“9/11”: the name that gelled within days had a different feel here in this city, this little Manhattan-shaped island I have lived on for nearly all my adult life. Here it was even larger than the Big International Event as the wider world perceived it.
I recently learned that for many New Yorkers under 40 years old, 9/11 is a historical abstraction, like Hiroshima was to middle-aged people like me. And currently there’s some scandal from Canada about whether it was “terrorism” at all, which is stupider than the “9/11 Truthers” of 20 years ago.
It’s important to me to keep the story alive, not because it is a Hometown Horror or because of the impact on my own life, but rather because it was a real inflection point in the battle of civilizations that woke the entire world up as to the nature of that battle, and the stakes.
But it really happened: 19 terrorists hijacked four American planes to try to destroy our society by instigating a “mass rise up against American hegemony” — which was mastermind fanatic Osama bin Laden’s explicit goal. We New Yorkers were happy when, nearly a decade later, SEAL Team 6 blew his head apart.
I worked as a young trader in the World Trade Center (WTC) until mid-2001, when I quit (in a huff!) and went to work elsewhere on Wall St. I was a proprietary options/equities trader there until a few months before. “Timing is everything” in options trading, but I had no idea what the future held. Or I’d be a richer trader, right?
Ironically, since the previous time Islamists tried to take down the WTC Twin Towers in 1993, the buildings had incredible ground-level security. Don’t forget your ID! Our enemies finally got it “right,” flying two planes into my old office.
None of my former workmates were killed: we were mainly in the low-rise WTC 7 and the “NY Mercantile Exchange” at ground level. You could pop out to smoke and regard the looming towers like an ant. They were huge, colossal, way larger than how they look in the media. It was the people with the longest elevator ride, the best view, who died. Like the “Windows on the World” restaurant waiter “Falling Man.”
The three things I remember most:
Seeing crushed cop cars being driven up Third Ave on flatbed trucks on my way home from work. Our blue-and-white NYPD cruisers were crushed like ruined toys being taken to wherever cars are interned. We’d never seen our dependable NYPD cars crushed by a building. You’d think: “Oh god no, was there a cop in that at the time?”
The smell. The Twin Towers burned in a huge, demolished heap that smoldered for six weeks. Occasionally the wind would blow north and we’d smell burning office, paper, and humans, which wafted north over Manhattan. Unforgettable: “JUST PUT THE FIRE OUT ALREADY!”
Of course, that portal to Hell of wrecked buildings had a much more than just a distasteful effect on city workers, many of whom died subsequently due to toxic exposure at the site, “The Pile.” Any wonder why we call these guys heroes?
Saddest were the homemade “Missing” and “Have you seen?” posters plastered around town in public places, with photocopied family pictures of ordinary workers from the WTC with their kids and pets, hastily constructed. Intimate, goofy, grinning like your and my family photos. Nobody took the phone number tear-offs at the bottom of the little posters. They were all dead and we all knew it, not “dazed” or “lost” as a few posters suggested: your beloved was crushed under 110 stories of concrete and burning jet fuel due to Islamic terrorism.
So many little horrors: by the time Al Qaeda Flight 1 zoomed low over the heads of me and 4 million Manhattanites to its final explosion, they’d murdered a flight attendant with a knife.
There were minutiae: everybody wearing flag lapel pins all at once, and for a long time New Yorkers were even more polite and kind to each other. Non-New Yorkers think we’re rude (we’re not!), but people were noticeably more considerate to strangers.
Conversely, I noticed more fights between friends and family: more domestics on the streets, loud disputes one can hear in close living, snappy parents to kids, beefs between neighbors. Funny what a thing like that does to human dynamics.
We turned our rage on ourselves and our loved ones. People drank more, but not, I estimate, as much as during COVID, which was crazy alkie. We have many adventures here.
Islam, the reason for the whole 9/11 experience, continues apace, remaining and expanding.
While IMMEDIATELY after Oct. 7 in Israel there was a “River to Sea” Palestine demonstration in Times Square just north of me, I don’t remember any “WE HEART AL QAEDA” marches in 2001.
A quarter of a century later, I’m still here. I live in Chelsea, South Manhattan, and my apartment looks south to the Financial District, where the WTC’s replacement — the Liberty Tower — now stands proud. Strangely, we have a Muslim mayor, a “Third Worldism” aficionado who actually provides cover for Al Qaeda types, a disheartening fact.
We still do the “Columns of Light,” whereby, like two towers, every year they beam up spotlights to the clouds: silent, two towers now of light and memory. I see it every September out my window and think: “Well, that was a Big Thing.” It is as close as this atheist gets to spirituality and awe.
A bit like with people, if you live in a city through its worst and most terrifying moments, you’ll end up loving that city …. all the more. I [♥️] NY.
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