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Dispatch From New York: The World Trade Center Falls

Jodi Kantor
Posted Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001, at 11:36 AM ET

I live in Brooklyn, just over two miles, one bridge, and six stories from the base of the World Trade Center. Normally I have a picture-perfect view of the World Trade Center--it's the highlight of the tour of our one-bedroom apartment--but this is what my fiancé and I see now: first, ashy gray smoke billowing over Brooklyn. (The television shows the sky north of Houston Street calm and blue. But here, in the path of the smoke, there's a V-shaped, charcoal-colored cloud splitting the sky, with a little of the regular morning blue around the edges.) Second, people posted on rooftops across the neighborhood. And beyond that: nothing. The entire jungle gym of lower Manhattan is blocked by what looks like a severe fog.

The view right now is terrifying, but it will be even scarier when the smoke clears, and we see the two totems gone.

All morning, the feeling around here has been: It's worse than you think. Every nauseating shock is followed by a more severe aftershock. First there was the tap on my shoulder at the gym, pulling me away from my paper and toward the bank of TV screens. Then I sprinted home to find my fiancé in shocked tears: He had watched with his own eyes as the second plane headed up the Hudson toward the Twin Towers--Why are they allowing planes in that air space? he wondered--and hit. Since then, we have been sitting on our couch, watching the same picture in duplicate: out the window and on the TV screen. When the first tower slid down, we actually felt our building rumble. And we're separated from Manhattan by New York Harbor.

Ron ran out briefly for groceries, thinking that we'd be hunkered down at home for the next few days (Slate's New York office is in the Chrysler Building, which was shut down shortly after the attack.) He says that everyone on the street exchanged eye contact; nobody spoke. I don't know which is more unusual for New York.

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Jodi Kantor is Slate's New York editor.
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Reader Comments From The Fray:


 Our hearts and prayers go out to the victims and families of this tragic event. We can all help with our continued prayers that our world leaders have the strength to master civilized discussions in order to overcome this type of dispair.

Anger and revenge are wasteful. Only peace prevails.

Call your local hospital, Red Cross office or mall to donate blood or services for those who were physically injured--as we have all been mentally affected--we must care for our neighbors.

--Robbin Gulino

(To reply, click here.)


 I stayed at my desk this morning putting out emergency web updates and installing new software as a touchstone of ordinariness. Finally I couldn't take the news any longer and went outside. Marshalls were outside the building waving traffic past the parking sites. Pedestrians looked at each other helplessly or sympathetically. A security guard said the one-two plane crash was predicted in their counter-terrorist training...the intent was to draw emergency workers into the initial wreckage then decimate them. I am unable to formulate anything. I talk to my wife, and am choked up. The kids are safe in school, I am at risk in a government building, my wife is in the chapel in the retirement home where she works praying for the thousands dead.

This is the war that has been celebrated and mythologized so ardently for the past few years. This is the war. When Oppenheimer saw the flash of the Trinity explosion, he quoted the Vedas "I am become the destroyer of worlds." Our world really did end today. Who destroyed it? We don't even know. Yukon said [in The Fray, here] we are on the threshold of a new kind of war, and this is a stunning, staggering demonstration of the reality behind that concept.

--Zeitguy

(To reply, click here.)


I work in the U.S. Embassy [in La Paz, Bolivia]...So, we have emptied out our embassy and explained to our Bolivian staff that no-one is certain what has happened but we were not a target. Just to be sure, though, everyone can go home for the rest of the day and the next day too. A number of us, considered "essential," are still here. I suppose, the essential few are wondering like me about how a normal day turned into something unexpected. Think of all those people at the World Trade Center, on flights to the west coast, at the Pentagon and in the U.S. government offices in Washington, DC--or even in tall buildings across the country which were evacuated. I'm sure they are like us. Familiar surroundings no longer feel as safe as they could be and no one knows exactly how to verbalize that feeling.

Televisions are on wherever they can be found in our building. This is our main source of information since our normal sources of information left with the evacuation of the government office buildings in Washington. Although not expressed, in the back of our minds we are all thankful that we are not the people in the news. That it is not our building billowing smoke and our friends bleeding and dying or burned. But it could have been and could be. Try to live with that in your everyday life and you will understand a little more about the people who work overseas to represent the United States. Terrorism is a daily reality for us overseas. Is it for you now too?

--Ray Tripp

(To reply, click here.)

 (9/11)


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