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Community Corner

Young Life in an Old Town: Remembering 9/11

I was a transplanted Washingtonian who was just starting to get her bearings in NYC when everything changed.

We had been living in Jersey City, NJ just across the river from the World Trade Center for about a year. As I walked our dog on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, I noted that it was a gorgeous day with the first hint of crisp fall weather in the air.

I had been very homesick for Washington when we first moved to New York, but on that morning I took in the skyline and felt strangely settled. I purchased a new farecard for the PATH train at 8:23 a.m. I still have the farcard, with the date and time imprinted, and I got out at my usual stop on W. 9th Street in Manhattan.

As I hurried through Washington Square Park on my way to my office on West 4th street, I noticed that the usual fast moving mob of commuters was staring at smoke coming from the World Trade Center, which was about two miles away. The first plane had hit but we all thought it was “just” a fire. I made my way to work and we all know what happened over the next few hours.

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As the day wore on, I was told that the safest thing to do was stay in my office building. We closed the windows to keep out the smoke that had begun wafting through lower Manhattan. The phones didn’t work and the city was on lockdown. I stared at the television (and occasionally the horrifying sites out the window of my 10th story office) for most of the day. Finally around dusk the trains to New Jersey began running again, but only from 33rd street. I walked with a colleague from Greenwich Village to Midtown in heels and a gray pantsuit.

That night, the roads that were usually clogged with honking cars and pedestrians were eerily empty except for the occasional emergency vehicle. When I arrived home, the morning doorman was still on duty. We exchanged a look and a hug, but no words.

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I remember Giuliani saying that the casualties “will be more than any of us can bear ultimately.” I remember massive rain coming on the night following the attack and being up all night listening to a storm. It seemed so cruel that the brave rescue workers trying to dig people out were doing so in a torrential downpour.

Remember when we thought they might actually find people? Finally, I remember having dinner at the bar of a Hoboken restaurant where the regular bartender was out because his father was a Trade Center victim. I watched Cantor Fitzgerald’s Howard Lutnick weep on television about losing more than 600 employees.

My husband and I cried and cried, right there at the bar. It’s been 10 years but I can still conjure the awful smell that lingered in Manhattan for months, the fear and sadness of the days and months after the attack. Time has healed the fear, but not the lump in my throat when I think about that day.

I’ll spend 9/11 thinking of everyone who lost a loved one that day, the people who left for work in the morning and never came back to our building in Jersey City, and my friend Susan who walked 29 blocks to the PATH train with me.

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