Five years ago in June, I moved into an amazing Tribeca apartment building at the very top part of Battery Park. I shared with three other people this incredible 20th floor apartment overlooking the Hudson. The entire apt had absolutely breathtaking views but my bedroom had the most beautiful view of all: my windows faced south, and the World Trade Center was so close you could touch it.
(This picture gives you some sense of how close we were (they were). I lived in the tall red building on the left, with the silver top. The World Trade Center, of course, is on the far right.)
Living so close to the World Trade Center gave me a deep appreciation for how beautiful those buildings were. While the Empire State Building and Chrysler Building are goregous in their Art Deco curves, the World Trade Center had this subtle, almost Gothic design you’d only see when you got up close. They anchored the skyline, and glinted so brightly in the sun. And no matter where you were in the city, particularly downtown, you’d look up, and they’d guide you home.
Moving so close to the towers felt, in some ways, like coming home. Growing up in northern NJ, I’d always lived in the shadow of that gorgeous skyline. In high school, I’d sneak away to the waterfront with my boyfriend and make out under the stars, silhouetted by New York’s bright lights. The summer between my sophomore and junior years in college, my first real job in the city, I commuted to the city through the World Trade Center Path Station, feeling so happy -so grown up - as I ascended the steep escalators up from the trains. After graduating, I moved to Hoboken, just a fingertip across the river. In law school, I danced with Ryan at Windows on the World.
Given all this, waking up each morning to the sun reflecting off the World Trade Center was just a dream. As was that summer. I spent countless hours running through the parks, watching the sun set from the financial center, so incredibly humbled - and thankful - that I lived in this amazing, amazing place.
At the end of that summer, I finished the clerkship I’d had since the previous fall, and started a job at the DA’s Office in the Bronx. The weekend after Labor Day, I spent Saturday night at an Italian festival in Hoboken, struck, once again, by the beauty of the skyline at night. That Sunday, I read the Sunday Times lying in the grass in the park outside my building, soaking up the gorgeous weather. Monday, September 10th, I went to dinner with the judge I’d clerked for at Danube in Tribeca. As we walked home along Chambers Street that night, that last night, it was misting out, the outlines of the towers faintly obscured. I think back to that walk often, of how we had no idea the world would change that next morning. I was nostalgic that night because I thought it an end of part of my life - a job that meant a great deal to me — but how little that would matter just ten hours later.
The next morning, the most gorgeous Tuesday that was ever made (I remember because it later seemed so ironic), I got up, put on a black jacket, skirt, and heels (I remember, because I could not bring myself to wear the outfit again), walked to the subway (I remember, because I racked my brain to think of the last time I looked at the towers), to the Bronx courthouse where I was supposed to watch prosecutors in the misdemeanor court parts. I got there early, and sometime around 9, a coworker mentioned that she’d heard a small plane had crashed into one of the towers. Dumb little plane, I thought - there had been a small prop plane nearly crash in to the World Trade Center earlier in the summer, and it sounded like the same thing. For some reason, I thought to go to a courthouse pay phone (I had no cell back then) and call my mother to let her know I was okay. We both would be thankful; it was the last time either of us would get through for hours.
The rest of the morning was horribly, horribly surreal. Because we were in a courtroom, details -some true, some not - floated in through each attorney or court officer that came in. When we heard there was a second plane, it suddenly dawned on us this wasn’t a random plane crash - but something so horrifying we could not even comprehend. Eventually, someone brought in a radio, and the frantic messages of the newschannel anchors - five years later, I can hardly bear to recall it. The barely concealed terror in their voices, the disbelief and chaos - and the utterly devastating announcements when one, and then the other, fell. Words just fail.
The rest of the day passed alternately in frame-by-frame advance, and a blur. I watched the footage from a supervisor’s office. Took the subway to Ryan’s apartment near Columbia when it started up again. Tried to call friends and family to let them know I was okay. Smelled the bitter acrid burning, even hundreds of blocks away. Cried and cried.
It’s amazing how the mundane details stay with you: I remember the next day having to shop for clothing and shoes since I had nothing but my suit, buying the New York Times knowing I would keep it forever, thinking how all those postcards of the skyline now showed a completely different New York. I went back to work on September 13, in the same suit I wore two days before. That Friday, I went back to my parents’ house in NJ, and for the first time saw the walls papered with missing posters at Port Authority, and the smoking, gaping hole in the skyline as I rode the bus on the Lincoln Tunnel helix. Learned of classmates and former coworkers who had died. In what would become a personal way of paying tribute, I began to read every single Portrait of Grief in the New York Times.
My roommates and I were able to return to our apartment nine days after September 11. That night again was indescribably surreal. All of lower Manhattan was cordoned off south of Canal Street, and we first met at Canal and the West Side Highway before being led back by Red Cross volunteers in small groups. For the rest of my life that trip is seared in my mind: the light rain falling, the bitter, acrid smell from the fires, the endless, heartbreaking caravan of firemen, police, and rescue workers, the sound of the rolling suitcases on the concrete, and, most eerie, Whitney Houston’s version of the Star Spangled Banner being blasted from some sound system as we approached. Our building ended up being fine, but I really didn’t care; it felt so ridiculous to be concerned about something like an apartment when everything else had been destroyed. More important was just trying to come to grips with what had happened while I’d been safely away - the Guardsmen with machine guns now stationed at our street, the park now turned into a helipad, the restaurants commandeered by rescue workers, the shreds of paper now blanketing every visible surface outside, and, most devastating, the gaping hole where once the towers had stood.
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In the nine months I continued to live in that apartment, I never took a picture from my window. At times, I’ve regretted that I don’t have anything to show people what it looked like, or how close we were, but at the time it felt so wrong, that I couldn’t bring myself to take any. Without the pictures, though, it was hard for people to understand why this affected me so deeply: even my parents - who had helped me move in - remarked that they didn’t realize how close it was until they returned, months later, and saw the unbearable view.
It’s hard to overstate the effect living so close to World Trade Center that day had on me. For months, I cried each time I looked out my window, read Portraits of Grief, or saw the missing posters; I seriously wondered whether I’d ever be happy again, and felt guilty for feeling terrible when I was so fortunate to have been safe, and to not lose any loved ones, when so, so many others had. Even now, five years later, I can’t bring myself to watch any of the movies or documentaries about that day. In truth, I don’t think I ever will. When the trailer for the Oliver Stone movie came on before the Da Vinci Code, I started bawling in the theater. In many ways, it still feels so close.
For all of that, though, I am incredibly grateful to have had the chance to live downtown - to have had three incredible months before the towers were taken away, and to have been, in a very small way, part of New York’s recovery. Although I moved out of the apartment once our lease was up, I returned just two years later, now working just blocks from where we lived. Each day, I take the PATH and enter New York (up escalators so reminiscent of the originals) through the reconstructed Path Station, whose walls are filled with quotes and photos celebrating the City. I often get tears in my eyes walking by the drawings by children who lost family members, and the photos of that Tuesday and its aftermath now displayed on the site’s fence. I feel wonder at all that’s been built since then; frustration that we don’t yet have a memorial; joy that I am back in my favorite part of this amazing metropolis.
But, more than anything, seeing the city emerge resilient after that terrible morning - it gives me what seemed so lost five years ago. It gives me hope.
For other personal stories and experiences, check out Remembering (Five Years Later).
