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September 11, 2001

tball

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I spent five weeks working in WTC Tower One beginning in September 2000. I was kicking off a project with a new client that we spent months and numerous trips to NYC pursuing, including several meals at Windows on the World. The memories of that restaurant are the most vivid and haunting for me.

Our team remained on site until July of 2001 when, thank goodness, we finished our part of the project. Our client wasn't too high up, so they lost less than a dozen souls whom we didn't work with, but a consultant from another firm we worked closely alongside perished. I'll never forget.
 
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Wilhelmson

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My cousin's kid's birthday.

I was doing a job in San Diego.

My sister lived in nyc for about 12 years after Fordham. She was walking to work on the Brooklyn bridge when the exodus began.
 

fatbob

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I was in NYC in 1990 pre a student working holiday up in Maine. I remember blagging my way up to the restaurant/bar deck without paying for a full obervation deck ticket. Unbelievable in hindsight in the post security world we've all become used to.

On actual 9/11 I was skiing in Portillo and wondering why there weren't many Americans on the slopes that day - ignorance in the days pre travelling data and smartphones was all:(
 

crgildart

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I remember being at work and being the person answering the phones as everyone else called in emotionally sick from watching it unfold. My wife was also home "sick" and I asked her to start the PVR to record the entire day of network news broadast. I have it on a DVD that we put in sometimes but probably not today.

At work I tried all day to get news online but the internet was it's own disaster. Nothing would load, and I had broadband at work back then..
 

neonorchid

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I had a tough day today. Not as difficult as 18 yrs ago - was evacuated in DC and worked in 2WTC in the late 90s - but it’s still surprisingly traumatic.
Ex co-leader of my hiking group and another woman were clothing buyers with their office in the twin towers.
She woke early on 9/11 with a weird feeling to stay home, take the day off, and didn't do the commute from Philly to NYC that day.
She never worked another day since.

^I was surprised to have learned she had only told me of that and not the others in the group, many of whom knew her much better than I.
 

Jilly

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I remember someone coming into the office and saying a plane had hit the World Trade Center. We had internet, but not like today. So I went home and picked up the small TV. CTV had a tower not that far away and we were able to get a signal on the rabbit ears. Lloyd Robertson was already on CTV. He normally does the 11pm national news. So this was bad. Then US airspace was closed. Our industry had just finished the annual convention. There were lots of people stuck in DC where the convention was. No planes, drive back maybe?

Then the whole Gander thing. If you ever get a chance to see "Come from Away" see it!!
 

Pat AKA mustski

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I arrived on campus early to set up as I always did. There were about a dozen kids who were early drop offs that hung out in my classroom in the morning. Theater kids are truly geeky and are always playing games, singing, dancing... what struck me was the silence as I opened the hallway door. There was just one kid and he was sitting stunned and told me that a plane had flown into the WTC. His parents had dropped him off at school anyway. As teachers, we spent the whole day distracting kids and keeping our TVs turned off. I remember the stress and the wondering all day until I got home that night.
 

Uncle-A

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I arrived on campus early to set up as I always did. There were about a dozen kids who were early drop offs that hung out in my classroom in the morning. Theater kids are truly geeky and are always playing games, singing, dancing... what struck me was the silence as I opened the hallway door. There was just one kid and he was sitting stunned and told me that a plane had flown into the WTC. His parents had dropped him off at school anyway. As teachers, we spent the whole day distracting kids and keeping our TVs turned off. I remember the stress and the wondering all day until I got home that night.
I started teaching Technology Education on 1 September 2001, on the morning of the eleventh the building guy stops in my classroom and asks if I can get the news on my computer. I told him yes and he said something is going on in NYC an airplane hit the World Trade Center. We had a couple of students that lost one of their parents that day, and it is something I don't care to talk about now.
 

Jim Kenney

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Never forget!
I worked in the Pentagon for about five years early in my career as a DOD civilian. I visited the building periodically for work-related meetings right up until I retired in 2019. I was not working there on 9/11/01, but was in the building the day before on the 10th for an all-day seminar.
At the Pentagon 911 Memorial dedication, 9/11/08:
pentagon memorial jim.jpg
I have a special kind of respect and admiration for the civilians onboard Flight 93 that stopped it in Shanksville, PA at the cost of their own lives before it could turn towards its intended target (possibly the US Capitol Building or the White House in Wash DC) and cause more damage and great loss of life.
 
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Uncle-A

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There’s some interesting stories about the building. It’s amazing the cast of characters who make huge projects possible. I came across this kitchensisters podcast late one night. It’s on Guy Tozzi, the construction, and the Building Stewardesses.

————————
THE BUILDING STEWARDESSES: CONSTRUCTION GUIDES AT THE WORLD TRADE CENTER
View attachment 80028
————
“I started at three dollars an hour, which was still a lot of money for a summer job. I think that whoever had the idea must have been someone with an incredible amount of insight and understanding of human nature. Because to think that you could find young girls like this, and instill us with that sense that we were almost as invincible as the building. We were the building, we were the World Trade Center.”

— Elizabeth English, who worked as a guide at the observation deck
——————————
http://www.kitchensisters.org/fugitivewaves/episode-30/

I watched 1WTC, the North Tower, come down looking south from the 30th floor of a building on 50th street. We were just staring south at the tower pouring out black smoke. For a bit the smoke died down from that huge black hole. But it was just a shift in wind. Then it came mostly straight down in the images that everyone had seen.

But after that, when the dust was blown away, what was left is something I’ve never seen in images. There was the exterior structural steel framework that went up to a point. It was early on a bright, sunny, day so it was strongly backlit. An almost black lattice pattern of steel. And then it just started to fall from the top. Slowly crumbling, the pattern disappearing as the steel fell down. And then it was completely gone.

Some days later, down at the pile of what was left, I happened to be staring at the skeleton of steel still standing. Then a guy nearby says, “It sounded like bells.”
“What’s that?”
“The steel, when it came down after the building it sounded like church bells. I was down here and heard it.”

Came of age in the 60’s and died young:
Brian Jones - 27
Jimi Hendrix - 28
Janis Joplin. - 27
Jim Morrison - 27
World Trade Center - opened April 4, 1973 - September 11, 2001 - 27 years

View attachment 80030
The Woolworth Building, once the tallest building in the world, is poking up near the Manhattan side tower of the Manhattan Bridge.

Photo before the Vista Hotel between the Towers, before 7 WTC which would be built in the open space left of 6 WTC. Building 6 held US Customs in 2001. In the picture it’s the low dark building with light roof just to the left of 1 WTC, the North Tower. The antenna on top would become much bigger. Building 4, the US Commodities Exchange, is behind the South Tower. It was part of the storyline in the movie “Trading Places”, which has nice shots of the Towers.
The North Tower was hit first but collapsed second. Building 7 collapsed later that day.

Fill, from digging the foundation, makes the flat land in the photo upon which would be built Stuyvesant HS, PS 89, Battery Park City, the World Financial Center, and recently, the Goldman Sachs Building. The West Side Highway is still elevated in this photo. That was torn down in the mid to late ‘80’s.
FWIW Jimi Hendrix was 27 not 28 he died in September and would have turned 28 in November.
 
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Tricia

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James

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it was so strange to hear only fighters going in and out. Comforting for me, that is a sound of freedom having been raised on Air Force Bases.
The silence of the air was a very strange element of that afternoon in nyc. I remember noticing it walking in the middle of the road over the 59th st bridge to Queens with the people making their on out of Manhattan. At some point you notice there’s no noise coming from the sky. And no towers, but smoke, at the tip of Manhattan.

A few days later, I was working down at the site. The day the President came, I was in a line unloading stuff from a feery that brought supplies in. Something caused me to look up, and there was a fighter jet flying low over NY harbor, headed up the Hudson. The woman I was working with about freaked out, till I explained. Then the F-18 banked to the right, and did a circle over the buildings of downtown. The wings were banked 90 deg at one point in the turn. and the pilot wagged the wings. The plane was incredibly low, and for that aircraft, pretty slow.

It was an incredible sight, and profound if you’d been working in the soup of doubt and unknown down there at that time. Seeing the B-2 Bomber fly over the Verranzano Bridge for the Millennium the summer before was amazing, but this had real meaning. I remember telling someone about it, and they say, “ But flying that low it would’ve hit the Empire State Building!” Yeah, that’s right, but that's on 34th St, like 2 miles away. and this was precision close in flying. I would see two more of those that day, and that was it afaik.

Later that morning, I suddenly thought the President must be here by now so I went looking. It’s not like there was an announcement, everyone was just working. Had the setup been south of the site, I would’ve missed it, but as it turned out, they were right on West St just North of Vesey St. There were were few people there, in my mind it’s like two dozen, but maybe 60?Thing is it was still a search and rescue operation, so everyone kept working. The collapsed footbridge across West St from the North Tower fell on top of cars, trucks, fire engines, with all sorts of debris made an impenetrable wall to the south and the Pile at that time.

I stood in a smashed out window of the World Financial Center not far away, watching the President give his speech. The thing is, it was windy, and also no one turned off the large generators, so it was very noisy. Even with the bullhorn, it was hard to hear him. I think I could hear maybe 20%. That’s why someone yelled out “We can’t hear you!” or something like that. To which George W gave his famous reply.
 
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Tricia

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The silence of the air was a very strange element of that afternoon in nyc. I remember noticing it walking in the middle of the road over the 59th st bridge to Queens with the people making their on out of Manhattan. At some point you notice there’s no noise coming from the sky. And no towers, but smoke, at the tip of Manhattan.

A few days later, I was working down at the site. The day the President came, I was in a line unloading stuff from a feery that brought supplies in. Something caused me to look up, and there was a fighter jet flying low over NY harbor, headed up the Hudson. The woman I was working with about freaked out, till I explained. Then the F-18 banked to the right, and did a circle over the buildings of downtown. The wings were banked 90 deg at one point in the turn. and the pilot wagged the wings. The plane was incredibly low, and for that aircraft, pretty slow.

It was an incredible sight, and profound if you’d been working in the soup of doubt and unknown down there at that time. Seeing the B-2 Bomber fly over the Verranzano Bridge for the Millennium the summer before was amazing, but this had real meaning. I remember telling someone about it, and they say, “ But flying that low it would’ve hit the Empire State Building!” Yeah, that’s right, but that's on 34th St, like 2 miles away. and this was precision close in flying. I would see two more of those that day, and that was it afaik.

Later that morning, I suddenly thought the President must be here by now so I went looking. It’s not like there was an announcement, everyone was just working. Had the setup been south of the site, I would’ve missed it, but as it turned out, they were right on West St just North of Vesey St. There were were few people there, in my mind it’s like two dozen, but maybe 60?Thing is it was still a search and rescue operation, so everyone kept working. The collapsed footbridge across West St from the North Tower fell on top of cars, trucks, fire engines, with all sorts of debris made an impenetrable wall to the south and the Pile at that time.

I stood in a smashed out window of the World Financial Center not far away, watching the President give his speech. The thing is, it was windy, and also no one turned off the large generators, so it was very noisy. Even with the bullhorn, it was hard to hear him. I think I could hear maybe 20%. That’s why someone yelled out “We can’t hear you!” or something like that. To which George W gave his famous reply.
@James your accounts of the entire experience continue to make me pause and bring tears to my eyes.
I appreciate so much about you and your experience in this moment in our world history .
 
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