As a New Yorker, I experienced the chaos, confusion, and silence of that day firsthand—this is my account
It’s hard to believe that 24 years have passed since 9/11—a day that changed the nation and the world. On each anniversary, I always find myself remembering not only the enormous impact and tragedy of that day, but also the people—friends, colleagues, strangers—whose lives were forever changed.
For me, the incident isn’t just a moment in history; it’s something I lived through as a New Yorker, step by step, block by block.
In honor of the anniversary, I want to share my personal story of that day and how it unfolded in real time—not as history, but as memory. Since I’m writing this from memory, my timeline might be a little inaccurate, but everything else is as it occurred.
So here is my account of September 11th, presented in the hope that personal memories can help keep the human side of history alive.
June, 2001
Breakfast with destiny.
My September 11th story actually begins three months before 9/11. At the time I was the editor-in-chief of Incentive magazine and Vivian Deuschl, who was then the global VP of public relations for Ritz-Carlton, was in our offices on 8th St. and Broadway, about a couple of miles north of the World Trade Center. She was there to promote the upcoming opening of a new Ritz-Carlton located by the Twin Towers. On that day she invited me to a breakfast for select consumer travel and business travel journalists. The GM of the new property was going to attend along with some top executives from Ritz-Carlton. Of course I accepted the invitation and I made a note of it on my desktop calendar.
All summer long this calendar entry loomed on my desk:
September 11: 8:00 a.m.
Windows on the World—Ritz-Carlton Breakfast.
August, 2001
A twist of fate.
Around the last week of August, I got a call from Vivian. Two of the top executives suddenly had a scheduling conflict so they were going to have to push the breakfast back a week. I said fine and thought nothing of it, not realizing that those two executives just saved my life.
About a day later, Donna Oldenburg, then the publisher of Incentive, came into my office and asked if I could fly to Chicago and take her place moderating a panel—on September 11th. That date was also the day we had to send all the files for the October issue of Incentive to the printer. Normally I would not leave town on “closing day,” but I had confidence in the ability of my staff and my publisher was in a jam, so I said sure and booked an 11 AM flight out of LaGuardia Airport on that date.
8:15 a.m., September 11, 2001
A flight that never happened.
I woke up on the morning of September 11th, turned on the TV to listen to the news and started getting ready to leave for the airport. Just as I was about to turn off the TV and leave, the first report came in about a plane hitting the North Tower. Of course I thought it was awful, but local news anchors didn’t immediately make a terrorist connection. They were just reporting it as a tragic accident. I phoned the airline (it was American) but the line was busy. I tried a few times but couldn’t get through, all the while the TV was showing me just how serious this “accident” was. After a while I decided that no planes were leaving from LaGuardia today.
8:55 a.m., September 11, 2001
A final moment of blissful ignorance.
I started my commute to work. I lived on the Upper East Side of Manhattan (still do) about 80 blocks north of 8th St. and Broadway so I walked over to the Lexington Avenue Subway at 86th Street. By the time I got there, the South Tower had just been hit. But the digital age was still in its infancy in those days. We weren’t as connected to news and events the way we are today and nobody walking around on 86th St. was aware the South Tower had also been hit. The only clue was a constant orchestra of sirens wailing in the background as emergency vehicles headed downtown. But, this being New York, that’s something that a native like me easily dismisses.
9:10 a.m., September 11, 2001
The commute from hell.
I boarded a train almost immediately. It was packed so I was jammed in with a ton of other New Yorkers who by that hour would have already been late for work even if it were a normal day. Everything went fine for the first two stops, but then the system began to crawl. We were stuck in the tunnel for prolonged periods between each station. No one in my car made any connection between this delay and what was going on at the World Trade Center. Occasionally someone would let out a frustrated groan, but it was directed at this being just a typical day on the New York City subway.
10:10 a.m., September 11, 2001
Wild in the streets.
When we reached Grand Central Station, the conductor told everyone that downtown service was being halted. He made no mention of the fact that by this time both towers had been struck by planes and one had collapsed—just that the entire subway system was being shut down. We all left the subway still thinking that only one tower had been hit “accidentally” and was on fire.
On the street, again the sounds of sirens blaring filled the air. People were running in all directions, well not all directions, just north, east and west. No one was going south—except me. I was at 42nd St. and Park Avenue South, still 34 blocks away from my office. Incredibly, I ran into someone I knew. Mike Tierno, the husband of Judy Quinn, a former co-worker of mine, was heading north. To the best of my recollection our frantic encounter went like this:
Mike: Vinnie! Man, this is messed up!
Me: Yeah. I’m gonna have to walk the rest of the way to work.
Mike: You’re still heading downtown? That might not be a good idea.
Me: We’re closing the issue today. I need to be there.
Mike: Okay, be careful though. Stay safe.
Then Mike ran off. Not knowing that this was a terrorist attack and one of the towers had collapsed, I thought he was overreacting. In fact I thought everyone around me was overreacting. I bobbed and weaved my way around a steady stream of people heading north that got increasingly thicker the further south I went until finally around 23rd St. it was like a wall of people leaving a sports stadium after a game. Some of them were even crying. I actually started getting a little annoyed. “What’s wrong with these people? So one of the towers is on fire, that’s nothing to fall apart over,” I thought to myself.
You might think I would have noticed the towers were missing, but the avenues of New York have often been described as canyons of tall buildings and that’s completely accurate. When you are standing on a street or avenue in Manhattan you are essentially in the bottom of a canyon. It wasn’t uncommon to not see the Twin Towers despite how tall they were. I did see billows of smoke high up in the sky but I just assumed that was from the fire in the North Tower. And the idea that the Towers could actually collapse, well before it happened, it was just inconceivable.
11:00 a.m., September 11, 2001
“The Towers are gone!”
At last, I reached 8th St. The air smelled like an electrical fire and it had a strange orange tint. I thought it was smoke, but it was actually silt from all the debris that had been thrown into the atmosphere a couple of miles to the south. As I entered my building, one of the administrative assistants who worked at my company brushed past me with an anguished look on her face. (I later learned that her husband was missing but he turned out to be okay.)
I got to the floor where Incentive’s offices were and I found my staff gathered around a small TV in the art department. I said to no one in particular: “Has everyone gone crazy? So a plane hit the World Trade Center, what’s the big deal?”
My staff looked at me like I was insane. Our Executive Editor, Joanie Steinauer said, “Vinnie! The Towers are gone!”
That’s how I found out the horrifying magnitude of what had happened. Tracy McCaffery, our art director, was on the phone with a member of her family. There were tears in her eyes. No one in her family could get in touch with one of her cousins who worked in one of the Towers. (It was later confirmed that her cousin was one of the victims.) I told Tracy to go home, that we would handle the close of the issue without her.
12:00 p.m., September 11, 2001
Nose to the grindstone.
Not long after that, the news reported that all public transportation had been shut down and nothing was leaving Manhattan. Images of armies of people walking across every bridge connected to Manhattan accompanied the announcement. Every member of my staff lived in one of the outer boroughs of the city, so they all had a long walk to get home. I told them all to go home and I would handle sending the rest of the files for the October issue to the printer.
This was long before print was dead and our average issue was about 125 pages. Not bad for a niche B2B trade publication. But this was the October issue, our big show issue, so it was well over 200 pages. (The show wasn’t IMEX America, which didn’t exist at that time. It was its predecessor, IT&ME.) Sending the files was always a complex job that involved final proofing of hard copy galleys, inputting any needed changes, uploading and finally transmitting files via phone lines to our printer in West Virginia. It was a time-consuming job under normal circumstances with a full staff. By myself it took me until almost midnight. We usually had a 5 PM deadline, but the folks in West Virginia stayed with me until the last file was sent.
11:30 p.m., September 11, 2001
The walking wounded.
As I left the building, I noticed the sirens had stopped. The city was eerily silent. I walked the 70+ blocks home on streets that were deserted of people as well as cars. It was a Tuesday around midnight so Broadway should have still been active with cars, but there wasn’t a single vehicle. I walked up Broadway in the middle of the street. It was kind of like being in a zombie apocalypse movie. I wouldn’t see the city like this again until the pandemic 20 years later. At 14th St., Broadway begins to veer towards the West Side so I went over to Third Avenue and continued uptown, again walking unimpeded in the middle of the street.
Around 20th St., suddenly a city bus startled me when it pulled up beside me. The driver opened the door and said, “C’mon.” I boarded and began searching my pockets for the fare. But he waved his hand and said, “Forget it. Just let me know when to drop you off.” There were about half a dozen other people on the bus. We rode north in complete silence, broken only when someone shouted, “Let me off here.” We picked up a couple more stragglers along the way until it was my turn to get off.
12:15 a.m., September 12, 2001
Destination Unknown.
I walked the final four blocks to my apartment along deserted streets; alone in my thoughts. My journey had been a series of cancelled plans and failed trips: the postponed breakfast at Windows on the World—my cancelled flight to Chicago—my aborted subway ride to work—my trek against the tide of the fleeing crowd—my silent bus ride home. I should have felt relieved but I didn’t. By the time I entered my apartment it was September 12th. September 11th was over—and so was the world that I had previously known.
Any thoughts, opinions, or news? Please share them with me at vince@meetingsevents.com.
Photo by Doug Welty, FEMA, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
