Fifteen years.
And I must tell you, it still happens at least once a day…when someone in my family looks at the clock the time is 9:11.
That is no joke.
It is a reminder that still causes my thoughts to call back to that day, fifteen years ago.
I have copied the thread below, it is the post I wrote for the tenth anniversary…I feel it is the only thing I can do…I’ve updated the links at the end.
When this photo was taken by Reinhard Karger, there was still over an hour to go before American Airlines Flight 11 would crash into the north tower.
Good morning, it’s been 15 years…no need to say anything else. The words September Eleventh just reach my ears like a stone. It is strange, but many of the WTC survivors and the victim’s families refer to that day in using the words. September 11th. The numbers: 9/11 just seem to simple a way to describe such a sorrowful day…a jarring cold way to designate an important date.
That September morning was beautiful…the sky was clear and blue, and there was that warm Indian Summer feeling in the early morning air. We lived in Newtown, CT…on Sugar Street, in a big white house that was built in 1900. The house used to be a nursery, called Key Rock Gardens, and the grounds were full of ornamental trees and perennial gardens. I was outside that morning, my husband had been gone for three hours…catching that 5:40am Metro North train out of Bethal, that took him down to Stamford. From there the train headed toward New York City, and after the hour and a half train ride, he would arrive at Grand Central Station. On to the subway, the 4/5, going downtown…to the Trinity Church/Wall Street station. Then he would walk up a couple blocks to Liberty Street, next to the World Trade Center Complex.
Me and the kids in the park behind the Twin Towers one Tuesday in July or August of 2000, Dan, my husband is taking the picture.
It was a Tuesday, and the Amish Market would have been in full swing along the large concrete walkways at the World Trade Plaza. Before we moved to Connecticut, when we lived downtown in Hanover Square, I would take our kids to World Trade Plaza and we’d meet their father there for lunch. Tuesdays were special, we would grab something from one of the vendors at the market and take our lunch to a small area, just behind the towers…We would sit on park benches, surrounded by ponds with water gardens and raised beds that held beautiful flowers.
Oh yes, that September morning was beautiful…I was watering the plants that were outside along the front of our house…when I heard the sound of a loud jet engine. I looked up and saw a huge jet flying real low over our house. I was familiar with that sound, growing up in Tampa our house was right in the path of the jets that would land at the International Airport, so the jets would fly directly over our house. You could hear the engines and see the big wheels, in the down position…
It was strange so see this plane flying so low over our house on Sugar St., we did not have any airports nearby where a jet that big could land…and what made it even more odd, was that the wheels were still up in there compartments….and the compartment doors were closed shut. I shut the hose off and went into the house, I was concerned, I thought the plane was having problems and that was why it was flying so low. The kids were playing in the sunroom, Disney’s Fantasia was playing on the VCR when my husband called me from his office. He had forgotten his cell phone at home that day…but that was not why he had called. He told me to turn the TV on, a plane had flown into the North Tower, or Tower 1 of the World Trade Center…his corner office was just across the street and overlooked the towers.
I was on the phone with him as I watched CNN’s Paula Zahn, filming her first show from the rooftop when the second plane hit the tower…it was strange, I saw the big fire-ball, but I had heard the speeding jet over the phone…loud, like a fighter jet flying low, buzzing a beach or a mountain…as it flew into the South Tower, also called Tower 2.
He told me the people who worked for him were going to try to leave the office, but several of his brokers went to see if they could help…he wanted to make sure they came back to the office and that they were safe, before he left the building. That was the last time I spoke with him. My kids and I watched those buildings fall. Then we waited. I knew his office was so close to the falling Towers, there was a strong possibility that he was in extreme danger. We thought the worst.
He walked in the door later that night after 7:30, covered in ash and dust, after running from the debris cloud as the second tower fell. His building was damaged when the towers fell, and three people from his office were killed.
FILE – In this Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001 file picture, a person falls headfirst from the north tower of New York’s World Trade Center. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)
The Story Behind the Haunting 9/11 Photo of a Man Falling From the Twin Towers | TIME
He said the worst thing was watching groups of 20 to 25 people holding hands jumping from the burning building. He saw people fall and burst into pieces as they hit the cement or landed on the large light poles that were in the plaza. He found a heavyset woman lying in the street, when he grabbed her wrist, she had no pulse, he said she must have had a heart attack as she ran.
These are just a few of the things he has told my father. It’s been fifteen years, and he still will not talk to me about the things he saw, but I am there when he has the nightmares. They don’t come as often now, but they still seem to break through his sleep during this time of year.
One thing is strange since that day fifteen years ago… you would be amazed at just how many times he takes a look at the clock, and the time is 9:11. He says it is God’s way of reminding him of that September day.
We cannot forget what we saw that day. We cannot “get over” what happened on that day ten years ago…and I will tell you, it is very upsetting to see articles and op/ed pieces in the press that tell us to leave 9/11 behind.
No.
We’ll never get over it.
There were two targets, Washington and New York. Washington saw a great military institution attacked, and quickly rebuilt. In Washington people ran barefoot from the White House and the Capitol.
But New York saw a world end. New York saw the buildings come down.
That was the thing. It’s not that the towers were hit—we could have taken that. It’s not the fire, we could have taken that too. They bombed the World Trade Center in 1993 and took out five floors, and the next day we were back in business.
It’s that the buildings came down, in front of our eyes. They were there and proud and strong, they were massive, two pillars at the end of the island. And then they groaned to the ground and there was a cloud and when people could finally see they looked back and the buildings weren’t there breaking through the clouds anymore. The buildings were a cloud. The buildings were gone and that was too much to bear because they couldn’t be gone, they couldn’t have fallen. Because no one could knock down those buildings.
Those buildings, jetting out of the skyline. You could see them from almost any angle in Midtown and Lower Manhattan. They watched over us. They protected us.
The Twin Towers, I took this picture in July or August of 2000.
When you ask New Yorkers now what they remember, they start with something big—the first news report, the phone call in which someone said, “Turn on the TV.” But then they go to the kind of small thing that when you first saw it you had no idea it would stay in your mind forever. The look on the face of a young Asian woman on Sixth Avenue in the 20s, as she looked upward. The votive candles on the street and the spontaneous shrines that popped up, the pictures of saints. The Xeroxed signs that covered every street pole downtown. A man or a woman in a family picture from a wedding or a birthday or bar mitzvah. “Have you seen Carla? Last seen Tuesday morning in Windows on the World.”
I remember seeing these posters and notes that were put up all over Manhattan…it was so hard to walk by these makeshift signs…those lost faces of families looking for their lost loved ones. Holding on to the last bit of hope, that they made it out alive and were somewhere in the city and just could not make it home.
The Pompeii-like ash that left a film on everything in town, all the way to the Bronx. The smell of burning plastic that lingered for weeks. A man who worked at Ground Zero told me: “It’s the computers.” They didn’t melt or decompose, and they wouldn’t stop burning.
But the human remains did decompose. My husband would smell death every day for weeks as he went back to work just a day after the towers fell. People would line the streets as the first responders would head into the pit. They held up signs, gave out bottles of water, and waited…
The old woman with her grandchild in a stroller. On the stroller she had written a sign in magic marker: “America You Are Not Alone, Mexico Is With You.” She was all by herself in the darkness, on the side of the West Side Highway, as we stood to cheer the workers who were barreling downtown in trucks to begin the dig-out, and to see if they could find someone still alive.
[…]
Many heartbreaking things happened after 9/11 and maybe the worst is that there’s no heroic statue to them, no big marking of what they were and what they gave, at the new World Trade Center memorial.
But New York will never get over what they did. They live in a lot of hearts.
They tell us to get over it, they say to move on, and they mean it well: We can’t bring an air of tragedy into the future. But I will never get over it. To get over it is to get over the guy who stayed behind on a high floor with his friend who was in a wheelchair. To get over it is to get over the woman by herself with the sign in the darkness: “America You Are Not Alone.” To get over it is to get over the guys who ran into the fire and not away from the fire.
You’ve got to be loyal to pain sometimes to be loyal to the glory that came out of it.
So many of those people who died in the towers have never been found, they just incinerated into dust that was blown over the city. Even in Newtown, Connecticut, for days after the buildings fell, ash and dust was falling from the sky. It was like being near a large wildfire, when you see those papery ash particles float down like bits of snow.
As of January 2010, only 1,626 of the 2,752 WTC victims had been identified.
Forward to March of 2015, that number of identified victims had only increased to 1640.
No.
We cannot forget…
Eric O’Connell/courtesy of HBO
“Beyond 9/11: Portraits of Resilience,” a collaboration by Time magazine and HBO, will be shown on CNN on Friday and Saturday; HBO will show it on Sunday at 8:46 a.m., the time the first plane hit the World Trade Center.
Nobody who remembers Sept. 11 wants to relive it.
And that makes the profusion of 10th-anniversary specials blanketing television throughout the weekend daunting to contemplate, let alone watch. Seeing those images and hearing all those stories is a painful exercise at best, cathartic only in the sense that repression is worse.
What happened that day was unimaginable, and, 10 years on, so is not going over it, again and again.
Eric O’Connell/HBO
A scene from “Beyond 9/11: Portraits of Resilience.”
There are many archives and photo projects that I would like to mention.
The September 11 Photo Project
The September 11 Photo Project began as a community response to the tragic events of last fall. The Project grew out of a desire to preserve the culture of the outdoor, makeshift shrines that sprang up in public squares and in front of firehouses throughout the city. Anyone wishing to participate was invited to give up to three photographs with accompanying text, which were hung in a donated gallery space.
The Project’s philosophy is simple: To display without exception every set of photos and written statements that are submitted, and to welcome all those who wish to view them. The Project is unique in its approach—each participant, not the organizers, selects the pieces that are displayed, and all are included in the firm belief that no entry is better than any other.
The September 11 Photo Project put the images it received into a book, you can click on that link and see sample pages. It is now a permanent exhibit of the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Collection of the New York Public Library.
Here are a few images from my book…the first picture is a color picture…remember that.
September 11, 2001, Documentary Project – (American Memory from the Library of Congress)
The September 11, 2001, Documentary Project captures the heartfelt reactions, eyewitness accounts, and diverse opinions of Americans and others in the months that followed the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and United Airlines Flight 93. Patriotism and unity mixed with sadness, anger, and insecurity are common themes expressed in this online presentation of almost 200 audio and video interviews, 45 graphic items, and 21 written narratives.
The day after the attacks, the American Folklife Center called upon the nation’s folklorists and ethnographers to collect, record, and document America’s reaction. A sampling of the material collected through this effort was used to create the September 11, 2001, Documentary Project. This collection captures the voices of a diverse ethnic, socioeconomic, and political cross-section of America during trying times and serves as a historical and cultural resource for future generations.
Photo: CUNY, The 911 Digital Archive. Please click for more image info.
My daughter Bebe wanted her dad to come to her history class and talk about his experience as a survivor on September 11, 2001. He did not want to do it…it still hurts.
Getting Dan to talk about that day is very difficult. Sometimes he will mention a few descriptions of images or thoughts or smells, but it is very rare. His nightmares have subsided, at least ones that are so real too him they wake me up.
So for this, the fifteenth anniversary of September 11, 2001, I thought it would be good to find some photos of what that day was like for my husband and so many other survivors who still remember that war zone as vividly as if it happened yesterday.
First, I want you to click on this link to a Flickr Slide Show. These are images of Liberty St., Maiden Lane, Battery Park and the Financial District Downtown NYC on September 11, 2001 and the days that follow. (If that slide show does not load, click here for the photo stream.)
I also came across this blog, which has some fascinating pictures and thoughts…13 Days: The World Trade Center, Day One
Day One: September 11
9:02 am
11:02 am
Woke up to sirens and radio reports of an incident at the World Trade Center. I grabbed my camera and was out on the street by 9:00.
This blog discusses the first 13 days and the first 13 weeks and the first 13 months after the attack on World Trade.
Fall, 2001
The collapse of the World Trade Center is one of those rare tragedies that people will ask of us in the future, in who knows how many languages, “Do you remember where you were, on that day?”
These pages are about exactly that: the weeks that followed the terrorist attacks of September 11th.
These pages are also a thank you. For additional photographs, please see 13 Days and 13 Months.
– Jonathan Corum
That is a wonderful place to spend some time, and get a perspective of what NYC residents had experienced during the days and months after those Twin Towers collapsed.
The photo up top, of the shoe covered in dust is from The September 11 Digital Archive « American Social History Project | Center for Media and Learning
On September 11, 2001, people around the world reacted to the attacks by using the Internet and digital media. This project is dedicated to the collection, preservation, and presentation of the history of that day and its aftermath. The Archive contains more than 150,000 digital items, including more than 40,000 emails and other electronic communications, more than 40,000 first-hand stories, and more than 15,000 digital images. In September 2003, the Library of Congress accepted the Archive into its collections, an event that both ensured the Archive’s long-term preservation and marked the library’s first major digital acquisition.. An unprecedented experiment in digital archival collecting, The September 11 Digital Archive became the Library of Congress‘s first major digital acquisition. The site was produced by ASHP/CML and the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, with support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
Visit The September 11 Digital Archive: http://911digitalarchive.org/
Unfortunately, those photos from the Library of Congress are only thumbnail size. You can only see full sized images on the LoC computers…which is really a shame because not everyone can get to Washington, DC. That is a real disappointment for me at least, I really would have liked to see the images larger than those 190 pixels.
Then there are a few more photos I came across while gathering links for this post:
Liberty Plaza
Liberty Street or Maiden Lane
Downtown Hell
From Time Magazine: 9/11: The Photographs That Moved Them Most – LightBox
Robert Clark—INSTITUTE
Kent Kobersteen, former Director of Photography of National Geographic“The pictures are by Robert Clark, and were shot from the window of his studio in Brooklyn. Others shot the second plane hitting the tower, but I think there are elements in Clark’s photographs that make them special. To me the wider shots not only give context to the tragedy, but also portray the normalcy of the day in every respect except at the Towers. I generally prefer tighter shots, but in this case I think the overall context of Manhattan makes a stronger image. And, the fact that Clark shot the pictures from his studio indicates how the events of 9/11 literally hit home. I find these images very compelling—in fact, whenever I see them they force me to study them in great detail.”
David Surowiecki—Getty Images
Patrick Witty, International Picture Editor of TIME;
former freelance photographer“After the towers fell, I walked back to my apartment on the Lower East Side, completely in a daze. I had shot black and white film that morning and there was a small lab in the kitchen of my neighbor’s apartment where I could process and scan. When I walked inside, covered in dust and a ripped t-shirt, my neighbors were there and we looked at each other in silence, in disbelief. Another photographer was there who I didn’t know, named David Surowiecki. At the time he was an editor at Getty Images, along with my old roommate Craig Allen. David and Craig were scanning film and transmitting the images from the apartment since Getty’s offices had been evacuated. David’s film from the morning was on a light table near the film dryer in the kitchen. I started looking at his film with a loupe and will never forget the feeling of despair when I saw this one particular image. It was a bizarre and terrifying, yet almost calm image, split down the middle with four tiny bodies falling to the ground. I saw bodies falling when I was near the burning towers, but I didn’t shoot it myself. I couldn’t.
That gallery has 23 images, some of them you may have seen before, but it is good to look at them again. My husband has told me that he saw groups people jumping together. A chain twenty-two people, holding each others hands and choosing to jump to their death. Horrifying.
Here is a link to the National September 11 Memorial & Museum | World Trade Center Memorial. The website had a live stream of the Memorial service from Ground Zero…hopefully you can catch a recorded video at that link if you missed the live broadcast.
You can find some interactive information here at this link:
15th Anniversary | National September 11 Memorial & Museum
Commemoration Ceremony
Join us on Sunday, Sept. 11 for the 15th anniversary commemoration ceremony. The livestream of the ceremony will begin at 8:40 a.m.
Here are some images from the memorial that my daughter took while she was in Manhattan a few months ago:
Click to view slideshow.
National September 11 Memorial & Museum | World Trade Center Memorial
Below are some links to items and artifacts that are part of the exhibit in the museum, stories, pictures and oral histories…Museum | National September 11 Museum
About
The Original WTC
9/11: Events of the Day
Rescue & Recovery
Tribute
Oral Histories
Like a chair that was donated to the museum, and the story that goes with it:
Lower Manhattan Resident Kathleen Gupta
Kathleen and Udayan Gupta’s Battery Park City home overlooking the World Trade Center was severely damaged on 9/11. Listen to Kathleen Gupta speak about residential life in lower Manhattan before and after September 11 and why the Guptas decided to donate a chair from their apartment to the Museum’s collection. Listen >>
Let’s look at the recent news articles for the 15th Anniversary:
Sept. 11 Families Face ‘Strange, Empty Void’ Without Victims’ Remains : NPR
10 things you may have forgotten about 9/11
Windows on the World September 11 – A 9/11 Story About Wine and Wisdom
Remembering Sept. 11, 2001
Seeking the Final Faces for a 9/11 Tapestry of Grief, Loss, Life and Joy – The New York Times
1,113 families still have no real confirmation of 9/11 deaths
9/11 anniversary: Handwritten notes reveal how George W Bush reacted on September 11 2001 | The Independent
Sept. 11 Anniversary: What the Attacks Taught Us About Science
Teaching The Attacks of Sept. 11 To Students Who Didn’t Live Through Them : NPR Ed : NPR
I want to end with this, Pieces of demolished World Trade Center aboard Mars Rovers | Human World | EarthSky
The planet Mars is now home to a piece of the demolished World Trade Center in New York City.
A decade ago, engineers working with NASA turned a scrap of aluminum recovered from the site of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks into cable shields. The shields now protect rock abrasion tools on two Mars Rovers, named Spirit and Opportunity. These quiet tributes to the victims of 9/11 left Earth in 2003 and 2004.
The piece of metal with the American flag on it in this image of a NASA rover on Mars is made of aluminum recovered from the site of the World Trade Center towers in the weeks after their destruction. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell University
The story of how aluminum from the demolished towers of the World Trade Center (WTC) wound up being incorporated into the Mars Rovers is an interesting one. The tale involves robotics engineer and Rover team member Stephen Gorevan. He was riding his bike in lower Manhattan when a plane hit the WTC on September 11, 2001. He told NASA:
Mostly, what comes back to me even today is the sound of the engines before the first plane struck the tower. Just before crashing into the tower, I could hear the engines being revved up as if those behind the controls wanted to ensure the maximum destruction. I stopped and stared for a few minutes and realized I felt totally helpless, and I left the scene and went to my office nearby, where my colleagues told me a second plane had struck. We watched the rest of the sad events of that day from the roof of our facility.
When the engineers went back to work,
…they were frustrated by not being able to assist with 9/11 volunteer efforts. So, Steve Kondos, who was, at the time, a Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) engineer working with the Honeybee team, came up with the idea of embedding some kind of “interplanetary memorial” on the Rovers:
To carry out the idea, an early hurdle was acquiring an appropriate piece of material from the World Trade Center site. Through Gorevan’s contacts, a parcel was delivered to Honeybee Robotics from the mayor’s office on December 1, 2001, with a twisted plate of aluminum inside and a note: “Here is debris from Tower 1 and Tower 2.”
Tom Myrick, an engineer at Honeybee, saw the possibility of machining the aluminum into cable shields for the rock abrasion tools. He hand-delivered the material to the machine shop in Texas that was working on other components of the tools. When the shields were back in New York, he affixed an image of the American flag on each.
The Rovers have been on the surface of Mars since early in the last decade.
Spirit ended communications in March 2010. Opportunity is still going strong, and its rock abrasion tool is being used to explore a large crater that the rover reached in August of 2011. Gorevan noted:
It’s gratifying knowing that a piece of the World Trade Center is up there on Mars. That shield on Mars, to me, contrasts the destructive nature of the attackers with the ingenuity and hopeful attitude of Americans.
Sometime soon, both the Rovers will fall silent. But their aluminum tribute to 9/11′s victims will survive on the cold surface of the desert world Mars for millions of years to come.
Take the time today…remembering what happened that day and remembering the people who lost their lives in Washington DC, Lower Manhattan and a field in Pennsylvania, and thinking about those love ones they left behind…families that are still waiting for some part of them to come home.
“Leaving New York”
It’s quiet now
And what it brings
Is everything
Comes calling back
A brilliant night
I’m still awake
I looked ahead
I’m sure I saw you there
You don’t need me
To tell you now
That nothing can compare
You might have laughed if I told you
You might have hidden A frown
You might have succeeded in changing me
I might have been turned around
It’s easier to leave than to be left behind
Leaving was never my proud
Leaving New York, never easy
I saw the light fading out
Now life is sweet
And what it brings
I tried to take
But loneliness
It wears me out
It lies in wait
And I’ve lost
Still in my eyes
The shadow of necklace
Across your thigh
I might’ve lived my life in a dream, but I swear
This is real
Memory fuses and shatters like glass
Mercurial future, forget the past
It’s you, it’s what I feel.
You might have laughed if I told you (it’s pulling me apart)
You might have hidden a frown (change)
You might have succeeded in changing me (it’s pulling me apart)
I might have been turned around (change)
It’s easier to leave than to be left behind (it’s pulling me apart)
Leaving was never my proud (change)
Leaving New York, never easy (it’s pulling me apart)
I saw the light fading out
You find it in your heart, it’s pulling me apart
You find it in your heart, change…
I told you, forever
I love you, forever
I told you, I love you
I love you, forever
I told you, forever
You never, you never
You told me forever
You might have laughed if I told you
You might have hidden the frown
You might have succeeded in changing me
I might have been turned around
It’s easier to leave than to be left behind (it’s pulling me apart)
Leaving was never my proud (change)
Leaving New York never easy (it’s pulling me apart)
I saw the life fading out (change)
Leaving New York, never easy (it’s pulling me apart)
I saw the light fading out (change)
Leaving New York never easy (it’s pulling me apart)
I saw the life fading out (change)
Tagged: 15th Anniversary September 11th