Day the Sky Turned Black.
September 11, 2001 New York..
Some mornings are no different than other mornings.
One of those days was September 11, 2001.
Coffee was perking in kitchens throughout New York City. The kids toted their backpacks to school. In the subway cars commuters folded their papers, half-reading the headlines of things that would not matter by afternoon. Office workers stepped into elevators, thinking about the little worries of small Tuesday mornings: deadlines, meetings, lunch plans, the minor irritations of daily life that mean so much until they don’t.
That morning the sky over Manhattan was the kind of blue that causes people to stop and look up from the sidewalk. It was a huge clear impossibly bright September sky, the kind that makes you feel, for a moment, really glad to be alive.
No one on those sidewalks, in those subway cars, in those elevators, climbing to the top floors of the World Trade Center“>World Trade Center, knew they were standing in the last peaceful moments of a world about to change forever.
That world died at 8:46 a.m.
8:46 AM 8:46 AM At 8:46 a.m., American Airlines Flight 11 hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
The impact was felt all through lower Manhattan. The people in the street below ceased walking. They looked up.
They could see smoke and flames billowing out of the upper floors of the North Tower and they stood there, frozen, trying to comprehend what they were seeing. The instinct was to look for an explanation that made sense – a terrible accident, a small plane, a mechanical failure. Something with a name, and a classification, and an explanation, and something that could be contained.
Seventeen minutes later, United Airlines Flight 175 struck the South Tower.
And at that moment, in offices and living rooms and streets across America, where people had turned their televisions on, the answer they would all been looking for was gone.
It was not an accident.
In Towers,
In the minutes and hours that followed, people inside the towers did what people do when confronted by the unthinkably unthinkable.
They called home.
People wrenched office phones from floors that were spared fire or structural failure and called the people they loved most. Got some calls in. Some got voice mail. Some of these messages are still out there, on answering machines and in the memories of families who have replayed them a thousand times since, clinging to the voice of someone they lost on an ordinary Tuesday morning.
“I love you.” Tell the kids I love them.”
I am all right. “I will get out.
And those words, the last words spoken by lives that should have lasted decades, became some of the most important words in American history. Not heroic in the usual sense, or dramatic, but human. In catastrophe, instinct was not for the grand gesture but for connection, for the particular, irreplaceable people who made ordinary mornings worth getting up for.
Outside the streets of lower Manhattan were filling with thousands of people pouring away from the towers. They were going fast, looking up, trying to see what was going on and how far to go to be safe.
The Ascent People Limited
343 firefighters were heading in, but thousands were coming out of the towers.
And it is the fact that always stops people dead in their tracks, no matter how many times they see it.
343 men climbed stairs in burning high rises.
They came through heat and smoke, through heavy equipment, up dozens of flights of stairs, past people coming down, moving steadily, purposefully, toward the burning floors. They knew the buildings were busted.
They knew the danger was real, and real serious. But they went anyway, because it was what they would have chosen to do, and because there were people above them who needed help, and because in that moment the calculus was so simple.
When the buildings fell down all 343 died.
They are remembered as people, not numbers. Fathers, sons, brothers, husbands, friends. Men who have families. Men who had homes to go back to. ‘Men with futures, with weekend plans. They cost men who died for others that Tuesday morning.
The act is remembered as one of the most remarkable demonstrations of collective courage in American history.
9:59 AM South Tower, Fall.
The collapse lasted for about ten seconds. A building that had taken 28 years to build, that had employed tens of thousands of workers each day, that had dominated the skyline of the world’s most famous city – gone in 10 seconds, leaving a huge cloud of dust and debris rolling through the streets of lower Manhattan.
People ran. The Cloud got ‘em. Strangers huddled in doorways, under awnings, leaning against buildings, faces in their hands, shirts off.
10:28 AM North Tower collapses.
Sleepy, sleepy city never sleeps.
Not the silence of those who are not here. New York was jam-packed. Human beings. Full. Noisy. Full of sirens and voices and the noise of emergency. But beneath all the noise there was something quiet. The usual hum of the mundane, the thrum of a city carrying on, was absent.
There are some mornings in New York that are beyond words.
Not in N.Y.
What happened in New York City on September 11, 2001 didn’t stay in New York City.
9:37 a.m.: American Airlines Flight 77 crashes into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the United States Department of Defense, in Arlington, Virginia. The blast killed 189 people, 64 on the plane and 125 in the building.
10:03 a.m. United Airlines Flight 93 crashes in a field near Shanksville, Penn. Forty passengers and crew of Flight 93 had spoken to relatives and knew what had happened in New York and Washington. They knew precisely what their hijacked plane was to do. They cast their votes. And they fought back .
They burst into the cockpit. That plane went down in that field in Pennsylvania, far away from whatever target the hijackers were aiming for. All 40 crewmen went down with the ship. There are a few live unknowns out there on the ground.
The passengers of Flight 93 are hailed as heroes — ordinary Americans, with no training, no warning and no time to be afraid who chose to act.
2,977
The September 11 attacks killed a total of 2,977 people.
They came from over 90 countries. They were office workers and police officers and firemen and flight attendants and passengers and people who were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. They were young and old, rich and working-class, all walks of life.
They both had plans when they woke up Tuesday morning. waiting for their families to come back home. With futures like futures do when you are alive and have no reason to believe tomorrow will not come.
They are not to be remembered as a number, but for what they were: 2,977 individual, irreplaceable human beings, whose loss is felt every day, for more than twenty years, by those who loved them.
What was left behind
Something happened in New York City and across America in the days and weeks after Sept. 11 that was, in its own way, as remarkable as anything else about that terrible day.
People were nice to one another.
Helping strangers to help strangers. Blood donation centers are surrounded by long lines of people. People from all over the country came to Ground Zero as volunteers. Flags on the window Locations of makeshift memorials, with handwritten notes. A city of speed and noise and constant motion forward. Stopped. Halted. Realized sometimes things matter more than the next place you have to be.
But solidarity was not forever. Not a thing. But it happened and millions of people saw it and it is worth remembering, along with everything else about that day.
Never forget this.
At the World Trade Center site in lower Manhattan, two reflecting pools now sit in the footprints of the towers. The names of the dead are etched in bronze around the edges of the pools at the September 11 Memorial and Museum.
Every Sept. 11, the names are read aloud.
Each and every one of them. 2,977 people are dead.
For ages. But it is finished.
Some things should not be summarized, abbreviated, abstracted. Some losses are so specific you can name them, one by one, in the same voices that would have called them home for dinner, that would have sung happy birthday to them, that miss them still, every single day, more than twenty years later.
2,977 persons
9/11/2001.
Never forget it.
September 11, 2001 · New York, NY · Washington D.C. 2,977 dead · Shanksville, Pennsylvania · 343 firemen. · 90+ countries represented In Honor of the Victims & their Families · Always remembered.
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