The first moments.

On this beautiful sunny day, we were talking, standing by a table near our windows when there was a slight light flicker, as in when someone opens a window far away in the city and the sun happens to reflect a beam in your direction. Then there was this incredibly loud jet-noise, sudden, jet increasing, towards us, quickly ending with a huge explosion. It sounded like a missile. The explosion much louder than any thunderstorm we were used to hear echoing in the building canyons. As we looked out, metal panels debris was flying outward  from both sides of the towers. We thought an airplane accident for sure, not knowing what was to come, or the massacre intended.
Tuesday September 11th, first photo, taken within a few minutes of the first plane hitting from the other side. The plume on the right shows a debris(?), perhaps a jet engine, falling somewhere in front of our building or adjacent to the gray building in lower right corner, not sure. We turned on the TV and on CNN at first there was nothing and then an announcement that "a small plane had hit the WTC." Certainly there must have been many people who died on the impact floor as well as many trapped above. In talking to my father on the phone before 9 o'clock, I mentioned this and felt terrible about this realization. I often take on architectural jobs in these office towers and am very familiar with these environments.

Several minutes into the apparent plane accident, a huge flood of papers starts appearing from the towers above. The incredible flood of papers fluttering in the breeze was coming straight down from the towers, showering our building. Having experienced several ticker tape parades on Broadway, the papers seemed so familiar but were terribly eerie. Another thing we noticed was the smell of fire, jet fuel mixed with things burning.

These photos are taken upward from our building, probably at a 40-45 degree angle looking up, note the edge of the upper floor in the corner of the photo. It's just a regular consumer camera with no special lenses or good equipment.
We closed our windows and stuffed towels in the seams to stop some of the smell from coming in.

Then the impossible happened. Another plane and this time there was no doubt; a huge passenger plane came in from our left. In Donna's words: "...an all black and big jumbo jet." There was a breaking sound of the puncture impact, like a Drrrr, a split silence and then the enormously loud explosion with the fireball and debris hitting the area around the tower. The explosion from our vantage point was much larger than the first one and left us in no doubt that this was an attack and no accident. 
Donna's immediate thought was what happened to the big airplane? It completely disintegrated and didn't come out (whole) the other side. 
The photo on the left we took within a few seconds of the second jet hitting the South Tower. Our thoughts were with the people killed on impact and those above struggling to get down. It seemed impossible to imagine anybody getting down from the upper floors and there was no way to do anything about it. 
Watching CNN, we saw former FBI director Carlson declare that this was a terrorist act, and that it was a direct result of the failed US foreign policies in the last decades. We never saw him on TV after this but he was right. It's what could be dubbed as "Patriotically Incorrect". He did make the anology of "someone shooting at a battleship with a shotgun."
But a terrorist attack it was and we just stood bewildered at our windows completely unprepared and at a loss as to what was about to happen next. We had no idea how bad it was going to get and figured the fire would eventually be put under control with a great loss of life. The word evacuate came up but we felt we might be in harms way on the street anyhow as nobody knew where a plane would strike next. Donna's father called and said the towers would collapse and we should get out.

above: Picture taken just minutes before the collapse. When the top started really moving, it fell in our direction as the facade broke across the impact floors, along the area of fire, with incredibly loud breaking sounds. As the facade collapsed, the floor plates had no support and one would slam onto the next. There was no stopping this avalanche.

The Collapse.

On the left is the last photo I took before the digital camera froze for some reason. We noticed an increase in the fire, apparently the floor in the impact area was giving way, with breaking noises. I clearly saw a large section of a floor collapse (probably about half length of the side facing East) from the corner to the corner mid picture to the corner on the right. So the flames previously separated by floors became two stories high in that area. There was a large bang, or bangs, as the floor crashed on the one below it, inside the building. This weakened the external structure, which was now spanning twice the height than moments before. We noticed some of the aluminum panels popping off, the structure was bulging! And then the columns on the entire right side in this view bent out with a tremendously loud high pitched and low resonance snap, toppling the entire uppermost portion of the tower in a fraction of a second. The tower immediately started disintegrating, collapsing, and we ran away from our  windows to the back of our space for safety. 
Our building shook and the lights flickered as the World Trade Center became an unstoppable avalanche.  
We heard the rumble slow down and carefully hurried to the windows to look out. We saw a large crowd of people by Noguci's cube run away from the blast wave, which engulfed them all in an instant. In a split second and without warning the blast wave hit and shot up our building vertically and our windows rattled as the view was blinded in an instant. There was no visibility into the thick dust outside except for numerous papers appearing in front of our glass  and then disappearing again into the ash and debris and like a sand storm with particles scraping against the glass. An eerie flattening calm 

descended on the area, all outside sound was dampened, similar to but much more than in a really heavy snow storm. 
As we were not able to see anything, we didn't know what to expect next but were aware of that the building had not fallen in our direction by more than half way at the most. We really worried about a domino effect, buildings weakening and not collapsing immediately.
We thought of the terrible fate of all these people in the towers. Hopefully most got out! Now it was time for us to get out immediately, we already should have.


Evacuation. 

We then evacuated, not knowing what would come next. Our view out our window was entirely cut off by the ash and smoke. We each grabbed a dog and ran down the fire escape stairs to the lobby of our building. There were hundreds of people waiting there, everyone in a state of shock and bewildered. People coming in off the street were entirely covered with ash and dust and a policeman guarded the entry advising people to stay put and not be leaving onto the street. We however decided to get out immediately. The lobby felt like a trap: A coffin. We ripped up and wet a t-shirt and held it over our nose as we bypassed the policeman and headed into Broadway. The street was an apocalyptic scene, the smell of concrete dust and fire permeated everything. We made our way downwards (South), away from the towers, down to Battery Park. At the corner of the Indian museum on Bowling green, we saw a glimpse of sky through the dust and realized that Pier A West of Clinton Castle, in the Hudson river was clear because of the wind direction.  We were outside the pier looking North when the rumbling noise started again, as we watched the North tower come crumbling down. Somehow it made sense as the first one had come down so fast. Another enormous cloud of ash and dust 

 
shot out from the WTC site and we were standing in its path. Crowds of people screamed and started running downwind but we headed to the Pier because it had a building under renovation. Some guy had wire cutters on him and quickly snipped a construction fence open so we slipped through and crawled into the building through a window. There we weathered the second dust cloud. We still don't know how long we remained in the building but we were eventually evacuated from the area by boat along with 20-30 other people.

While sailing on the boat on the Hudson river, we passed by the WTC site, plumes of smoke rising up from the rubble left from the disaster and the different buildings that were on fire. Most people on the boat were grave silent, without words, wearing life vests and just unresponsively looking straight forwards. Except for a TV crew, a cameraman and a reporter trying to get people's reactions. I don't even remember what we said to them. The boat headed North and docked at Chelsea Piers.

After landing and getting off the boat, we walked in a daze through a dense crowd of people into Chelsea. We tried calling people to say we were ok, there were long lines at every street telephone. But the cell phones were jammed anyway and it was impossible to call internationally. Our first stop was at the John Elder Gallery, where I had a show scheduled, but nobody showed up that day and the building was empty. We then headed to a hair salon owned by one of Donna's clients in the 20's. We stayed there for a while and she was nice enough to let me use her computer to send out a few e-mails to say that we were ok. 

We walked Northwards, taxis were sparse, no subways and buses were in some kind of a panic mode. We walked all the way up to East 80's, all the while not knowing what time it was. Some young guys we overheard on the street joking about the whole thing. Reality had not set in. We made it to our friend Veretta's by early evening, probably around 6 or 7 o'clock and I thought it was still 10 o'clock in the morning, I guess that is when the first tower collapsed.

Shock does strange things to you and time stood still for the whole day.

We stayed with our friend Veretta dazed and confuzed. We decided to head down in the morning, the 12th to try and rescue our other pets from our studio.

Each of the mornings of the 12th, 13th and 14th, we took a subway down to 42nd Street. That's as far down as it would go. From there we walked to 14th street and passed through a military blockade to walk downwards.

On the first day we stayed on Broadway and passed a checkpoint on Houston, another on Canal and a couple of other streets. Luckily I had a driver's license with me, Donna had no ID when we ran out the morning prior.

A dense burning smell permeated the air, a strange concoction of something that left an ashy taste in your mouth.

By the time we reached Broadway and City Hall park at J&R and Fulton Street, the experience was like entering a scene of a volcanic eruption. Burned out cars, mud ankle deep  everywhere, police and military personnel all over the place. We got our first glimpse of the WTC site on our right walking downward, where we saw WTC 5 where the bookstore used to be, now a burned out charred building structure. Walking farther down, we looked down the streets toward the WTC site and saw that the top portion of Tower 2 had collapsed onto Trinity Place, at the corner of Liberty. That was certainly close enough to the Liberty Plaza building to cause alarm. Liberty Plaza is seen in photos as the black building straight out our windows.

Dust was everywhere, laying thick on the sidewalks, padding our steps as we walked on the street. The rain didn't help as it made mud out of all the debris. 

We managed each day to reach our building. It was dark, with no electricity, dirty from all the dust and ash. The windows were covered with the ash and dust and nobody was inside it. The front doors were padlocked with a heavy chain and papers from the WTC blowing around everywhere in the dust. 

There was no answer at the management offices, Insignia Residential, they didn't make much of an effort to do anything. Not a telephone number on the door, contact info, sign up sheet or anything. The Insignia incompetence really pissed us off along with other residents of the building trying to get in to rescue pets and get basic belongings. For a few days we went down there, taking hours making our way through the ever toughening checkpoints along the way. 

By Friday, we needed Military escort to get to the front doors, still locked and still without information from Insignia Residential (hint: don't rent from those people). Our super had just been in the building and we managed to get a contact# to have him meet us the morning after.

Saturday, September 15th, I was escorted to our building by this great army sergeant named Buddy, for a few minutes to get basic belongings. We walked up the darkened stairwell up to 13th floor. The building smelled stale and of death like it had been on fire and was all dark inside. Pitch black. Using our flashlights we made our way past the elevator bank to the apartment doors, I opened them and went inside. Luckily we had put towels in the windows after the first plane hit so there was minimal dust inside. But with the building standing in the wind direction of the WTC, the smell inside was revolting.

One of our birds didn't make it and was dead on the floor. Considering everything, this was minimal damage and I stuffed all the other one's into bags, got a hold of ID's and credit cards before I looked out the windows. My digital camera worked this time around and I fired a few rounds before leaving the apartment down the darkened stairwell with Buddy, again to meet our superintendent on the first floor. Thanks.

The smoke from the ruins was still heavy. Everything outside seemed blurry and this terrible smell permeated everything, all the way into our closets.

And the WTC would be missing from our view from now on.

above: WTC 5 where the bookstore was. Still standing but heavily damaged and completely burned out. 

Above: Mangled debris of collapsed WTC4 and South Tower on the corner of Liberty and Trinity Place.


Above: A view out our window showing one of the towels we had stuffed in between the airplane crashes. 

Missing Persons.

Times Square subway station, late September, 2001. The columns and walls were literally wallpapered with posters of missing persons.

Late September, the smoke still permeating the air. Note the dirt on our windows, 13 floors up, a week or two after everything had happened.

Rescue workers on street below, on Trinity between Rector and Liberty Streets. Rescue equipment filled the street behind Trinity Church while the corner area was being cleaned off around WTC4. A local school (4th building from the corner, at the edge of the shadow) was turned into a temporary morgue, with "morgue" sprayed on the yellow brick with orange spray paint. While freezer trucks parked outside, intended for body parts and corpses.

The South Tower, from our vantage point, had collapsed Eastwards onto WTC 4. This is where we used to enter the World Trade Center a few times a week. We wondered about all the people working in the Mall below, where I bought my glasses and used a pharmacy.

We later found out that the sub levels were evacuated right away.

The Burger King building on the corner oddly escaped, still standing. I think the Burger King sign got knocked off the corner. The debris pile from South Tower reached onto the top of the 5 story building -corner of Trinity and Liberty.

World Trade Center building 5. The black partially collapsed structure on top  was the intended disaster control center. It was completed a couple of years ago and cost many millions of dollars. Nice location, Rudy.

Late September/early October, rescue crews at work on the site. The debris on the corner that was approximately 5 stories high, already much cleaned off corner/street area. 

Some of these shots are close ups of the debris.

above: Flag not flying. South Tower remnant. Behind there was the relentless digging for many months which went on and on. The heavy machinery was working a cloud of smoke day and night. The constant humming of the machines was followed by breaking sounds, scraping and occasional falling parts, large pieces of steel moving around.

below: Cleanup mid-October, the South Tower debris is mostly removed from the eastern portion of the WTC site, and off the streets near the intersection of Trinity Place and Liberty Streets.

above: The flag of the American Stock Exchange. In the background the machinery digging in the foreground of the North Tower remnant.

below: Closer view into the pit, nearest is WTC4, sliced in half by the South Tower, on its left is WTC5 where the bookstore used to be, behind that covered with an orange net is our US Post Office. WTC6 is in the upper Left of the photo, it was directly connected into the WTC7 tower that collapsed later in the afternoon on Tuesday the 11th.
All the burned out black buildings were demolished by January.

Streets around the area, mid October:

Cranes at South Tower site.


Driven by the "changed" view from our window,  our flashbacks and our bad experience with Insignia Residential management company, we decided to look around and perhaps move. Our contract was expiring anyway.
We ended up moving into a larger space across the street, which seemed perfect for us. A few floors had opened up in that building because of all that happened and we figured it was worth it for us to try and get a larger space. At least we were not looking into the disaster site any more. 

The block we lived on was blockaded by police until early February. In that time frame, hundreds of Policemen were roaming the area and sectioning off the red zones. There was a new name for our neighborhood now: Ground Zero.

The area stayed busy for months, trucks carrying heavy loads out of the site day and night. Thousands of truckloads passed our windows.