On this 25th anniversary of 9/11, it is time to tell the story of my visit to New York City on Sunday, September 16, 2001.
I needed to go. I had watched what happened on television, like everyone else. But I needed to stand there and see the city with my own eyes—to understand the enormity of it, and to begin to reconcile why we might need to respond in whatever way ultimately became appropriate.
I remember the moment I first realized everything had changed. I was driving across a nearly empty Cross Bronx Expressway, heading toward Manhattan, when I looked ahead. Something was wrong. The New York skyline had always been familiar to me. The World Trade Center towers gave the southern end of Manhattan a kind of balance and height. Now they were gone. New York used to look flat from that direction. Now there was a hump in the middle. I remember thinking: They’re really gone.
As I got closer, the absence became more real. And downtown was just as empty. I parked at 22nd Street and Broadway and walked toward Union Square. It was quiet. Not silent—New York is never silent—but subdued. Candles burned in small clusters. People spoke softly. Faces were serious.
Then I began seeing the photographs. Missing people. Photographs taped to telephone poles. Photographs on bus shelters. Faces looking out at the people walking past, as if the city itself were asking, Have you seen this person?
I took the subway to Canal Street. When I came out, blue police barricades lined the streets, with police standing behind them. Smoke still rose from the ruins, drifting across the city and obscuring the twisted steel much of the time.
I walked Canal Street from river to river.
The missing posters became impossible to ignore. There were dozens on each telephone booth. More on the bus shelters. They covered walls and storefronts. The chain-link fences had become memorials. Flowers were tucked into them. Ribbons were tied to them. Notes had been pushed through the links.
Then I began noticing the trucks. Flatbeds carrying enormous pieces of steel. Sometimes a single beam filling an entire truck. A gigantic excavator was being brought into the city. It was the biggest machine I had ever seen—and it took six flatbed trailers to carry it.
Cases of Poland Spring water were stacked high along Broadway near Canal Street. Thirty-two bottles in a case. Just like the water we had donated earlier that week at a busy drop-off station in Elm Park in Worcester, Massachusetts.
Construction workers, paramedics, firefighters and police officers were walking north from the site, returning from their time at the towers. Volunteers stood along the street, handing out water and snacks as the workers passed. We, the onlookers, stood dumbstruck. And we applauded. Not cheering. Applauding. Every time a firefighter, police officer, paramedic, construction worker, or truck went by, we clapped. “Thank you.” That was all it seemed to say.
I remember a man in a McDonald’s uniform. His name tag said Moses.
I remember someone using a missing-person poster—8½ by 11 inches—as a sun shield.
And then I saw a father. He was standing at a police barricade holding a photograph. Talking to a police officer.
“Have you seen my son?
“Please let me through so I can look for my son.”
“No.”
He never made it through the barricade. That particular moment has stayed with me for 25 years.
I went to New York because I needed to see for myself. I needed to understand what had happened. I thought I was going there to see the destruction.
What I remember most is the people.