The Air That September

Manhattan

I’ll always remember the smoke.  Not the massive black clouds coming from each building following impact, nor the masonry white billows that roared through the streets of Downtown Manhattan after each Tower fell.  These television images (for me and countless others) are more vibrantly remembered, no doubt in horror and desperation, by those who were there at the scene, or in the immediate vicinity.  What I’ll remember, though, is the light gray film, replete with a million black particles, which found its way across the river and into Downtown Brooklyn, where I work.  This evil mist hovered in the Brooklyn air for the better part of the day, and represented the remnants of what will always be the worst possible fire anyone in the City will ever experience.  I’d never seen anything like that constant and unapologetic swirling soot, and I haven’t seen anything like it since.  Which I guess is the prevailing and overriding legacy of that entire day.

The shock of the first moments, when my partner Esty and I first ran to the other side of the fifth floor of our 130 Livingston Street offices, to a waiting television, went away rapidly.  As we viewed the first Tower burning and – moments later – the unbelievable sight of a second plane smashing into the previously unaffected Tower, I recall a brief inner trek through apprehension and fear.  This was followed rather quickly be an indignant snarl that filled my soul.  The very thought of such an attack offset all feelings of personal fear and also outer dread for those who in an eye-blink were doomed.  The thought that from the moment each guided missile met its target, instant death was guaranteed for so many, would come later, along with all the other grief that the images of the coming days would garner.  I remember later thinking that the time that Esty and I had spent running from our desks to the conference room television – about 15 seconds – was probably more time than anyone on the impacted floors in the World Trade Center had to escape.  That was and remains a mind-boggling equation to deal with.

There has been much written about the reaction of New Yorkers’ to these unprecedented attacks, at the time and in the aftermath.  What I can submit, that is, my personal emotions, I feel are absolutely relevant as representative for someone from the City who did not directly lose a loved one that day.  I would never be so foolish or bold as to try and compare my feelings to those who lost someone, as I have seen so many lamely attempt to do since that time.  I’m always amazed how when something high profile occurs anywhere, in a good, bad, wonderful or horrific way, there is a time directly following said event when an incongruous number of people try to associate themselves with the moment at hand.  Being “part of” something is a sort of sick obsession we’ve all seen, if not acknowledged.  Well, I’m not ashamed to say that I’m very happy that I was safely just across the river in Brooklyn, and not in the Trade Center.  But I do pride myself, as someone born and raised in Queens – someone who used Manhattan as part of my childhood playground – as a New Yorker through and through.  I always was, and always will be, a New York City street kid.  And though I wasn’t a brawler myself (I never got in a fistfight, though I broke up hundreds), I respected the law of the City streets.  You settle your arguments one-on-one, with fists and not guns, knives or other weapons.  Only the cowards used weapons.