice at 160 Broadway, less than a full block east of the World Trade Center. He is no stranger to the Trade Center or the particular culture that surrounded it—John worked for the firm of Ohrenstein & Brown on the 85th floor of 1 World Trade before founding his own company.

  He talks of the massive damages sustained by the area and the local businesses, as well as the loss of many dear friends.

  O’HARA’S. What a place. It had two bars on the bottom floor. It was located one block from the Trade Center. There was a door on the north side of the room that faced out onto the Towers—that’s how close you were. They had all Irish bartenders at O’Hara’s, except this one Japanese guy named Kato. He always bartended upstairs with my friend Brian McCabe, whom we referred to as “The Other Middle-Aged Guy with Gout.”

  The rules at O’Hara’s were simple. You had to be a lawyer or you had to work in the Towers to drink there. I met up with another lawyer friend of mine on the evening of the tenth to watch the Broncos on Monday Night Football. Then we got a car to go home.

  I remember driving past the Towers and talking about them. I don’t remember what we said exactly—I made some kind of joke as we drove by. That was the last time I ever saw them.

  O’Hara’s is gone now. The building’s still there and it’s sound; I’ve seen it on the news videos. But the windows are all blown out and the place is filled with shit.

  A lot of people from Cantor Fitzgerald hung out there, and Cantor lost 700 people, I think. Seven hundred. This woman I knew was seven months pregnant. She’s gone, too.

  See, I still had a lot of friends who worked up in the Towers. But I’ll get to that in a minute.

  I never thought it was a jetliner. When I first heard a plane hit a Tower, I thought it was a Cessna. When you worked in the Trade Center, you always saw Cessnas and other little planes flying below you. I figured some idiot had lost control and flown into the building.

  In retrospect, that was a little naïve. A Cessna would just bounce off those buildings like a bug.

  When I watched the attack on TV, the impact of the first plane looked like it might have gone through my old office at Ohrenstein & Brown. It didn’t, though. Even when I worked in the Towers, it was always difficult to tell which floor was which when looking at them from the outside. They were just too damned big.

  My current office is on the ninth floor of our building at 160 Broadway. It used to be that 70 percent of the view from our window was 1 Liberty Plaza. The rest was dominated by 1 World Trade. Where we once had a relatively nice view out the windows, we now have a view of carnage. And through that: New Jersey. You can see right through where the Towers and 7 World Trade Center were. They’re just … gone.

  Sure, I was concerned that my business was gone. The Wednesday or Thursday after the attack, I was watching the TV coverage and they said that 1 Liberty Plaza was about to collapse. That’s right across the street from my place but what could I do? We weren’t allowed back in the area until Monday, the seventeenth, but even then, we had limited access. You had to get past several security checkpoints.

  I’d actually tried to go to my office that first Saturday, the fifteenth. My ID as a local business owner let me in through th
e first few checkpoints, but I couldn’t get all the way down to my office because security was still afraid that stuff was falling off 1 Liberty Plaza. My whole section of Broadway was shut down. No luck there.

  As it turned out, my building had survived, by which I mean it was structurally sound. But the heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning system is probably destroyed. Before evacuating on the eleventh, the building owner didn’t turn these systems off. The first Tower hadn’t fallen yet, and I guess he just hadn’t considered what might happen if the intake fans were running and two massive skyscrapers collapsed next door. All the pulverized debris from the Towers got sucked into the air ducts and distributed throughout the building.

  When I finally got into my office on the seventeenth, I found that everything was covered with dust. Curiously, however, the windows were intact. Which tells you the force of the debris that was flying: it was strong enough to get through cracks in the ceiling, the window seals. It covered my desk, my chairs, my papers, everything.

  This is a sample of the debris taken out of my office.97 My girlfriend’s father is a PhD in chemistry. Technically, he’s retired, but he still has a lot of friends at the University of Connecticut and volunteered to have this stuff analyzed. The tests came back showing that this dust has a little bit of everything in it. Little pieces of paper. Silicates. Concrete and glass fibers.

  I don’t know why I keep it. I guess I just don’t want to throw it away. It’s been sitting on my desk in my apartment; I’ve been working out of there since 9/11. Looking at it, it’s kinda hard to believe that the Towers were reduced to that in a heartbeat. All those big things were turned into little things in an instant.

  Little things matter a lot to me now, you know? Like, I was going through some old things the other day, and I found my men’s room key from when I worked on the 85th floor of 1 World Trade. For a split second, I had this insane thought that, gee, I’d better give this back.

  I’m keeping it. I don’t think they’ll miss it.

  Right after the attack, things got worse before they got better. I started hearing from people I used to work with and friends from high school. That’s how I found out that four people from my high school class were killed. One was a guy I’d gone to high school with. We’d lost track of each other for a couple of years. Then, over the last three years, I started seeing him all the time. Mike Duffy. He became a regular at another place I hang out at. After all this happened, I half-expected to see him. In fact, I found myself looking for him every time I went to the bar. I never ran into him, and I didn’t think much of it until I got a newsletter from my high school.

  Another guy I graduated with—John Schroeder. I played lacrosse with him. In my junior year, he was captain of the team. He’d gone off to school at Princeton, but we started bumping into each other occasionally when I was working at the Trade Center. He was on the 87th or 89th floor of 1 World Trade, right where the plane went in. He’d married a girl from our high school class, and I think they’d been husband and wife for just about three months before this happened.

  Then there was this friend of mine’s father. And the guy who was at my brother’s wedding. And my good friend’s brother. And this other guy’s cousin. Just more and more names. They keep rolling out in the papers every day. It sucks.

  But I think the most disorienting part of all this is the number of people I sort of knew who are gone. All those people from Ohrenstein & Brown and all the other firms who used to hang out at O’Hara’s—the ones I only knew by their first names. And now I have no idea whether they’re with us or not. I may never know.

  At first, I was upset with the tourists going downtown, especially when they first opened Broadway on September 20 or 21. There were people climbing on light poles, hefting cameras in the air, taking photographs, and crowding the streets—you couldn’t walk on the sidewalk, it was so crazy. A three-minute walk to my office ended up taking twenty.

  I thought it was disrespectful to come as a tourist and gawk. There were people having their photos taken, smiling and posing with what was left of the World Trade Center in the background. At that point, we still thought there were 6,000 people buried. So these people were taking snapshots of a graveyard. That’s how I see it. Disrespectful.

  I made comments. One guy was fighting with police to get a picture. I walked up to him and asked, “Where’s your family buried?” He was caught off-guard, and I said, “Really, tell me where your family members are buried. Because I’d like to dig them up and take their photograph.”

  He wasn’t from New York. But he kinda got the idea.

  In fact, one of the restaurants down there printed some signs outside their restaurant: “This is hallowed ground. Show some respect.”

  That was appreciated.

  I was out of my office for about a month before the building management finally got everything cleaned up. When I re-opened and started seeing clients again, you could tell it was a dramatic experience for them. It was the first time a lot of people had been downtown, which must have been sobering. And someone involved in litigation isn’t usually happy to begin with. I’ve had a couple clients come in, look out the window, and start crying. I let them have their moment and then try to get them back on track.

  I understand what that’s about. It’s very tough for me to sit here in the office and perform work when I recognize I’m just a couple hundred yards away from a mass grave for thousands of people.

  And I know that approximately 20 to 40 percent of the lawyers in New York City either couldn’t get into their offices or had them destroyed. The damage to business in this city has been unbelievable. For instance, the phones didn’t work for six weeks, but that didn’t really matter. In all that time, I had nothing to do.

  That first week we were anticipating about $20,000 in revenue. We got maybe $500. It’s only been this last ten days or so that business has picked up again to the levels prior to 9/11. I’ve already had one case pulled from me—a criminal defense client hired a new lawyer because he couldn’t get in touch with us for a week. And I couldn’t call him, since I had no access to my case files, no phone numbers.

  97 John held up a small vial of gray dust.

  ALICE GREENWALD

  What is the point to a headstone on a grave? Why have human beings captured the ashes of loved ones in urns since time immemorial? How do the living cope with the memory of the departed, especially when those who have left us did so under tragic and confounding circumstances?

  These and other questions were very much on my mind when I interviewed Alice Greenwald, who currently serves as president and CEO of the 9/11 Memorial and Museum.

  Built directly upon and within the World Trade Center campus, the memorial and museum shoulders the awesome responsibility of welcoming visitors from around the globe as they seek to connect—and, in many cases, reconnect—with all that happened there twenty years ago.

  “I see the 9/11 Memorial and Museum as the container for the nation’s grief,” Alice says. “It’s a very important function.”

  If this sounds like an understatement, it is. But Alice has earned the right to be pithy. Her extensive career in remembrance affords her a viewpoint into the process few people can match.

  She began her journey in remembrance at the Spertus Museum of Judaica in Chicago, the Hebrew Union College Skirball Museum in Los Angeles, and the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia where she served as executive director for five years. Between 1986 and 2001, she provided expertise to clients including the Baltimore Museum of Industry, the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Historical Society of Princeton, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USH-MM). Her work with USHMM evolved into a nineteen-year affiliation where, among other assignments, she served as associate museum director for museum programs.

  The author of several articles and books, Alice was executive vice president for exhibitions, collections, and education at the 9/11 Memorial and Museum from 2006 to 2016, and as
sumed the chief executive role in 2017.

  Perhaps unsurprisingly, the list of Alice’s accomplishments goes on.

  For all these reasons and so many more, I was grateful to speak with her by video conference in the closing days of 2020.

  I’VE BEEN IN the memory business a long time. People ask me, “Why do we remember?”

  Well, there’s a great quote from Elie Wiesel in one of his books: “If we stop remembering, we stop being.”

  I believe that memory is essential for moral conscience. If we can’t remember what happened to other people, we can’t possibly determine what’s right and wrong. Remembering becomes an existential imperative so we can learn to be better human beings.

  As I see it, this imperative has two parts. First, we could say that remembering is simply one of life’s obligations. That we have a fundamental obligation to remember those who have died. And when I say “died,” what I really mean is that we remember how they lived. This isn’t just a human response. As far as we know, elephants do the same thing. But it becomes especially important when we try to breach this interesting chasm between the profundity of loss and the outrage over a loss that’s unjust, as in cases of criminal inhumanity.

  That’s just one part. I said there are two. The second reason we remember is to ask ourselves what we’re capable of as human beings, both at our worst and at our best.

  Human beings make choices. The nineteen hijackers, Osama bin Laden, and everyone affiliated with al-Qaeda … they made a choice to perpetrate that horrific attack on 9/11. But on that day—and in the weeks, the months, even years that followed—people made other choices: to respond with empathy and compassion, from a deep sense of public service. Service to one another, not to oneself.