From two years ago. Because witnessing and remembering is important.
Lived about 20 blocks from the towers.
Was teaching that day, up at CPE1 on 106th street. Was helping in a first grade class when a first grader told me another kid was saying that there were explosions downtown. I said that people like to make stuff up. Still have no idea how the kid knew.
Then the principal started coming around and telling us. A lot of phones were down, and there weren't computers in the classrooms and people didn't have iphones or anything.
We got only a bit of news. It was really scary, because we just couldn't find out what was happening. We heard about the Pentagon, and there were rumors that the Supreme Court had been attacked... and then the fighters started screaming overhead, and I genuinely believed WWIII had started.
Parents started to come and get kids. An aide sat in the back with an ear bud in, and told us what he could figure out.
At around 10:45 I went out to get food for everyone. The streets were PACKED... like a completely full subway, with everyone walking north. Now, 106th is MILES from Ground Zero... but everyone was just running away. Saw people covered in the dust. Went into a restaurant, where there were a hundred people around a TV, and there was a shot of one of the towers still standing, and I blurted out "Wait, are the towers still up?!?" and everyone turned and one person said "No, that's from before."
Eventually school closed and I went over to 5th ave to catch a bus downtown, because the subways were down. The only traffic was buses, and HUGE convoys of tractor trailers with medical supply names on the sides, and humvees. I still didn't know everything that had happened.
When the bus got a bit further south I leaned out (it was a bus where everyone faced each other) and looked downtown, and my heart stopped. I hadnt seen the plume yet, and it basically covered the entire horizon. I think I gasped, and everyone else leaned over and looked down the length of the bus, and you could tell nobody had really SEEN it yet, because everyone was floored.
I lived below the cordoned off zone.
Met all my friends at my buddy's apartment on Thompson, which was also below the cordoned off zone. When our friend who actually worked at the towers showed up at the door we all burst into tears and hugged. My college roommates dad also worked there, but got out safely we learned later.
Everything was dusty. That night it was silent. I had a corner apartment on the NE corner of MacDougal and 3rd. I could see right down south MacDougal and see the plume. There were huge floodlights all night, lighting it up. I got high, and sat on my fire escape on the 3rd floor, and watched four kids (I assume NYU students) play frisbee in the empty West Village streets while a kid jumped up and down smoking a joint on a trampoline right in the middle of the intersection of MacDougal and 3rd. Occasionally they would call out "car!" and move for the humvees or whatever that came by. It was silent, and eerie.
The fire department on my block (now Anderson Cooper's house) lost a guy... Keith Roma. The flowers outside the place took up the ENTIRE block, five or six feet wide and three or four feet deep.
There were missing person posters EVERYWHERE. Myentire neighborhood was covered in them. This is Rays, which was a couple of blocks over...
And another.
Another shot...
I remember two that stuck out.
One was an older man, and on the poster it said he had six grandkids.
Another was a pretty young blond woman in a white dress. On the poster it said she had just gotten married.
I knew that nobody needed to know any of that to find them... it was just their loved ones heartache.
The Daily News the next day... I remember seeing this cover...
... and thinking "Holy shit. If there are 10,000 of us dead... how the hell can we ever recover?"
My best friend was in the National Guard and was called in for body recovery on the 12th. He called me on the way in, and we talked. We didn't talk again for three days. He called when he had come back out, and had a breakdown. He just kept talking about what it was like to find the bodies, the parts, and having to MOVE them... he kept talking about the weight of them. I quickly got out of town (he lived in NJ) and got over to his place, and we got in the car and left, drove up to Vermont, and stayed up there for a few days so he could get his head straight.
Everything I owned was dusty for a month after, and the smell... the smell stuck around for six months. The plume, the smoke... it lasted what felt like forever.
I didn't see any footage or photos of it for... for a long, long time? I couldn't. Maybe years later, I did... The first thing I really saw was when I was at the New York Historical Society, and I walked past a door, and there was a movie theatre inside, and on the screen as part of a 9/11 exhibit they were just playing a single shot... a single steady shot of one of the towers burning. A close up, showing maybe the top twenty or thirty floors. I happened to look to the right as I passed, and it hit me like a truck. I just stood there, mouth open, and watched the video from the doorway for maybe ten minutes. I just couldn't move. I still don't really watch anything about it.
When the big power outage happened, everyone I know panicked; we assumed we got hit again. Every time a plane flew low, my then-girlfriend and I would pause, and wait, until it passed. The plane crash in Queens a month or so later had everyone panicked. And every time there was fireworks in the city, the streets would be full of frightened people, thinking we were under attack.
Worst day of my life, without question.
