My Tribute
I grew up on the lower east side of Manhattan not far from the WTC. Looking uptown from my parents’ bedroom I could see the Empire State Building and then as I got older I could see the WTC looking south. I watched them grow. From the cranes that moved up each floor from within (they looked like tentacles) to the rust colored girders that eventually turned steel gray. I was fascinated by them.
Three years later that fascination would continue. I went to a military high school. On graduation day I received a call that they were filming a remake of King Kong and needed extras with short hair to play national guardsmen. I thought it was a prank from one of my classmates. It wasn’t. Several of us spent the night at the WTC which had been set up for a casting call. We never were called but were paid $25 for our trouble.
In the following years, there was the tightrope walker, the human spider and a parachute jumper. The fascination just continued.
Now fast forward to 1991. I am living and working on Long Island. I have an opportunity to manage my company’s NY office which just happened to be at One WTC on the 90th floor. There were many days we were above the clouds. Sometimes it was cloudy when I entered the building and sunny in my office. We used to stand in the window wells and look straight down or stand at the ground level as close as possible to the building and look up. The sense of perspective was wild. I even arranged for our office to be open on the evening of the Macy’s 4th of July fireworks display for the employees and their families.
A few months later we moved across the street to the World Financial Center and my office on the 31st floor faced the same direction as before. I had a beautiful view of the towers. I was in and out of the concourse daily to the subways, lunch or shopping. When the bomb went off in 1993 we heard and felt it with such force my secretary thought a plane hit our building. Ironic.
Even after I moved to NJ (both home and office) I still would pass the towers every time I visited my family. It got to the point where the kids would always say “which one did you work in” and “open the sunroof” and “I heard one is slightly taller than the other” (a fact I could never confirm or refute.) We even made it a point of getting t-shirts at the 2001 US Open that had the WTC in the logo since they were such a family topic.
Amazingly, I did not know one person who perished that day. As the confusion and disaster unfolded, my mind’s eye knew what those people in the building saw as the plane approached. My old office faced north and by all estimates was no more than 3 floors below the impact and a little to the right. I can never explain that to anyone. My sisters knew friends and relatives of friends. The only friends I lost were the towers. I don’t mean that disrespectfully to those who lost loved ones. I can’t even imagine the feelings of those who lost much more.
The final chapter comes about a month after September 11th. The City of New York is a client of ours. We were invited to come to the site. At first I thought this would be an awful thing to do but I needed some way to come to grips with this. Up until that morning I almost backed out. I had the same feeling I had at Pearl Harbor. I stood there looking up at….nothing. Another feeling I can never describe. At one point we stood on a makeshift platform designed for the families and other visitors. The hand written notes from the children, the flight crew’s friends and families that were on the handrail of the platform were enough to break your heart.
The below link has some pictures I took that day. Many people wish they could turn back the clock to a younger age. I will always wish it could be my 43rd birthday all over again and I could freeze time. That just happened to be September 10th, 2001.