September 11, 2021 – Twenty years later and I’m sure all of us remember where we were, what we were doing, how we felt when the terrorist attacks began.

I was living in San Francisco

That year I was also suffering from insomnia, probably related mostly to work stress. Whatever the reason, I got up early every day, 5 or 5:30. First thing I always did was put the coffee on, then immediately switch on my desktop computer to the home page which for me, at the time, was Yahoo News.

I remember seeing a blurb about a plane crashing into one of the WTC towers. I assumed it was a small plane, pilot error kind of thing, initially didn’t give it much thought. Once the coffee was ready and I refreshed the page, the blurb got progressively bigger on that flickering screen and I decided to turn on my television.

I saw the crash of the second plane into the WTC live on TV as millions of others did and the rest of the day is kind of a blur. Eventually, I rode my bike into work down in SOMA, but probably didn’t do much.

Flight 93

I was familiar with United Flight 93. It was a great flight if you were on a business trip coming back from New York because the non-stop got into San Francisco mid-morning and you still had practically the whole day. I’d taken it a number of times, and had a reservation on that very flight two weeks later on September 25, 2001. Of course, that ended up being cancelled as well as the entire trip it was for.

Thinking about the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, I remembered that I wrote out my impressions of visiting Ground Zero in December, 2001, almost three months after the attacks but long before the site had been “cleaned” entirely.

I was in New York for the convention that had been postponed from September. I mainly wrote these for family members (hence the reference to SF and to Milwaukee, where I grew up).

What I heard, what I saw, what I felt, what it was like.

Notes on Ground Zero, December 2001

Took C Train subway down 8^th Avenue which stopped at Chambers St. downtown. When we walked up the stairs to street level, first thing I noticed was muddy grey dust all over and that kind of smell in the air you often smell at a construction site (concrete?). Also, there was a burning smell you sometimes got a whiff of.  It was a gray day but very warm for Dec. 2, probably mid-50s, probably warmer than SF.

I followed the crowd down the block and we made a right turn down Broadway. On the right you could see the cranes and an immense (I would say, 6 or 7 stories high) pile of rubble that had a lot of girders and steel twisted in circles, like pretzels. I think this was the 47-story building that collapsed late in the afternoon of September 11.

Walking further, I got stuck in the Sunday crowd, which was stopped at an intersection where a large wooden barrier had been erected, like the kind that normally surrounds a construction site. On the barrier were signs, pictures, notes, banners from elementary school children, flowers, incense, baseball caps, ribbons, balloons, candles and other memorial-type items. The crowd there was alternately reading the memorials and trying to take pictures of the devastation beyond, or taking pictures posing with the police officers who were guarding access to the WTC site.

That barrier was adjacent to the building used as a staging area for the rescue/recovery volunteers, so I was able to see them reporting for work or leaving, or getting food and coffee. Lots of people with disposable coffee cups. The sidewalks downtown there are not as wide as some other areas of Manhattan, so there was a lot of pedestrian gridlock. There was a general quietness to the people, not really a hush, but you could overhear parents telling their kids what had happened here, describing the two buildings that were destroyed, and other conversations were about September 11 and what was remembered about that morning.

I walked past Trinity Church which was intact and no longer looked even dusty. Looking in the other direction down Wall Street, I could see the NY Stock Exchange just a block or so away. It is remarkable that it reopened just a few days after the attacks, as it is about 4 blocks away from Ground Zero and these are short, very old streets/blocks and I imagine that the ubiquity of huge stone/brick buildings shielded that area from raining debris.

I walked west on the street adjacent to Trinity Church, and several of these east-west streets are now ripped up for subway repair, as the tunnels under the WTC collapsed and all have to be rebuilt. So these streets were covered with enormous timbers, which is what I remember from Metrorail construction along Wilshire Boulevard and Vermont Ave. in L.A. when they were building the subway there. Also, there were a number of rat poison bait-contraptions placed against buildings. I imagine that many downtown rats were displaced by the destruction, and I wonder if being a rat was an advantage that day, if scurrying about in the dark below ground was a ticket to survival. (OK, I am kind of weird, but you know that already.)

From that vantage point, you were mostly free of the crowds and the strollers, because the access was over wooden planks and loose asphalt and harder to get to. I could see fire department hoses shooting streams of water onto the pile of rubble mentioned earlier – not sure if the buildings are still on fire, but I can’t imagine why they would be watering it if not. Some windows in that collapsed building were intact.

Of the WTC itself, all I could see from behind police barriers was that section of the façade still standing which you see in all the news photos. It’s about 3 or 4 stories high and appears to be a corner of one of the buildings – I think south tower. I believe they are going to preserve it as part of a memorial which is why it is still standing.

My final vantage point was from an overpass-type area on West Street (the street that eventually runs along the Hudson River) looking north (so my walk was almost in a circle) and from there I saw the rubble trucks leaving the destruction zone. They were like huge dump trucks and were stopped at the checkpoint and washed down. (Perhaps to get the dust off? So much dust..) I also saw an ambulance leave with lights flashing, no siren, wondering if it was carrying body parts or what. What else would be there almost 3 months after the fact?

What you don’t see on the news is the circle of devastation around the WTC. There is a big hole there, as those two buildings are just gone, but there are enormous structures adjacent, probably bigger than almost any buildings in Milwaukee or SF, that have enormous gashes in them, corners knocked off, evidence of fire, and windows blown out. These have been vacated and reminded me of red-tagging after an earthquake. The circle beyond those buildings is lesser damage, with a number of skyscrapers actually being covered in what looks like tarps – I expect that is so windows and other loose stuff doesn’t rain down into the street. Beyond that, you have the street level, and all the shops that would normally be there – pizza joints, dry cleaners, groceries, hair salons, etc. just shuttered and closed. There is dust everywhere, and those streets are very quiet.

My last view of this was from the Rainbow Room on the 65^th Floor of Rockefeller Center, where I went with (note: my aunt, who died in 2013 at 92) Joan Arnold for a drink (well, mineral water!) before dinner. From uptown there you could see what looked like a hole in the ground with light rising up from a pit. They work on cleaning up 24 hours a day. I think they have still only recovered a few hundred bodies out of about 3,000.

New York around Rockefeller Center and the Dolby office and my hotel (both on 55^th Street near 5^th Avenue) seemed mostly normal to me. The big stores have their Christmas windows in, the shoppers were out, and the lights were festive. The skaters and the tree at RC were just as I remember them from other times there at this time of year.

The saddest thing for me to see in NY this trip were the fire station houses you would walk past, all having memorials outside of them and pictures of the firefighters from that station who died that day. These were everywhere and unavoidable. Yet at the same time, there was the usual sirens and careening through the streets of fire and police trucks, the only difference being that the vehicles now fly big American flags.

I was glad to see it, happy to be back in NY, happy to fly again. I can already tell that people are starting to let their guard down a little, which I don’t think bodes well, but you have to live your life too, and it makes no sense to go about worrying about things you cannot control.

• Jim Arnold, 2001.