Our 9/11 Story

On the morning of September 11th, I was finishing breakfast and listening to National Public Radio when there was a sudden boom that rattled the windows and shook the floor. The radio turned to static. I went to the window and looked out to see an immense pall of black smoke filled with small squares of white (later I realized that this was office paper) around the top of the World Trade Center. The view from my window is partial, and I was unable to see the North tower, but it was clear to me that this had not been a simple fire.

Milda stumbled out of the bedroom, and I said "a bomb just went off."

We turned on the TV in time to see the networks cutover to the special news bulletin saying that there was a fire in the World Trade Center. We watched a few minutes later as an airplane flew into the second tower. Our house shook again. The reporters hadn't seen it, though it was clearly on camera. It was several minutes before they heard from a caller on the phone what had happened and replayed the tape.

Milda called her Mother to say that we were OK. Her Mother didn't yet know what had happened. Our neighbors came over. They couldn't stand being in their apartment which looks straight at the towers. From her apartment the scene was ghastly. The police had set up a triage site on Broadway below us. Only two or three people were being treated there when we looked. The buildings were burning, and someone with a large mirror was signaling for help from a few floors above the fire in the South Tower. Others were jumping to escape the fire and smoke.

Back in our apartment we watched the news flipping from network to network. None of us thought the towers would collapse, after all they had just withstood the impact from an aircraft collision. Then, as we watched, the South tower began to fall. On TV it was a quiet thing. At home it was a low bass rumble as the buildings shook. We retreated to the bedroom (which has no windows) and waited as the floor shook. I thought of earthquakes, and of the landfill that Battery Park city is built upon. As the shaking stopped and we ventured back into the living room, the light changed. First the daylight turned a murky yellow, then black as thick particles like sandy black fog rattled past the building.

It was as dark as night outside, and on TV we could see the cloud of smoke and debris we were in. This was when we decided to leave. We had been lucky with one tower, and didn't want to chance it with another. We each took a wet washcloth as a breathing filter, and some bags before descending to our backdoor onto Maiden Lane. We went East and then North out of downtown, and the following photos chronicle our trip. As I am able I will add new photos or further detail our location in given pictures