NYC 9/11/01

On September 10, 2001, I entered New York City from the Newark Airport. As the shuttle drove near the city, I noticed the World Trade Center’s twin towers in the distance, so tall and outstanding that they were always the first welcoming site to tell me that yes, I’d come to New York.

I arrived around noon for a meeting the next morning, and busied myself in the afternoon and evening rambling the city, visiting some favorite sites. The most exciting news of the day was New York’s mayoral primary election, set for the next day. At Times Square, MTV’s Total Request Live was on the air. I wandered into a group of overactive teens on the sidewalk below, and got to wave at Carson Daley. That was me next to the guy with spiked hair, which I’d thought had gone the way of the Ramones. Oh boy, I thought, now I’d have a New York adventure to relate when I flew home Tuesday night.

I took the subway downtown, looking for a favorite vintage clothing store on Canal Street in the Village. I never found it, but at least enjoyed the sights and sounds and smells of lower Manhattan. Rain fell on and off, and by nighttime a brief downpour and wind pushed a torrent almost sideways at strollers. I had an umbrella, but ended up with soaked shoes. Oh well, I would only be in NY for one night, and could tough out the next day with damp feet.

That day, September 11, dawned bright and warm, with a remarkably pure blue sky, not a cloud in sight. There had been some confusion about my room when I checked into my hotel, the East Side Marriot at 45th and Lexington Avenue in midtown. I was also unsure if my meeting was still to be held at the arranged place, an office building on Fifth Avenue. At about 830 I strolled to a deli across Lexington from the hotel to see if I could assemble a breakfast and snack it on the street, but saw nothing that really grabbed me. So I went back to the Marriott, and between 830 and 9ish I was eating breakfast in the Marriott’s restaurant. About the time I was spooning some oatmeal into a bowl at the buffet, a Boeing 767 was speeding over my head, very low and headed downtown. I knew nothing of it. A few minutes later another jet was approaching Manhattan from the south. At about that time I was enjoying a really good , New York raisin bagel with just a schmear of cream cheese.

Coming out into the lobby after breakfast, sometime after 9, I wondered again how I’d find out for sure where my meeting was. That was my biggest concern in life at that instant. It was then that I noticed a group crowded around a TV in the lobby lounge. Wandering over, I saw a scene of a burning building. I asked a man to my left what was up, and was told that an airplane had struck the World Trade Center.

I thought I had enough time to stroll down 45th St. a few blocks to check my email at a nearby Kinkos, and set out on foot. Sirens in NY are the common background noise, but now they seemed more common than usual. Also, it looked as if half of Manhattan had emptied out of the office buildings and were simultaneously trying to get a signal on their cellphones.

Looking at my watch, I decided that no, I wouldn’t have time to check my mail, and besides, I was getting a feeling of bad news in the air. As I got back to the hotel, I noticed a distinct cloud of smoke at the far downtown end of Lexington, which was several miles from the hotel. I asked the doorman if the distant smoke plume was coming from the World Trade Center, and he thought it was. I was surprised to learn the fire was that large.

As my meeting’s 10am start time neared, I decided there was nothing for me to do but catch a cab to take me to the location, on Fifth Avenue, and hope that it indeed was the right place. The cabbie headed north on Lex, with the radio on and a reporter on the scene at the WTC discussing the fire and plane crashes on her cellphone. Suddenly she screamed that one of the towers was collapsing on itself. I looked over my shoulder down the Avenue, and saw the cloud of smoke and dust start growing bigger and bigger.

Traffic was thick, and I was sitting in the cab a block or two from the meeting place, so paid the driver (the fare was $3.90, and I gave him a five — why do we remember things like this?) and set out on foot. Arriving at the location, The Crown Building, there was some confusion with the guard at the desk about precisely where the meeting was, along with security concerns about bombings, but eventually I was sent up to the ninth floor where indeed the meeting was to be. However, the half dozen or so assembled had forgotten the reason we were in New York, and were instead muttering among themselves about events. We had a high-speed internet connection that was to have shown the company’s software demo, but instead we used it to check online news. Two jetliners had crashed into the two towers of the WTC. Apparently another had just crashed into the Pentagon in Washington. There were more jetliners unaccounted for on the East Coast.

After awhile we fitfully managed to discuss some of the meeting topics, but kept interrupting ourselves as each of us would talk to the outside on cellphones and bring in infobits, rumors, and news of fresh disasters. Fire and major disaster at the trade center. The president aboard Air Force One and jetting to a secret location. All airports throughout the US shut down, the White House and US Capitol evacuated, and Manhattan Island itself sealed — no one could come or go. The Trade Centers held as many as 50,000 people.

I tried calling my wife on the office phone, but lines were so overloaded that it was noon before I was able to get through and assure her I was well. She was crying.

I drifted downstairs during a bathroom break, and was told that if I left the building I could not come back in. Security. We were able to call the only deli in New York that would still deliver, and ordered out for some sandwiches. Since the meeting had been for the day, most of us were set to fly out of the city in the evening, and had no hotel rooms for a second night. As the island was now in lockdown, the later hours of the meeting were occupied with phone calls trying to arrange either a ride out of the city, or rooms. The meeting finally broke around 4, and we left the building, a core group of four of us headed back to the Marriott hotel. I had checked out before leaving in the morning, but had checked my bag with the concierge, and hoped to coax myself another room for the night.

As we walked to the hotel, I could see that the cloud far downtown was much bigger. It was then that I noticed how scarce traffic on the street had become. New York avenues are packed 24/7, but now we could walk down the middle of them without fear. There was an occasional taxi and police car. And every so often an emergency vehicle would come tearing either up or down the avenue, ambulances, cop cars, even requisitioned civilian SUVs. The latter I noticed particularly — speeding, emergency flashers on, horns honking, and covered with white dust, bound for hospitals at some end of the island.

At our hotel, I found that no, a room was no longer available. Since my flight out (set for 7:50pm) was hopelessly cancelled, this left me in a bind. However, two of the company’s executives had earlier booked themselves rooms for a second night at the Roosevelt Hotel, planning to stay in the city for some sales calls. Since I was on their advisory board, and I was in the city at their behest, I was the boardroom equivalent of a puppy that had followed them home, so I guess I was their responsibility. One of the execs, a sales rep named Chad, had a twin bed in his room, and asked me to bunk with him for the night, which I gratefully accepted. He was also from Michigan, by the way.

We walked to the Roosevelt a few blocks away, me thankful that I had a new suitcase with wheels and a handle. We checked into the Roosevelt, a nicely restored old pile (ID was required before we could even get to the front desk). In our room, Chad and me sat down to plot strategy. Our flights blocked, most access to and from New York cut, we had to find some way of getting home. With all airports locked down, we were limited to trains and automobiles. We made some calls about Amtrak trains, but found that service would be erratic, and could take days. Rental cars were an option that we also pursued, but securing a car, getting to it and getting it out of the island seemed daunting. There was a rumor that flights would resume at noon the next day, so we plotted ways to get to the airport.

Between calls we watched TV, which of course showed nothing but the horror that was happening several miles to our south. We saw endless footage of the airplane strikes, of rescue crews, and shots of the burning towers before they fell, with tiny, despairing victims jumping from windows hundreds of feet in the air to certain death.

I could watch no more, and left for a walk. I had never walked the streets of New York so slowly in my life, but the rhythm seemed to match the hour’s tempo in midtown that Tuesday evening. There were few people on the streets, and very few vehicles. Sirens sounded from every point of the compass, and the dusty emergency vehicles still screamed by. Most businesses were closed, and the signs in their windows were their own poetry. “Due to today’s incident…” “Because of the disastor.” Spelling, printing, and coherence were erratic, but were in perfect sync with the city’s mood, as if one had given a human anthill an enormous, scattering kick.

That night our little group went to dinner at Bice, a so-so Italian restaurant on 56th. The place was understaffed, but packed with diners, who all seemed overloud and overjolly, working very hard to eat, drink and be merry.

I found here that the disaster was a sort of background item that, frankly, no one seemed to pay much mind to. I don’t even think it was soothing denial, at least not mostly. I suspect that when humans are caught in the middle of a major, historic disaster their thoughts are not My God, this is a major historic disaster, or rarely even My God, how do I get out of this alive? Rather, they go on for a time with the same parochial thoughts they had before the horror hit, noticing the event just as distraction. For the last minutes of life, I bet most of the people trapped in the Twin Towers were thinking things like, oh great, now I’m gonna miss that lunch meeting. Our workaday lives are like a suddenly severed limb, with residual, phantom feelings our lingering reality of the moment. Only later do we start talking about the stuff that shows up in history books. I bet aging survivors from the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941 are less likely to think about the horror of December 7 than they are to drift back to a golden, lost December 6.

As noted above, the restaurant seemed artificially loud and jolly, a sort of Decameron party to distract from lower Manhattan’s reality. A pair of overdressed young women joined the men at our table, welcomed free drinks, chatted about sex, and were obviously working their trade. I left Bice’s soon after, and trudged my way back to the Roosevelt through the deadest night midtown had seen in years.

I tucked myself into a narrow rollout bed in my borrowed room. I lay in the dark, and realized I wasn’t thinking that the 21st Century had now, bloodily, begun, but rather silently praying Chad wouldn’t bring the party girl back to the room.

He didn’t, and arrived a bit later. Sleeping wasn’t easy, so Chad and I tried calling to get information on our air tickets, or other options. The TV kept feeding us images of horror. Around midnight, we were both lying in our beds debating whether we should put our clothes back on and try to head down to the site of the disaster. As a writer, I have a built-in urge to get out there and cover the story, and this was obviously the event of a lifetime. But somehow this part of me lost out. Perhaps I was too tired. Perhaps there was some other voice in me that said being a lookie-loo at this time and place would add to the obscenity and stain my soul. We finally put out the light and drifted into a fitful sleep about 1am.

I awoke Wednesday morning around 7. Chad showered while I watched the transfixing news. Chad had hoped to bail from NY earlier, but he and the boss of the company had set a sales call in New York for this morning, and couldn’t get through to confirm that it was cancelled. It almost surely would be, but making this sale was vital, so he had to go through the motions, put on his tie, and head out. Before he left, we were able to arrange a rental car at the Newark airport, with which we could make a drive-all-night breakout, but the airport itself was sealed off, and it was unsure we could get to it anyway. The local news was a constant hum of freeway, bridge and tunnel closings. This one would be open for a few minutes, and then was shut down again because of some top secret threat. Traffic one way on George Washington Bridge was possible, at least until it wasn’t. Subways and trains flickered in and out of service, and everything south of 14th street was simply a dead zone.

After Chad left, I showered, put on the spare shirt I had wisely brought, and wished I’d been so wise with my underwear and socks. I set out to grab some breakfast and see if I could get these necessities. The midtown streets were still oddly empty, and many stores and restaurants were closed. By the way, I found that outlets of national chains (Starbucks, Bon au Pain) were more likely to be shuttered, while the local places, especially delis, tended to tough it out and keep the doors open. New Yorkers ain’t gonna let a disaster get in the way.

Indeed, the locals were making the best of things. At the little souvenir stores that are so common in midtown the postcard racks were being picked over for any images of the Trade Centers. I saw several card slots empty, and an Asian tourist buying a whole fistful of cards with an aerial view of the WTC. A street-corner photo vendor offered matted prints of New York sights, two for $20. However, his photos of the WTC had bright new banner labels on them, $15 each. Never miss an opportunity…

I busied myself seeking reasonable socks and underpants, visiting some neighborhood bargain and 99 cent stores. I found the socks, but for underwear could find only boy’s Star Wars novelty shorts and men’s sizes 44 and up. I refused to wear undersized Jar Jar Binks scanties, so went commando.

Chad and I kept in touch through his cellphone and room phone messages. I sorted out a way to get us to Pennsylvania station, and then take a train to Newark, where we might be able to get a shuttle to the Newark Airport, but the whole idea seemed hopelessly fragile and unlikely. The rental car deadline had passed, and we now couldn’t get through on the rental desk’s 800 number. As we talked late in the morning, it was obvious that no flights would be leaving at noon after all (indeed, they didn’t). Assuming we could somehow assemble a journey to Newark, we would surely sit for hours and probably days at the airport until the FAA finally permitted flights, which would have a massive backlog to sort out, and would likely be slow, erratic and clumsy. We would be lucky to fly home before the weekend.

I set out to grab some lunch at the corner deli, but found myself unable to resist wandering downtown on Madison Avenue. Traffic was still light, but there were police patrols at most major intersections, usually about a half dozen cops looking less concerned than bored. At 30th street traffic was blocked altogether, a bomb threat or something, I suspect. I could have gone over a block and continued south, but the dust and smoke cloud was large and looming here, and the same impulse I felt last night warned me to go no nearer to the scene of disaster.

I headed back to the Roosevelt munching a not very good turkey sandwich on the way, concerned that we would be trapped in New York for another night. We had extended our checkout time until 3, but after that all was uncertain. I wanted very much to escape. After the first day of numbness and detachment, the New Yorkers seemed to be getting grumpy. It occurred to me that, if the island was shut off to all incoming traffic, no food or other supplies could get in either, and by Friday the New Yorkers would likely be killing and eating each other.

Back at the room, Chad, a resourceful guy, had been able to get through to the Hertz car rental desk at JFK Airport, and found they had cars available. He reserved one for the afternoon, and I told him I’d hail a cab. The other two members of our party had to make it back to California, and decided to stick it out another day in hopes the air system would come back to life.

At 1:30 or so Wednesday afternoon, we bundled our bags into a cab and left the Roosevelt for who knew what. The doorman helped us with our bags, glancing at the at the copy of the New York Post I’d just bought with horror headlines. “The only thing I want to read about is a few thousand dead Muslims.”

The cab driver (who, in a nifty irony, seemed to be Arabic) told us there would be an extra charge for trying to get to and then into the JFK Airport, to which we had little choice but to agree. He put us through more than the usual cabbie wandering around midtown due to blocked streets, but finally found a tunnel (Lincoln?) open and aiming us toward Brooklyn and JFK.

The main exit ramps to the airport were blocked one by one. We finally found one that, while blocked, seemed to offer pedestrian access if we were willing to hoof it to the terminal a few hundred yards. The cabbie pulled over onto the shoulder, popped the trunk and we got out to retrieve our luggage. At this point a very beefy NYPD cop zipped up on a motorscooter and loudly advised the driver to “Get dat fuckin’ cab outta here NOW!” The driver, Ahmed or something like that, realized that it was not the time (and he not the background) to be arguing with a nervous NY cop, so we hastily moved on.

At the next entrance (“This will be costing you more now” said the driver) we found another cop who seemed more helpful. We couldn’t get in there either, but he said we should try the long-term parking entrance, from whence we could catch a shuttle to the car rentals. I suggested that Chad ring up the Hertz desk on his handy cellphone for directions to the long-term parking lot, and they essentially talked us and our long-suffering (though later well tipped) driver around JFK to the magic entrance.

After Ahmed dropped us off, we walked in search of the shuttle. I mentioned to Chad that I found this whole business too much like a Twilight Zone episode, with us eternally but never quite reaching our destination. I’ve been to JFK before, but it was never like this — the entire facility was virtually deserted, and you could hear birds sing here for the first time in living memory. We then made contact with a shuttle, which ambled along to the other side of the airport and the Hertz desk. Amazingly, everything was in order, and we were able to rent a Toyota and take to the road at 3pm Wednesday afternoon.

I had some concerns that, from JFK, we were on the far east side of NY and would have to work our way around the island to start home. But we somehow made our way across the Verrazano Bridge into New Jersey, and were finally on our way. Switching off on the driving, we hammered along on Interstate 80 for 13 hours straight. My car was at the Lansing airport and, as we neared Lansing, it dawned on me that it would be shut down like all the other US airports, and that I might have renewed trouble, There was indeed a lone airport cop at the entrance, but I was allowed to retrieve my car. All cars parked closer than 300 yards to the terminal building had been towed back, but mine was outside the restriction zone. I said goodbye to Chad, wishing him well on his leg back to Grand Rapids, and I then drove off into the night. I arrived back at my home at 5am on Thursday morning.