Windows on the World, WTC (RIP)

        I was home visitin' mi mum for Mother's Day. I went through a couple boxes of old photos and found a batch from our Mother's Day breakfast 1986, at Windows on the World restaurant on top of the North Tower of the World Trade Center, NY.

       On the morning of 9/11/01, this restaurant was the site of a business technology conference hosted by the Risk Waters group.

Don't breathe the air today

Don't speak of why you're afraid

-Sleater Kinney

Here are my distinct memories from 9/11/01, circa 8:46 am onward:

 -I was on the bus to work. Bus was still in Brooklyn, on the Expressway headed towards the tunnel to lower Manhattan. I was in my own world as usual, probably listening to music. A guy sitting in the last row (I remember this for some reason), who had been listening to a walkman radio, suddenly shouted out that a plane hit the WTC, I looked out the bus window, and had a perfect view of the towers, and the first. My first thought was that it must have been an accidental collision, like the plane that hit the Empire State Building in the 1930s (just the tippy top of it). My next thought was, "there are people dying there right now."

-After the 2nd plane hit, and it became obvious that this was no accident, I distinctly remember thinking, "What the eff kind of bumbling moronic/lazy?/Stupid?/effers do we have working in the Cee-Eye-Ey, or whoever's supposed to be preventing this from happening."

-Another guy on the bus said (again, aloud, to anyone listening) that he was supposed to inside the WTC, but he was running late to work.

-Our bus, and all traffic heading towards Manhattan, came to a complete standstill (thankfully we weren't in the tunnel yet!)- while seemingly every emergency vehicle from Bklyn zoomed through.

-A lady on the bus started having a panic attack, and was demanding that the driver to let her out on the expressway. He kind of just ignored her. He was an older man, I remember, and looked very sad and/or weary about what was happening.

-Eventually (after an hour, but before the South Tower fell), traffic was turned around back to Bklyn. A man in the window of an apartment building we passed was waving an American flag out his window.

-Papers from the towers flew all the way over to Bklyn (Park Slope, Brooklyn Heights). I was tempted to collect some for posterity, but I stopped myself because it seemed morbid and/or disrespectful.

-THE SMELL that day--- like something burnt, electrical, but like nothing I've ever smelled before or since.

-Meeting a lady I knew from my local bus stop, who, unlike me, actually left her house early and got to work (in lower Manhattan) on time (I only escaped being on a bus that travelled through lower Manhattan because my boss was in Sweden that week, so I came to work late). Anyway, so this lady was physically okay, thank God, but she described horrible things- bodies falling, body parts in the streets, etc. So did a lady at my church- a falling body missed her by mere feet.

-I didn't attempt to go in to work (in Manhattan) until Thursday the 13th. The trains were running mostly normally by then. (Speaking of trains, my next-door-neighbor at the time worked for the MTA, and was in one of the stations near the WTC when the attack happened. I don't remember all the details, but the jist of his story was that his supervisor screamed "Run for your lives!" and he and his co-workers did just that, and thankfully got out of the station in time, before it was destroyed.... maybe it was Cortlandt Street station actually; that was closed for years after 9/11).

Anyway, the hospital at which I worked and still do work is a few blocks north of Bellevue and NYU hospitals, and I used to walk by those hospitals to get to work every morning. Well, I wasn't quite prepared for what I found my first day back to the city, 9/13: every available side of a building/phone booth/pole/construction wall was plastered with hastily made "Missing" signs, with photocopied pictures of loved ones who worked in the towers. I guess the family members were hoping that hospital employees might recognize them, but sadly, from what I understand, hospitals were on the ready but never received the patients (survivors) they were expecting.

Monday

Can I go back a little, to Monday, September 10? That was the last day of normalcy; the world would change in a mere matter of hours. How did I spend the time? Doing normal/inane stuff: I was engaging in some flirty e-mails (at least flirty on my part) with one of the surgery fellows. That evening, I went to an Anatomy and Physiology lecture at NYU.

Memories of the World Trade Center

-It's such an 80s building in my mind, I guess because it was mostly in the 80s that I visited it. Also, at that point it was still pretty newish (I think it opened in the early 70s), so people still oohed and ahhed about these huge toewers.

-Besides the Mother's Day in the mid-80s, I remember going on class trips to visit the observatory at the top of (one of?) the towers. My last class trip to the WTC was in the early 90s, when I was in 8th grade. I actually shoplifted a little marble elephant from the gift shop up near the observatory. I still have it somewhere.

-One of the last times I spent any considerable time there was when I started 9th grade and my mom and I went to one of the stores therein to purchase me a school bag.

-I think that the VERY last time I was actually inside the WTC was when I was 16 and my parents, brother, and I took a trip to Liberty Science Center, which required transferring to the PATH train at the station in the WTC.

-In the summer between my junior and senior years of college, I worked as an office temp at a company in lower Manhattan. I remember taking my lunch break in that plaza between the two towers. Even though the plaza was pretty spacious and it was outdoors, it seemed dark (at least at the times I went there) due to the shadows of the buildings.

-In early 1999, I had a part-time job in Brooklyn Heights, directly across water (and Bklyn Bdge) from the towers. After work, in the evenings, I would sit on a bench on the promenade with my frappacino (I know, right?). There were always sporadic lights on in the windows of the towers, no matter how late at night, and I would sit there and picture the important financial (and other) workers burning the midnight oil. I remember thinking of them admirably, admiring their work ethic.

-In the summer of 2000, I rented a room in the village, not far from the towers. From that point and onwards, they always served as a placemarker of sorts. Yes, even tho I lived in the city my whole life, I have a terrible sense of direction, but no matter where I was in Manhattan, I could usually see the Twin Towers, and that was my marker for downtown.

New Monstrosity
Last year, May 12, 2012 to be exact, I met up with my maw and sister to visit the memorial (reflection pools) on the footprints of the towers. HORRIBLE- I hated it- what a yucky kind of memorial those pools are. I mean, black granite, deep into the ground... I see it and I just think of holes, or The Hole (which is what some people called Ground Zero in the early days). The pools are in a park-like area: carefully paved paths, and a tree hither and yon, but it the greenery looks too forced and planned and thus, artificial. The worst part is, to enter this memorial park/pools area, you have to go through airport security- seriously, you have to have your bags scanned, and go through a body scanner. Meanwhile, some genius decided to build another hideous skyscraper, the newWTC- why??? Isn't it an automatic target for another air attack??
             Anyway, the only good (or at least, thought-provoking) thing about my experience at the memorial was this weird little occurence: one of the few 911 victims I know OF (just OF; I never actually met him in person) is the brother of an acquaintance who had an office in the North Tower, right at the impact zone (his brother said that when he watched the footage, it looked like the plane flew right into his brother's office). Anyway, out of the 3000 names that were carved into the stone memorial, I didn't expect to find his name. I wasn't really looking for it-the names are organized by company I think, or something, but I remember I didn't know the details to even look him up. But I looked down at the part of the panel right in front of me, and there was this man's name staring back at me! Anyway, I recently looked up this man on the internet (there are several great sites that people have built to honor the 3000 souls with individual bios). He lived in Cobble Hill, he loved his family very much (he had very young kids), and in his "free time" (ie, time that wasn't consumed by work or fam) he started some kind of grassroots organization that went around planting trees. Most tellingly, though, was the photo of him that accompanied this bio; he had such a kind, warm smile, such kind, warm eyes.

May he, and all the others, rest in peace, and may their loved ones find healing and comfort.