Remembrances from 9/12

A quarter century after the devastating attack on September 11th, a journalist recalls and reflects on reporting downtown the following day, September 12th.

Though it was a gorgeous autumn day, West Broadway was devoid of people. There was a film of white dust on the parked cars, and one Volkswagen was upside down, but in a parked space. So everything seemed sort of normal about a dozen blocks north of the hellscape of Ground Zero, and yet not.

It had been less than 24 hours since the Twin Towers were shockingly demolished by a pair of hijacked jets. Though I was then the features editor in the entertainment department of the New York Daily News, I had volunteered for the all-hands-on-deck coverage team to report on the crisis, and was looking for stories downtown.

I had been in media circles for more than a decade as an editor and writer, and had reported on international conferences and written for national publications. But this was my first assignment covering a disaster — and certainly nothing prepared me (or anyone else) for the ghastly magnitude of the story.

New York Harbor, before 9/11.

BEYOND THE BARRICADE

I left the Daily News office at West 33rd and 10th mid-morning, with a camera, a reporter’s notebook, and a pen. (It was 2001, and I was late on owning a cellphone.) I walked to 23rd and 7th, where the police had established a barricade, preventing non-residents from advancing further south.

I flashed my Daily News staff badge, but that didn’t seem to be sufficient to get past the officers manning the barricade. Then a car with two journalists from rival newspaper Newsday approached, saw me struggling with the cops, and told them, “He’s with us.” I hopped in the back and we headed downtown.

They dropped me off around Canal and West Broadway, and I started walking south. The scene was surreal in that everything looked, for the most part, as usual and the weather was perfect, yet there was hardly a soul in sight. One exception was a mother with a baby in a stroller, both wearing masks (about two decades before that would be commonplace during the pandemic).

On the deserted streets, I came upon an ID card, lying on the sidewalk. It had a color photo of a 30-ish African American man. I immediately got goosebumps, imagining that the card had been blown from one of the towers and landed here, now about nine blocks north of the impact site. Or perhaps it had belonged to someone understandably fleeing from the disaster. I picked up the card and, at the time concerned that the person would be able to recover it, placed it on the ground-floor window ledge of a building on West Broadway.

I didn’t take a picture of it, and, journalistically worse, I didn’t write down the name on the ID card in my notebook. In a four-decade career in journalism, that is the 101 error I most regret. Maybe it was because it seemed like everything was happening in slow motion, but I feel like I failed that individual, denied him his story. I walked on.

I came across the FDNY station for the combined Engine 7 / Ladder Company 1 on Duane Street. Firefighter John McConnachie was part of the crew that was likely the first to respond to the emergency, as it was just seven blocks away. As I was interviewing McConnachie for details about his experience, he was also peppering me with questions. After having been fully immersed in the emergency response for 24 hours, he had just returned from Ground Zero and was anxious for news or context. (Remember, this was the pre-smartphone era.)

Pat Zoda, another firefighter in that battalion, recalled the apocalyptic scene at the now-collapsed towers. In response to my inquiries, he noted there were “burning bodies in the lobby. There were limbs by themselves. Air pressure must have come down the elevator banks and blown out all the lobby windows. Whoever was around perished.”

Zoda, McConnachie, and fellow firefighter Steve Rogers shared other horrific details — their efforts to reach office workers trapped above the 80th floor in the North Tower had reached as high as the 30th floor when they heard a massive explosion: the second jet hitting the South Tower. They immediately started heading back to the lobby. They took long pauses as they recalled other moments they thought they themselves wouldn’t survive. “I lost my mask,” recalled Zoda, “there was dust in my mouth and caked in my eyes and nose. We saw the dust coming toward us — we all thought we were dead.” Rogers, who had punctured his hand on a nail in the black fog, noted that “My helmet was knocked off by debris — it was pitch black and I started walking quickly. I found an engine, got in, closed the windows, and waited.”

But miraculously, everyone from that station made it. It happened to be the same station that the French Naudet brother documentarians were shadowing for a film about a rookie firefighter, which then transitioned into the documentary “9/11.”

AN AWFUL CALL

Still trying to make sense of their experiences, I started heading back to the Daily News offices to file the story about the courageous and lucky firehouse. When I got to West and Chambers streets, I saw an EMT worker on the corner. David Langer was a Hatzolah medic, and was still somewhat in a state of shock. He had yesterday morning gotten a call from his good friend, a vice president at Fiduciary Trust Co. International, who was trapped on the 97th floor of 2 World Trade Center. (I’m leaving out his name here to keep from stirring painful memories for his family by resurfacing his name in search, but the story, like the firehouse story above, can be found in the NY Daily News archives.)

“He called me and said he was having trouble breathing,” Langer shared. “He asked what he should do. I told him to wet a towel or his T-shirt and breathe through something thin like that.” Conditions worsened, and his friend and five similarly trapped colleagues started calling their loved ones to say their goodbyes. Langer sped to his friend’s Brooklyn home to comfort his wife and family and, while they were all on the phone, they heard a final scream, the line went dead, and then the tower collapsed.

There were thousands of such grim and painful stories that day, in New York, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania. (A decade later, I learned that I had lost another friend that day — a New Jersey middle school classmate with whom I had lost touch — again keeping his name private). As a media organization, it was our responsibility to capture the stories: of heroes, of victims, of New Yorkers, and I was in awe of my Daily News colleagues and their professionalism and skill in the coverage of the attack. With leadership from news and city editors Rick Pienciak and Dean Chang, stirring “violin” pieces (summary mood snapshots weaving together a coverage overview) by Corky Siemaszko, and the renowned award-winning photography of the NYDN photo team, including Todd Maisel, David Handschuh, Susan Watts, and others.

But the journalistic moment I’ll remember most is the one I failed to properly record.

This remembrance was written by Brooklyn Story Lab CEO Lance Gould.