I was a chief resident of a program at one of the larger hospitals in NYC. My co-chief and I were walking around doing our morning check ins and saw the first plane hit the tower on the news in one of the wards. We went into full staff protocol, everyone was called in and we over the next few hours we waited, and waited, and waited, and no one came. That night I couldnt get home to my apartment in the Bronx so my step brother and I had dinner by our parents apartment on the upper west side. It was his first week of freshman year at a college in NYC where he watched the events from his dorm window.
My husband and I were married about three months before at Windows on the World at the top of the World Trade Center. Our wedding pictures show us all with the towers in the background
I was working at a startup with the office down by the World Trade Center. We used to meet one or two times a week, and it would usually be around 9:30 because we wanted to miss the rush. We were supposed to meet on 9/11, but I couldn’t get a hair appt on that day so I asked them if we could,d meet on 9/10. Because of my haircut appt we were all working from home on 9/11.
I usually had CNN on in the morning when I worked. When I saw the second plane hit, I knew it was bad. I called my friends working in the city, and some of them just got out of nyc before they closed out the tunnels and bridges.
A good friend from college was on flight 11. He had a young wife and two small kids. My daughter’s teacher husband worked at Cantor and died. She was teaching when he called. He said, “Don’t delete this message it may be the last time you hear from me…” Going to those funerals were very hard because they were all so young with families.
For a long time driving to NYC from NJ was always very strange not to see the twin towers. We’ve celebrated few milestones at the Windows on the World. I used to walk through the Vista hotel going to work.
Like many of you, I can’t believe it has been 25 years because it seems like yesterday.
I live in CT, in a commuters’ town to NYC. That day I was working at a consulting firm in Stamford CT but I often went into the City to meet clients. My sister called me in Stamford and said, “Well, you didn’t go into the City today, I guess.” Nope. Thank goodness.
A few days later I did go into the City, and I felt like I was in Beirut or Tel Aviv. There were police and national guard everywhere, with long guns, wearing camo – Grand Central Station, in the subways, on street corners. It was terrifying.
My son’s Bar Mitzvah was exactly one year later. We had relatives visiting from California and other far-away places. In temple, the night before the Bar Mitzvah, people stood to name people they had lost a year earlier. The number of names was long. Our relatives from CA acknowledged that the reading of so many names brought it home to them in a way that reading newspapers and watching TV had not.
And then there were all the cars of people who never came home remaining at the train stations.
That morning while walking away from the WTC, my husband passed the then named Beekman Medical Center. There were medical professionals standing outside the hospital bearing witness to the events from only a few blocks away. He said to them you need to be prepared, there will be lots of people needing medical attention. Which as you say didn’t happen.
I worked close to the Smithsonian Institution in DC and I remember someone saw it on their computer and told us. I could see smoke that I assume was from the Pentagon. I normally took metro to and from work, but decided that could be dangerous. I was also worried because the Smithsonian is a national treasure and I figured it could be a target. My uncle worked 6 blocks from where I worked, and I called him and told him he needed to leave (he had “executive parking” and he needed to drive me to where my car was parked on the way :). I also asked if he would drive 2 friends of mine. We got out of the city pretty early, but it was already kind of spooky.
I had been to NYC that July, to celebrate a special birthday for someone, and we ate at the top of the WTC. (Unfortunately my H lost my camera with all of the pics from then).
I had recently moved from working at a major trauma center in Maryland to California. My colleagues went into “mass casualty” mode, prepping any number of beds once the Pentagon was hit. Just as in NYC, they remained empty.
I was using AOL at the time, and quickly opened email before heading off to a class. There was an image of a building with a plane which I glanced past, thinking it was advertising some movie. Then I got in the car, turned on NPR as I drove, and realized (with horror) that that image I had ignored was one of the towers being hit. My teacher refused to cancel class that day, so on every break I headed back to my car to turn on NPR again. One of my classmates was from NY and was frantically trying to get ahold of his wife and friends. I remember people being told to not go near the bridges in the Bay Area for fear that there would be attacks later that day. I was supposed to fly a week or two later and remember calling the airline to cancel because I wasn’t comfortable getting on an airplane, and that there was no pushback.
Good friends of mine were visiting NYC that week but were not at WTC that day. They ended up taking Greyhound from NYC to southern California later that week.
I also remember after flight 93 crashed in Pennsylvania, there were (unfounded) rumors that maybe there was a survivor, and how I hoped there would be.
Thank you all for sharing your stories. Never forget.
I was in NYC at my midtown office. We were watching on a TV. A former colleague who had just started a new job downtown that week got off the PATH, saw what was happening, and walked up to out office to be with people he knew. He told us he’d seen people jumping from the building. Another colleague 's spouse was a fireman, and their Brooklyn-based squad got lost trying to get to the WTC and lived as a result. Thankfully, no Google maps in those days.
We all walked up to a Red Cross blood donation center – transit was shut down --thinking there would be a need, and the weather was beautiful, which made it feel almost stranger, because that would normally have given everyone a certain joy.
In the days afterwards, there was such confusion, and also despair, as we all discovered friends and acquaintances who had perished. Honestly, not enjoying this revisiting of this day.
25 years. Hard to believe. I was in my office when the front office staff told us what was happening. I called my parents, who lived in the NY suburbs, and several college friends who lived in the area, and friends who lived in DC. One of my college classmates worked for Cantor Fitzgerald. He was at work. He did not make it. RIP JS.
Agree that the cars at the station were so gruesome. One of my neighbors who worked in the first tower to be hit had a very distinctive set of bumper stickers on his car. We huddled that night at the end of the driveways… what would be the greater kindness- to move his car back to the driveway, to leave it there until a family member could cope with moving it, to ask their priest (who had been in and out of the house since 1 pm or so) to come up with a plan???
A few days later the local police towed the car to the driveway… and the guy driving the tow was sobbing as he positioned it “just so” in front of the garage.
The image of the medical teams outside the ER at the THREE hospitals I past as I walked north from midtown trying to figure out how to get home with Manhattan in lockdown… those immaculate gowns and gloves and stoic professionals waiting for the casualties which never materialized…while the fireball from lower Manhattan was raging orange and visible from Fifth Avenue… ugh.
I saved my un-used MetroNorth ticket, I don’t know why. The conductors couldn’t move, the evacuation cars were so packed that night. And the train made every stop, and at each stop, a line of first responders waiting-- gloved and masked and wearing scrubs-- to tend to the wounded. Which of course- there were none.
NJ transit did the same thing. Once they started running again, they had workers at many stations with bottled water and stuff to clean people off when they disembarked.
My husband was probably on that same PATH train. I just learned yesterday that 2 cars from that PATH train survived intact and are on display at 2 different museums.
My husband was at the Pentagon…. Survived but there was trauma and PTSD. (He died of cancer in 2024). Trying to decide if I want to go to Arlington Cemetery when I leave the gym this morning,
Just saw that Arlington National Cemetery has a very good video on their Facebook page — it was formatted as an interview with two staffers who were working that day.
I really dislike this day and would prefer to just get to 9/12. That said, Savannah Guthrie’s interview this morning with Andrew Card (Bush’s Chief of Staff) was excellent.
I couldn’t get on an NJT train until the following day, and it had a bomb scare. Thats the kind of thing that most commuters on most days would treat as an inconvenient delay, but on that day, everyone was quite tense.
Yeah, the random bomb, anthrax, poison gas, everybody afraid of everything.
Yet we weren’t afraid of each other. And the pop-up memorials around town-- carefully tended by friends and families at first, now institutionalized by the city and civic groups- just lovely.
Yes, I always bought my breakfast at the same place every morning, and when I walked in for the first time after 9/11, the people who worked there ran from behind the counter to hug me and said “poppy with scallion cream cheese, you’re okay!!”
Otoh, the firehouse I passed every day, where I always exchanged hellos with the (very handsome) guys, was completely wiped out. I still get teary walking by there. There was a huge pop-up memorial there for a long time.
I have to read- out loud- every single name at every firehouse memorial I pass in any of the boroughs (I’m never in Staten Island so that doesn’t count). It is immensely irritating to anyone who is with me but I no longer apologize.
Some of those “probies” were 22 years old-- still being trained on the equipment- when they jumped on the trucks to head over to the pile. I feel compelled to name them, I don’t know why.
I mentioned above I worked for a consulting firm that day. The man who managed the office and was responsible for the office’s P&L was a royal – rhymes with lick and starts with pr. He gathered us all for a meeting at 1:00 PM that day and said, “What happened today was terrible. But we have a business to run.” I never forgave him for that.
First he got divorced, and then he died a few years later. Karma.
I was on patrol in my job as a police officer in a suburb of Salt Lake City, driving southbound on Bountiful Blvd approaching the intersection with Mueller Park Rd. I heard on the radio (not the police radio) that a plane had hit the twin towers. In my mind I pictured something like a small private plane. When I heard another plane hit the other tower I went down to the station, as did other co-workers, and started watching on tv. It was horrible as my heart went out to all those trapped in the buildings. Then when I saw that first tower fall I was just sickened and my next thoughts immediately went to “how many police officers and firefighters did we just lose?”. When you work public safety that just hits a bit harder.
A neighbor of mine at the time was the General of the Utah National Guard and was at the Pentagon but happened to be out jogging when the plane hit. The events of that day certainly changed the nature of his job as he was heavily involved in preparations for the 2002 Winter Olympics. Things were pretty tense for Law Enforcement and Security personnel for those Olympic Games because of the events of 9-11.
Also 9-11 is our wedding anniversary so it put a damper on that day in that way as well.
I live on the West Coast (Southern California) and was heading to a doctor’s appointment and was going to go in a bit late to work afterwards. When I got into the doctor’s office the entire staff was gathered around the computer at the reception desk and people were on the phone. I didn’t know what had happened at that point, so they filled me in. Let’s just say it wasn’t a very productive doctor’s appointment as my doctor and I were talking about what had happened. I found out more details listening to the radio on the way to work from my appointment and once I got to work. I work at a school and were thinking about closing, but we decided to stay open. We did let parents come pick up their kids if they chose to do so.