I expected to see mass panic, but instead the exodus was relatively calm and orderly. Black smoke now filled the sky, evident from anywhere on the island. Subways were shut down and taxis proved impossible to find, so I made my way down Broadway against a sea of people evacuating uptown. After all, they had been bombed before in 1993, and though six people had died and thousands were injured, the Twin Towers still stood. Despite the horror of the scene, there was an assumption that the worst had already occurred few people thought that the towers would actually come down. The steel seemed to have melted around the impact zone and it reflected the sunlight, giving the edges a quicksilver sheen, like an overwrought special effect. I passed a kindergarten playground opposite a firehouse where children were still playing as their teachers looked over their shoulders at the buildings burning in the distance. On the streets people stood frozen in mid-commute, gathered at street corners, talking to strangers or on their cell phones, gazing at the blazing scars cut into the sides of the Twin Towers. As I left the apartment for City Hall, fire companies from around the city were already racing to join those who had already arrived at what would become ground zero. An orange blossom of flame exploded on our screens as a new reality dawned. Despite the cloudless sky, I tried to convince myself that this also could have been an accident.Īt 9:03, the second plane banked sickly toward the south tower as the world watched on television. I recalled that a plane had once crashed into the Empire State Building in 1945. Then the first sirens of that long day sounded in the distance. We waited for impact, heard a faint sound, and then saw the beginning of the black smoke curl above the trees, beyond the church steeple of Our Lady of Pompeii. We assumed it was going to crash, but the plane seemed strangely in control to be flying so low. She shook me and we both saw its silver underbelly pass by the window of my fifth-floor walkup in Greenwich Village. I was sleeping late after a long weekend of work, when my girlfriend heard the roar of its engines approaching. The pilot of the first hijacked airplane, Mohammed Atta, was flying American Airlines Flight 11 low and loud down the length of Manhattan with the lives of 92 passengers in his hands, above stores, churches, and finally past the Washington Square Arch as he aimed for the heart of the Twin Towers. Primary elections were being held throughout the city, and as people were lining up to vote at polling places or dropping their children off at school, suddenly they stopped and turned their heads toward a rumble in the sky. It should not be forgotten that September 11 began as a beautiful blue-sky day. And so it fell to four of us in our small office to do the best we could to do them justice, to say thank you, to provide some measure of comfort to their families on behalf of their city. Nothing had prepared the city or the department for this volume of loss. In the course of one morning, it lost nearly half that historic total. The New York City Fire Department had lost 778 men from its founding in 1865 until September 10, 2001. As Mayor Giuliani’s speechwriter, it has been my responsibility to write or edit each of their eulogies. ![]() ![]() On my desk is a list of every firefighter, police officer, and uniformed service member who died in the line of duty on that day. Overnight, and somewhat to our surprise, New York has been embraced as the nation’s symbol of resilience, the indomitable heart of America. ![]() The heroic actions of those we lost reawakened us to the essential importance of personal courage. Amid our grief we now see that New York had been distracted by flash and wit and cash for too long. The hijackers crash the plane into an empty field near Shanksville, Pa.Ī whole portrait of America was taken from us in an instant: individuals of every race, religion, and ethnicity fathers and mothers, children and newlyweds, brothers, sisters, and best friends.
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