Where Were You On September 11, 2001?

The "Where Were You" question is one asked frequently when a person recalls a profound, memorable or life changing moment or event. It is asked for a wide array of situations, ranging from devastation to celebration.

With the eighth anniversary of the attacks on New York's World Trade Center, Washington, D.C.'s Pentagon, and the ill-fated attempt on The White House (the plane crashed in Pennsylvania) just a couple of days away, it is time again to ask "Where Were You?" when you first heard about or saw these devastating events take place.

Personally, I was heading to New York City when I first found out that "something was wrong." At the time, I was working at NYU (New York University) in downtown Manhattan, just a couple of miles north of what is now termed "Ground Zero." I was heading west on a Long Island Railroad (LIRR)train. (My wife and I have since moved to Pennsylvania, by the way). About 20 minutes outside of Manhattan, from Queens County, someone on the train said, "Check out The World Trade Center." With that, we looked out the window to see smoke billowing from one of the towers. By the time the train got to Manhattan, another plane had struck Tower Two.

From Penn Station, the hub for the LIRR in Midtown Manhattan, I had to take a subway downtown to work, just three stops away. As I got on the car, the conductor said that the car would not be stopping at The World Trade Center "due to fire," still no indication of what had happened. When I got off the subway at West 3rd Street, a few blocks from NYU, things were unusually quiet. Fewer people were talking and there were not yet the sounds of emergency vehicles filling the air as they would just shortly thereafter.

I walked down West 3rd Street and as I turned south, I could see the Twin Towers dominating the sky as they always did, but now with smoke billowing from both. I stopped at one of my usual breakfast venues. I took a corner table and watched the television that the owner had perched above the counter. It was here that I first realized what happened. Here was the surreal part for me: from my seat, I could look at the tv and see the replay of the planes hitting the Towers........and if I craned my head just a little, I could look out the window and see the actual Towers in the aftermath of the collision.

I went to work where, of course, everyone had radios and websites on. Telephone service was out because the phone company's main cables were in the Towers. Eventually, both Towers fell, but it didn't register with me immediately. I first thought the newspeople meant the tv antenna on top of one of the Towers. Then denial was replaced by reality, but shock still won out.

We left work in the early afternoon. I had no way to get back to Long Island. The Long Island Railroad train service was suspended. Thank goodness, my girlfriend, who is now my wife, lived uptown and I had a place to stay. This lead to the next surreal scene. Usually, New York City streets look so small with so many cars on them. However, because all cars were ordered off the roads, especially south of 14th Street, the roads looked huge and the sidewalks, which are crowded on a "normal" day, were packed! It was along these sidewalks that I walked from West 4th Street to West 42nd Street, where the subways were permitted to run uptown.

The memories of that day are still rather fresh and vivid. Personally, I will not forget the day's events and I was one of the lucky ones who did not lose a friend or relative. I can only imagine what this anniversary does to them.