How it felt
Gallicho, Grant
NOTEBOOK HOW It FELT A report from Manhattan Like most people, I had no idea as I walked to work September 11 that four planes had been hijacked and one of them had slammed into the north...
...The phones were useless for much of the day, but as the hours passed more information came...
...Tasha Rifkin, another friend, watched both towers collapse from New Jersey...
...Everyone was in shock, watching the ground as they walked more slowly than usual...
...They can't find it...
...Everyone stared at the void...
...The triviality of the act left me feeling cheap and disconnected...
...I looked more closely at the family, and saw the father poking a broomstick through the fence...
...Pointing and whispering, getting as close as the National Guard and the NYPD would allow...
...Since the attack, downtown Manhattan has remained one giant closed casket...
...People were hysterical, holding each other up, helping the elderly and children, frantically trying their cell phones...
...When the E train finally stopped at the Broadway-Nassau station, my friend and I weren't so sure we wanted to see the body...
...There was nothing there but smoke...
...All of the rescue workers and many of the pedestrians wore facemasks, but we weren't prepared...
...First, there was the smell...
...He saw that I saw him, quickly capped the container, and moved on...
...Then he watched the south tower collapse...
...After an hour I wished I had one...
...There were the refrigeration trucks as well...
...I could not bansish the questions, the images, the need to know what to feel and think, or how to pray when it did not seem that God, Emmanuel, was with us...
...The subways had shut down again, so hundreds of us filed east and walked quietly up through Chinatown...
...This is one of the most bizarre things I've ever seen...
...On Saturday I returned...
...When my cellular phone finally came back up at 8 p.m., I had fifteen voice-mail messages...
...What was next...
...We wept together...
...Maybe a small plane had clipped one of the towers...
...the column of smoke where the towers stood...
...The island went on lockdown...
...The dust on the tips of their shoes, on their faces, hands, in their eyes and lungs...
...Farther down the fence, two tourists had snatched up a memo from the lot...
...Now I better understand why people need to have open-casket wakes...
...Everything seemed to happen in slow motion...
...In a matter of seconds, I saw a car accident, an old woman hyperventilating, a young woman vomiting, and strangers embracing...
...At low resolution we saw the building fall...
...A third unidentified plane circling New York...
...Several people cried openly, on other people's shoulders, into cupped hands...
...I actually think I can see somebody...I don't know...I don't know what it is...
...A family of four stood outside a fenced-in parking lot, which was strewn with papers from the World Trade Center...
...Her experience was like Izzy's: "It was as though I watched it happen in slow motion and fastforward at the same time...
...CNN, no...
...The south tower just collapsed...
...the address caught my eye: One World Trade Center, ninety-second floor...
...Once I reached my block, I ducked into church, slouching into a pew in the back corner...
...At Canal Street and the West Side Highway, emergency workers, national guardsmen, camera crews, citizens, and tourists were gathered...
...I couldn't help but imagine the horror I had not witnessed...
...Izzy boarded a train and rode into the city...
...I knelt, tried to pray, but found I couldn't...
...Then the other tower went...
...The dust had a fibrous quality, almost reflective, a putty tone that colored the scene sepia, like an old movie...
...Bingo...
...I had never heard Broadway so quiet...
...Many people huddled around television sets in restaurants and bars...
...Others stood silently watching the trucks go by, filled with debris, the bent steel visible and still recognizably part of the towers...
...Staff members who live outside Manhattan had an uncertain journey ahead of them after limited outbound transit resumed...
...As the office gathered around the computer screen, the horrors unfolded...
...Then they began to grow, people with cameras and dogs...
...Four others were present with me...
...Hands covered mouths...
...When Quanda Williams, Commonweal's administrative assistant, asked me as I passed her desk if I'd heard about the plane that hit the World Trade Center, I dismissed the incident as a tragic accident...
...he seemed oblivious to the funeral pyre...
...Pedestrian traffic was diminished...
...By the time the page loaded, United Flight 175 had already been driven through the south tower...
...A terrorist attack, for sure...
...No third plane circling Manhattan...
...It's like nine [a.m.] or Commonweal 5 September 28,2001 something....I am standing outside the Hoboken [New Jersey] PATH train, looking up at the World Trade Center, and the top twenty floors are belching smoke...
...The crowds were small and silent...
...One held it up as the other filmed it...
...They had live coverage...
...Everything was covered in a film, which, up close, looked like paper pulp...
...Riding slowly through the well-lit, clean, deserted World Trade Center subway station without stopping caused more than a little uneasiness as we all made eye contact without speaking...
...NOTEBOOK HOW It FELT A report from Manhattan Like most people, I had no idea as I walked to work September 11 that four planes had been hijacked and one of them had slammed into the north tower of the World Trade Center...
...His toddler daughter squatted beneath him, tiny hands thrust through the links, grabbing papers as her father pulled them toward her...
...As I continued up Ann Street, the sights on the ground were almost as staggering as those in the sky...
...The smoke was acrid...
...Everyone was mesmerized by what they saw...
...Grant Gallicho Commonweal 7 September 28,2001...
...Everything closed: subways, commuter rail, bridges and tunnels, highways...
...I couldn't help but think of the firefighters, police, volunteers...
...Something was amiss...
...Downtown traffic was sparse...
...One Great Dane was outfitted in an American flag...
...One young man used his empty film canister to scoop up dust that had settled on a ledge...
...The first was from a good friend...
...One Liberty Plaza, ready to collapse, its curved contours in stark contrast to the straight lines of buildings beside it...
...Friday's rain had washed much of the dust and papers from the lot, but a shadow, a kind of Commonweal 6 September 28,2001 photographic negative, remained—eight and one-half by eleven rectangles of dust...
...What kind...
...Paul Kane, our business manager, suggested the BBC...
...I couldn't hear anything around me...
...That was 9 a.m...
...Commonweal's production editor Tiina Aleman, who lives in Jersey City directly across the river from the twin towers, reflected on their demise, "Two old friends were murdered in front of my eyes...
...They hit the Pentagon...
...I was nervous about leaving, feeling decidedly agoraphobic...
...Looking for news, I frantically went from site to site, trying to get video of the events...
...How many people had just died right before my eyes...
...On Friday the fourteenth, like a lot of New Yorkers, I felt impelled to go downtown to pay my respects...
...After the north tower fell, "the skyline looked blank...
...Next was the dust...
...When he exited Christopher Street in lower Manhattan, he saw the chaos up close...
...Her mother collected them, one hand on a stroller that held a baby who watched this paper gathering intently...
...The rumors proliferated...
...Traffic and people were stopped...
...There were five of us in the subway car as we passed directly under the wreckage...
...Part of the financial district had been opened to pedestrian traffic, accessible by subway only...
...I was in shock...
...The walk uptown was long...
...MSNBC, nothing...
...I needed to stop at an ATM, and hated having to do so...
...They carried the dead...
...The dust on the tips of my shoes— bits of the World Trade Center and its contents...
...As is routine for me, I sat down in front of my computer, opened the New York Times Web page, and sipped coffee...
...The page took longer than usual to load...
...They were part of the landscape...
...How are they doing it...
...All of us in the office stood watching the monitor, the video of the south tower's collapse played again and again...
...I stared at my feet for much of the way, the images replaying: the BBC video...
...Maybe real New Yorkers didn't wear facemasks...
...It's the same regret as when a loved one dies and you feel you didn't have the chance to tell her that you loved her or how much she mattered in your life...
...The walk home, thirteen blocks away, like so much that day, was surreal...
...Grant, this is Izzy Casaletto...
...Some cheered as the rescue crews passed in ambulances, squad cars, and fire engines...
...By the end of the workday, almost everyone had left...
...Along with a visceral sadness I feel regret that I didn't look at or really think of them more often...
Vol. 128 • September 2001 • No. 16
