My September 11th

I submitted this to the LA Times. If they don’t put it up on their site, I’m crying anti-Semitism.

I was living in Greenpoint in Brooklyn on September 11, 2001.  At the time, I worked a soul-crushing phone sales job on Broadway just south of Houston.  I almost didn’t go to work that day because I wasn’t feeling well, but I was paid hourly plus commission, so a sick day meant a pay cut.

I came up out of the N/R station at Prince Street in between the two planes hitting the towers.  I got in line and bought a bagel and a coffee from a cart on the street.  I was close enough to see that something had hit one of the towers, but far enough away to not realize exactly what had happened.  No one on the street around me seemed to realize that this was more than an accident either.

I walked up to my office and sat down at my desk.  About a minute later, the second plane hit the tower.  Everyone in the office was online checking news reports, trying to figure out what happened.  Once a report went up on CNN.com indicating that this looked like a terrorist attack, I emailed my parents to say that I didn’t know what was going on, but that I was fine.  I then tried to go home.

When I got down to the street, it was more or less total chaos.  Ambulances, fire trucks and police cars were racing downtown while a huge sea of people walked uptown.  A bunch of people were crowded around a ConEd truck that was playing its radio loudly in order to try to help everyone figure out what was happening.  I stopped for a second, debated entering the subway at Prince Street before deciding to walk up to Union Square to take the L train directly back to Brooklyn.  I walked into the Union Square subway station and actually managed to get onto an L train seconds before they shut down the entire subway system.  At that point I knew I’d be walking home.  

I left the subway station andwalked east on 14th St over to Avenue A.  I walked south on Avenue A down to Delancey, where the Williamsburg Bridge empties out into lower Manhattan.  This was back before everyone had an iPod - I listened to Radiohead’s Amnesiac on repeat on my Discman in order to drown out all of the sirens.  It took me years to be able to listen to that album again.

By the time I got to Delancey, both towers had collapsed.  It didn’t even enter my mind that such an event was possible - I just remember thinking how crazy it was that the smoke was so thick that it was obscuring the view of the towers from the Lower East Side.  It wasn’t until I got home and called my parents that I learned that the towers had collapsed.  I distinctly remember my mom saying “they both fell” right as I turned on the TV to see it for myself.

As I got to the entrance to the Williamsburg bridge, about 20 cops were trying to keep pedestrians from walking on the roadway of the bridge.  They eventually gave up, and began doing what they could to make sure people were walking safely across the bridge.  I remember seeing photos later that night of cops handing out water bottles to pedestrians on the bridge.  “The world is ending.  Here, make sure you stay hydrated.”

As I walked across the bridge to Brooklyn, a man with a portable radio shouted out whatever he was hearing over news radio.  At that point, there were several other planes in the air (other than the ones actually involved in the plot) that had not yet responded to air traffic control.  Miami, Boston, etc etc.  I’m sure that the guy with the radio thought he was helping.  He wasn’t.

It took me about an hour to walk from the base of the bridge on the Brooklyn side north to my apartment in Greenpoint.  I walked into my apartment at about 11am.  My roommate, who was pretty sick, had not even gotten out of bed yet.  So I had to knock on his door and tell him that September 11th had happened.  Neither of us had a cell phone at that point, so we spent the next hour calling family/friends from our land line, which actually worked, much to our surprise.  We then went up to the roof of our building, tried to hold it together, and took some pictures.

That night, a bunch of our friends got together at Enid’s, a popular bar in the neighborhood.  It felt good to be amongst friends if for no other reason than to remind me that I wasn’t the only person who had no idea what to think, feel or do. That was the last time I left my apartment for several days.