The New Yorker 9/11 Made Me
Every year, as the anniversary of September 11 approaches, I find myself pulled back to that day. I read survivors’ stories. I seek out every new documentary I can find. I return to footage I’ve seen countless times, watching it unfold again even though I already know every terrible turn the day will take.
I’ve often wondered why. Maybe it’s because I was 19, standing at the threshold of adulthood. Maybe it’s because the Twin Towers had always been part of the landscape of my life. Or maybe it’s because September 11 was the day I first understood how quickly the world could change, and that some things would happen for reasons I would never be able to make sense of.
New York was never an abstract place to me; it was part of my life long before I ever lived there. I grew up in New Jersey with the city skyline always on the horizon, and trips into Manhattan were woven into my childhood. My family went to see the Rockettes during the holidays. School trips took me to Broadway, the Museum of Natural History, and Carnegie Hall. For many people, New York was something glimpsed in movies or imagined from afar, a place they dreamed of visiting someday. To me, it was my backyard.
Family friends across the Hudson River, circa 1988. Photo Credit: Roman Chiminec
On Tuesday, September 11, many of my friends had only recently left home for schools in New York—some at NYU, others at Pratt. I had stayed closer to home, beginning my freshman year in New Jersey. That morning, I woke to the news that a plane had hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
Less than half an hour later, I watched the second plane hit the South Tower. In that instant, any hope that the first had been an accident disappeared. My friends were in New York, and suddenly I was terrified for them. I called again and again, but couldn’t get through.
I stayed in front of the television as the morning became increasingly unimaginable. I was 19, watching something I had no frame of reference for, realizing that whatever the world had been when I woke up, it would not be the same by the time I went to bed.
Then the first tower collapsed.
I watched as it disappeared into an enormous cloud of smoke that swallowed the streets of lower Manhattan. Less than half an hour later, the second tower fell. The two buildings that had anchored the skyline of my childhood were gone.
It all happened so fast. My grandparents had seen the towers burning from across the river during their morning walk. By the time they got into their car and drove home, both were gone.
Photos of the 9/11 attacks taken by USA Today photographer Tim Dillon from the New Jersey reservation where my grandparents were that morning.
People say there was a world before September 11 and a world after it. For me, there was also the person I was before that morning and the person I became after it. Until then, I had simply assumed that people went to work and came home. That planes took off and landed safely. That buildings that had stood for decades would still be there tomorrow.
At 19, I learned how quickly the things we take for granted can disappear. I learned that terrible things could happen without warning and that sometimes there was nothing you could do to stop them.
Twenty-five years later, I am still trying to make sense of what I learned that morning.
On Saturday, September 15, I went into Manhattan to meet a friend who was attending Pratt. Outside St. Vincent’s Hospital, people lined up to donate blood. The city was quieter than usual. The horns, shouting, and constant rush I’d always associated with New York had given way to lowered voices and stilled streets.
We made our way to Union Square, which had become a gathering place for the families and friends of the missing. Photographs and handwritten fliers covered lampposts, fences, and walls. My friend and I moved slowly from one to the next, reading as many as we could.
Union Square, September 2001
These weren’t formal portraits. They were snapshots of people in the middle of their lives—holding their children, standing beside their parents, laughing with friends, celebrating birthdays, posing on vacation. We read each description, each plea for information, trying to reconcile the faces in front of us with the numbers we had been hearing all week.
Union Square, September 2001
That Saturday, I saw New York in the depths of its grief. Two years later, I would call it home.
I moved to New York City in September 2003, while the city was still rebuilding and reminders of September 11 were everywhere. The firehouse closest to my apartment on East 47th Street, home to Engine 8, Ladder 2, and Battalion 8, had lost ten members that day. Their names were memorialized outside, and I passed them almost every day as I settled into my new life in the city.
Engine 8, Ladder 2, and Battalion 8
Across the FDNY, 343 firefighters had been killed, but walking past those ten names made the loss feel personal and close to home. They were men who had run toward the towers while others fled. I thought about that whenever I saw their names.
FDNY in the stairwell on 9/11
Downtown, Ground Zero was still an open wound in the city. I would pass the site where the towers had once stood and look into the enormous void they had left behind. Over the years, I watched it slowly begin to change.
I lived in New York for 17 years, from 21 to 38. I left in 2020, but after spending nearly my entire adult life there, the city had become part of who I was. I still consider myself a New Yorker, and I always will.
I was 19 when I watched New York endure the unthinkable, and 21 when I moved there and began building a life of my own. In the years that followed, I watched the city rebuild. Ground Zero changed. A new building rose. Life moved forward, as it always does. But the city never forgot what happened there.
And neither did I.
When I think about New York after September 11, I think about the spirit of the people who carried it through. In the days after the attacks, strangers took care of strangers. They handed out food and water, gave blood, searched for the missing, and found whatever ways they could to be useful. In a city of millions accustomed to passing one another on the street, suddenly everyone felt like a neighbor.
Paul McCartney organized The Concert for New York City at Madison Square Garden to honor first responders and raise $35 million for relief efforts.
And then, slowly, New York began to live again. Broadway reopened. People returned to work, descended into subway stations, crowded sidewalks, and went about the ordinary business of being New Yorkers. The city did not move on from what had happened; it learned how to move forward with it.
In the wake of the attacks, Milton Glaser added the words “more than ever” and a bruised heart to the ubiquitous logo.
That, to me, is the particular strength of New York City. It can carry an unimaginable amount of grief without allowing that grief to define it. It remembers what it has lost while continuing to make room for what comes next.
On September 11, I watched the worst of humanity. In the days that followed, I saw the best.
Maybe that is part of why, every September, I return to that day.
I look at photographs of the skyline I knew as a child, with the towers standing exactly where I remember them. I think about the people who woke up that morning believing it was an ordinary Tuesday: the passengers and crew members who boarded four flights, the firefighters and police officers who went to work, the thousands of people who sat down at their desks, made phone calls, drank coffee, and began another day at the office.
I want to remember them.
September 11 changed the way I understood the world. It taught me, at an impressionable age, how suddenly life could change and how little control any of us have over what comes next.
But New York taught me something else in the years that followed: how people take care of one another, how a city carries its grief, and how life continues without leaving behind what was lost.
Twenty-five years later, I still cannot make sense of what happened that morning. Maybe I never will.
But I can remember.
And I always will.
9/11 Memorial