Memories of September 11th

Up until September 11th, I worked in One Liberty Plaza, aka the NASDAQ building, right across the street from the south tower. I was running late that day; I was on the subway from Brooklyn when the planes hit. All anyone on the subway knew was that there were "smoke conditions" at Cortlandt Street, the stop right under the towers, and so everyone got off at Rector, just a few blocks south of there. As I walked up the stairs to the street at about 9:05, my first thought was "Why is there a ticker-tape parade?". I walked half a block east and saw the source of the papers looming so surreally in the sky over the dark spires of Trinity Church.

I somehow managed to get a cell connection through to my sister. I called Grace from a payphone. Then I walked over to One Liberty just to see if I should be at work. I can't express the unreality of the day any better than that: the towers were burning, and I was worried about getting in trouble for not being at my desk.

The guard at One Liberty said "No, go home." I walked around One Liberty to the north, and then to the west, crossing the street so that I was within a hundred feet of the south tower. This was probably a half hour before it fell. I asked a cop if there was anything I could do, and he said "No, get back." I wonder what happened to him.

I walked a few blocks northeast. People were standing around in the streets, staring up at the burning towers. At one point a stampede very nearly happened over by Broad and Fulton when someone got the idea that one of the towers was falling. I remember staring at the towers and saying to myself "I don't think they're going to fall, but still... I think I'd better get the fuck out of Dodge." So, not wanting to mess with the trains, I began my customary walk north, over the Brooklyn Bridge, and to my apartment in Park Slope. The masses of people swarming over the empty roadway and milling over the bridge made me think of the exodus from Sodom, and as I looked back I thought about being turned into a pillar of salt.

On the Brooklyn Bridge pedestrian overpass, there are two large rectangular areas where the walking area flares out around each caisson. I stood in the "lee" of the pedestrian flow at the southwestern edge of the western caisson and, about a minute after hearing someone nearby say "...no, they'd never fall.." watched the first tower fall. An inarticulate sound of abnegation and a tingling wave of horror swept through the crowd, and Manhattan disappeared in a cloud of dust. I turned dumbly, sickly, and started walking the rest of the way home.

I'm thankful for that voice that told me to get out of Dodge. I'm thankful to those people who ran toward, ran up, when all common sense screamed down and away. And here I sit, in my cubicle in Manhattan. And it still doesn't feel real. Part of me saw a little box with consummately filmic flames coming out of it fall down. Part of me knew I was seeing lots of people die. The parallax is still vertiginous.

-Hugh Yeman, September 11, 2007