On 9/11, Hard Rock Daddy takes a break from the music to share a personal experience about that tragic day in 2001…
September 11, 2001
It was a perfect September day…the bluest sky that I can ever recall seeing in New York City. It was the kind of day that makes you feel alive with energy. At the time, I was living in a condo in New Jersey. The view from my living room and balcony was the skyline of lower Manhattan, anchored by the majestic Twin Towers. Little did I know that my life would be forever changed when I woke up on that fateful morning.
8:50am – While showering to get ready to go to work at a music magazine in New York City, I could hear my phone ringing off the hook. I figured that it was probably my wife, who was already at work in lower Manhattan, but I couldn’t understand why she didn’t just leave me a message as she usually did. When I finally answered the phone, I asked…
“Why do you keep calling? Why didn’t you just leave me a message and wait for me to call you back?”
She replied…
“Look out the window!”
I stepped out onto my balcony, looked across the water, and was shocked to see a hole in one of the towers. We both thought, as most others did, that a small plane probably hit the tower. It didn’t look good, but at the time, we had no idea of what was to follow.
We hung up the phone, and I continued to get ready for work, not realizing that my usual train had already stopped running because it ran directly below the World Trade Center.
I watched the news from a vantage point that allowed me to see the TV and the Twin Towers at the same time. I saw the fireball from the explosion out of the corner of my eye as I watched the plane hit the second tower on television.
I immediately called my wife (whose office was about 10 blocks away) and told her to get home now. She asked why, and I told her that terrorists were attacking NYC. Not realizing the gravity of the situation, or maybe overwhelmed by shock, she responded, “but it’s not my building.” At that time, she and her co-workers were watching the events unfold from their office windows.
I frantically said to her…
“Just leave. Quit your fucking job if you have to, but get home now!”
Fortunately, she was the first one out of her office. Many of her co-workers who waited to leave ended up covered in soot, and had to be hosed off when they reached their destination. To this day no one knows what health effects these people may suffer down the road as a result of the exposure.
It didn’t take long for my wife to get to the ferry that took her directly back to our condo complex. Normally, the ferry, which ran every fifteen minutes during rush hour, was only a 10-minute ride, which meant that she should have been home no later than 9:30am. The ferry was packed with others fleeing NYC. To make matters worse, the ferries were told to move much slower than usual to avoid creating underwater currents that could contribute to the possible structural problems that the Twin Towers were facing.
By my wife’s recollection, there were papers and debris flying all over the docks, which were about a half mile away from the Twin Towers. I kept trying to call her on her cell phone to no avail. All of the lines were busy, and remained that way for most of the day. I had no choice but to helplessly wait for her arrival.
Sitting in shock on the couch, watching the towers burn at a little after 10am, I felt a rumble (like a small earthquake) and then the first tower collapsed. As the first tower crumbled to the ground, my wife still wasn’t home. Unable to reach her cell phone, I feared the worst. Already in a terrible state-of-mind after suddenly losing my father less than two months earlier, I thought that my world had ended. Fortunately, my wife walked in a few minutes after the first tower collapsed. She explained what happened, and why it took so long to get home.
Along with all of our neighbors, we sat and watched in shock and horror as the second tower collapsed right before our eyes, an indescribable sense of loss. After all, one of the appeals of this condo was the view of the Twin Towers, and in one fell swoop, they were gone, replaced by a cloud of smoke that would literally hover for months, with a burning smell that cannot be described by words.
To make matters worse, our condo complex was also a ferry destination, and most of the people that took the ferry worked in lower Manhattan. Each work day, parked cars lined the road beyond the gate of our community. When September 12th came, many of the commuters’ cars remained, and served as a constant reminder of those that didn’t make it out of the towers. Slowly over the following months, the cars started to disappear, but it took a long time before the final car was picked up by a loved one.
When we returned to work a few days later, the Empire State Building was evacuated due to a terror threat. I left my office, along with many others, and my wife did the same. It took hours to get home as there was a mad rush out of New York City. When we got home, I told my wife that we had to get out of town for a while, or I was going to lose it. It was all too much to take. The pain of my father’s passing was only made worse by the cloud of smoke, the constant burning smell, the cars that still lingered outside of our community and the terror threats still coming.
We retreated to upstate New York to visit her parents for a few days, far away from the surreal madness of the days that followed 9/11. In this temporary haven, I was finally able to experience some peaceful moments. The sights, the sounds and the smell of the country air provided us with a great respite from the turmoil that we were living through.
After 9/11, there was an eerie silence blanketing New York City. A cloud of shock and despair hung over our grieving city. New Yorkers who were always in a rush, and usually fairly impatient with each other, became quiet and polite. There were no honking horns from impatient drivers. The feeling in the air was remarkably similar to the atmosphere in a school after a student dies. It’s a silence, a mood that is so thick that you feel like you can touch it, or cut it with a knife.
The surreal silence lasted for nearly a month, but the process of getting back to “normal” was very abrupt. When the grieving process ended, it was time for New Yorkers to be New Yorkers (for better or worse).
Twelve years have passed since 9/11, but these memories have never faded. They are a part of who I am today. And though time has a way of blunting the pain of tragedy, each year, on the anniversary of 9/11, the feelings that surface are still incredibly raw.
Tomorrow, Hard Rock Daddy will be featuring a special Three For Thursday in remembrance of 9/11, and then things will be back to normal.
Today, please take a moment to remember the innocent people who lost their lives on 9/11, and think of the families and friends who are still suffering to this day. Please feel free to share any thoughts that you have in the comment section below.
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