September 11, 2001. I was there. And this is how it was.
I had a 9:00 am meeting in midtown for the editorial board of Reform Judaism magazine. I took the train from Port Washington, NY into the city on what was an almost unspeakably gorgeous blue sky day. It was so perfect, so crystalline, the kind of day when you feel all the optimism of September and new beginnings. I also remember sitting on the train reading this NY Times story, about former Weatherman fugitive Bill Ayers who bombed New York City Police headquarters in 1970, and thinking, 'Man, what an arrogant unrepentant schmuck.'
I got off at Penn Station and took the Shuttle across town to Times Square and walked thru Grand Central Station in that carefree mode of a day tripper in New York. I remember stopping by the Transit Museum store down on the lower level of GCT for a few minutes and mentally buying Hanukkah presents for my sons who love trains and subways. Then I walked up to the street and a block over to my meeting at the URJ. I think the first plane might have hit while I was down in the subway, or maybe it was while I was in the elevator going up to the meeting. Why didn't I hear anything? It's still so dreamlike, even seven years later.
My meeting was interrupted when Emily Grotta, the URJ Communications Director, walked in and said that a small plane had hit one of the World Trade Towers and there was a lot of confusion downtown. We would adjourn the meeting temporarily to get more information and then resume. Meanwhile, the staff tried to maneuver TV sets into the lobby area so we could watch the news, but we were asked not to leave the building. Everyone tried to make cell phone calls, without success. I ducked into an office and used the desk phone to call home. Miracle of miracles, it worked. I reached Jeff and he gave me the full picture. Astounding. Two planes...both towers had been hit...the Pentagon was hit...a hijacked aircraft in Pennsylvania had come down. "Nina, we're under attack." The thought hadn't even occurred to me until Jeff said it.
TV sets were still not up and running at the URJ office. Bizarrely, I got the news this way -- a URJ staff member with a tiny transistor radio, walked over to the windows overlooking Third Avenue for better reception. He held the radio up to his ear and reported to us: "The South Tower has fallen." It was after 9:00 am and I still had not seen a single image of the destruction. Instead I found myself constructing pictures in my mind, as if it were World War II and we were all gathered around the family radio. I went back to someone's office and tried to get news on a website... MSNBC, CNN, NY Times. Nothing. The internet was jammed.
The next imperative was to check on loved ones. I learned that our kids were safe and in "lockdown" at their schools on Long Island. No elementary school kids would be released until a parent was contacted, such was the worry over local fatalities in a town that's a bedroom suburb of Manhattan. The High School was not allowing kids to watch TV, also fearful of that students would learn of their parents this way. Jeff tried to drive to the nearby Sands Point shoreline offering a good view of New York, but the road was already blocked by Port Washington police. My father had started out for New York but was turned back. Jeff was busy phoning every congregational family with jobs in New York.
Everything below 14th Street was shut down, off limits. I told Jeff I'd either stay with my sister Emily on 16th St., or wait until trains were leaving New York.
The TV sets were now working and the day unfolded with more images of horror and destruction than anyone could bear or integrate. Over and over we watched the towers fall. Glued to the TV, we cried, hugged, recited tehillim (psalms) in an office where many staff members had loved ones who were employees in the World Trade Towers and the financial district. Several rabbis walked uptown to our building from the HUC campus in the Village to be with us. We were told again not to leave. No trains were coming into Manhattan. No trains were going out.
Around 3:30 pm, we were advised that we could leave, or stay in the building. Nothing was going into New Jersey, but the Long Island Railroad had limited service. I decided to walk downtown to Penn Station. My biggest problem...stupid high heel shoes. I took them off and walked barefoot in the street, joining the dazed and somber parade of people doing their best to be supportive and gallant. Smoke was everywhere. As I headed down Third Avenue, the absence of the Towers was completely disorienting. It literally changed the
light in the city. You never really noticed them before, but their
absence changed everything.
The train ride home. Weeping people, everyone sharing stories, and the city receding from view with every passing moment. There were no strangers on this train...we were all fellow travelers and comrades summoning every ounce of New York grit and determination and heart we posessed. Applause for the police. Applause for the firemen. Applause even for the train conductors who waited at every stop and never collected money or tickets. Astonishment that the sun was still shining on this apocalyptic day.
Arriving home, I now learned that I had indeed lost friends. That several people I knew literally ran for their lives. I heard stories of friends who escaped death by the slimmest and craziest of accidental margins...home with a sick child, running late because of traffic, out for a doctor's appointment.
Over the next days people in my town spoke in whispers of the cars in the commuter parking lot that sat unclaimed because their owners didn't return to drive them. We smelled the smoke that drifted across the waters and settled over Long Island. We attended community services. We processed the news. We knew we would never be the same.