Twenty Years Later, I Can Still Hear It

The First World Trade Center Attack: Friday, February 26, 1993

I can still remember it.

I was at work, in an aging Art Deco building a couple of blocks south of the World Trade Center.  Suddenly:  A shudder, and a muffled explosion, jolting our office on the 25th floor.

Twenty years ago this morning.

My desk faced north, and it was as if a sonic boom had rolled our building backwards, and then forwards. Just for the briefest of moments.  I can still hear it.  In a city full of noise and distraction, this was utterly unique.

Our office's lights went out.  Down the hall, cables clanged in the elevator shafts, like somebody was trying to ring old church bells in a steeple.  Computers went dead.

It all happened so fast, we didn’t have time to be scared. Our desktops clicked and beeped back to life, florescent ceiling lights flickered back on, fax machines that had been in mid-transmission began squawking error messages, and alarm bells from the elevators started ringing.

And of course, a chorus of muttered expletives erupted from co-workers who, like me, did not welcome this disconcerting setback. It was lunchtime. It was also Friday, invoice day, and billables needed to go out the door. Crashed computers and jammed fax machines were even less tolerated than on a normal day.

As we rebooted our computers and somebody reset the fax machines, we wondered aloud at what had happened. Did something blow up in our building, a 30-story pre-war tower perched along the Hudson River in Lower Manhattan? Maybe there was a massive wreck at the entrance to the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, which snaked by the entrance to our building? Nah, it was probably stupid Con-Ed’s fault, New York’s problem-prone power provider; one of their steam pipes probably blew.

And being New York City, where one worries little about what you can’t see, and even less about why it might be important, we went back to work. As I’ve said before, New York life is lived in inches. Your power's coming back on? Then get a move on!

So we were only marginally curious when the office manager in the next-door law firm came over, and invited us to come take a look out their north-facing windows.

“All this black smoke is coming out of the Trade Center garage,” she informed us.

Located four blocks south of the World Trade Center (WTC), our office building's north face gazed up West Street, straight towards the Twin Towers.

Sure enough, from the law firm's office, looking due north as the street below us curved slightly, we saw thick, sooty smoke billowing out of the entrance to the Trade Center's parking garage. Not just puffs of gray, but heavy, charcoal-colored plumes.

And true to the New Yorkness of the moment, cars continued to plow through the smoke as it blew across West Street. Pedestrians still plied the sidewalks and crosswalks, more concerned about dodging traffic than the smoke which must have been making their eyes water. We could hear sirens, though, and within moments, a couple of police cars rolled up the street.

They were the first of what we'd later learn would be a massive turnout of first responders to the first terrorist attack on the Twin Towers.

Lunch Brake

With a brownout imposed by Con-Ed across the Financial District taking away our computers, my co-workers and I decided to take an early lunch.  Maybe full power would be back in an hour or so.  Since it was a bitter, snowy day, they ordered lunch from a greasy diner down the block and had it delivered, but I wanted to see what was going on at the WTC.  I strolled up to the two-story Burger King on Liberty Street, across from the WTC, which is still in business.  Eerily enough, this same Burger King where I had lunch twenty years ago today would narrowly miss being destroyed on 9/11.  The police turned its ashen dining rooms into their temporary command post on that fateful day.

Liberty Street's Burger King after 9/11

Although the streets outside were choked with emergency vehicles by the time I arrived for lunch, everything seemed normal inside the Burger King, until after I started to eat.  I looked around the dining room, and at the next table, I noticed several young women huddled over hot teas and coffees. They had no coats on this frigid day, and their blouses were dingy gray. Their hair had fine soot on it, and their faces looked like they had been hastily washed, maybe in the Burger King's bathroom?

Turns out, they had been evacuated from one of the towers, with not even enough time to go and get their coats from a nearby closet. They had broken into a sweat while trudging down what seemed like miles of emergency stairs, they had frozen when hustling across the open plaza at the base of the towers, and they were coughing from all of the soot they’d inhaled both inside and outside the buildings.

Something really bad was taking place right across the street!

After lunch, and wishing the Damsels in Distress success in finding a way back to their homes in New Jersey, I still had some time before trying back at the office to see if our computers were working again.  I walked down to the Bankers Trust tower, a black steel skyscraper that, having been rechristened the Deutsche Bank building by 9/11, was irreparably damaged during the second attack on the WTC.

On this February afternoon, throngs of people had gathered on an outdoor mezzanine along that charmless bank headquarters, looking quietly to the Trade Center, their chilled faces marked by bewilderment and pensiveness.

I turned to follow their gaze.

Snow, Smoke, and Soot

And there I saw them. 

Long, shuffling lines of gray and black, some people wearing coats, others coatless, but all covered to varying degrees in soot. Coughing, but otherwise silent, without expression or vigor.

These were the evacuees from the Twin Towers, thousands of them. About 50,000 people worked in or visited the WTC daily. Take the entire population of Biloxi, or Ames, or Sheboygan, and funnel them out of two 110-story towers, four shorter buildings, and a shopping mall, one by one. And you have the miserable, sooty lines of evacuees that February Friday.

I was taken aback. Talking to the Damsels in Distress at Burger King, it hadn’t occurred to me that a massive evacuation was taking place at the WTC.  I still didn't realize that both towers had become two giant smokestacks.  Later, we would learn that police helicopters plucked over 100 people from the tower roofs that day, including a pregnant woman who gave birth soon after being rescued.

Evacuation can be a great equalizer. At least from skyscrapers. When you’re emptying such enormous buildings, executives, managers, secretaries, clerks, and custodians suddenly become one human mass facing the same predicament. There isn’t one emergency stairwell for million-dollar CEOs, and another one for hourly employees. It’s sheer physical fitness, not your job title, that spells the difference between getting out with enough energy to make it home, or just getting out.

Indeed, all ages, body types, and physical conditions were represented in the grim, sooty lines of WTC tenants shuffling out of the towers. Some were walking arm-in-arm for mutual support, some were almost being carried by others.

None were talking; many were coughing.

I vividly remember one tall woman with what we Texans call "big hair" that was dusted with soot. She was wearing a plush, knee-length mink coat – obviously having taken the time to retrieve her valuable fur before vacating her office – and still had on her high heels. After all, even in an emergency, some New Yorkers wouldn’t dare forgo their fashion sense. She walked towards me, patting the sleeves of her thick mink, and each time she did, soot puffed out of her coat.

Undaunted, or perhaps simply resigned to reality, she strode past me and into the throngs of people milling about emergency vehicles, on into the bizarre afternoon.

Try Again?

Part of the bomb crater in the WTC parking garage in 1993

By the end of that weekend, we would learn it wasn’t Con-Ed’s fault at all. Instead, Muslim terrorists had rented a yellow Ryder truck in New Jersey, loaded it with explosives, and detonated it in the WTC’s underground parking garage.

Apparently, their plan was to topple Tower One with their bomb, and that as it fell, Tower One would destroy Tower Two.

I remember our office staff laughing out loud when we heard on the radio days later that the FBI had closed the case. A couple of the terrorists, upon learning that their plan hadn't worked, reported the Ryder truck stolen, and went back to Ryder to claim their deposit, where the FBI was waiting for them. With idiots like that trying to blow up New York landmarks, we quickly assumed that while the city might be plagued with other crises in the future, we had little else to fear for the Twin Towers.

In fact, after the WTC was cleaned, repaired, remodeled, and reopened, I was standing in line in the lobby of Tower Two, waiting to get a photo identification badge that would give me open access to the complex, since I often ran errands for the company there. I remember chatting with a couple of other guys in line, also waiting for their badges, and we got to joking about the foiled destruction of the very building we were in.

Like typical civilians who mock government bureaucracy, we saw the I.D. procurement process as useless red tape meant to pacify building tenants who might be leery about moving back into the towers. Just another hoop to jump through; just a veneer of security to try and show that the Port Authority is serious about protecting their trophy property.

After all, nobody would be insane enough to attempt the destruction of the Twin Towers ever again!

I so wish we were right.
_____

(Condensed from four essays I'd previously written in memory of the six people who were killed on that tragic day.)

And a Child Shall Advise Them

It's one of those ubiquitous questions most enthusiastic grandparents ask.

"Can I tell you about my grandkids?"

Well, I don't have any grandkids, or any kids, for that matter, even though it sobers me to realize I'm probably now old enough for not only the latter, but the former as well.  So I'm gonna have to tell you about my neighbors' kids instead.  And specifically, their precocious, blond-haired son, who just turned the wise old age of seven last week.

Yes, seven.  His extreme youth is vital to this story.

This is the kid who, two summers ago, when he was five, corrected me by saying a cicada's shell is called an "exoskeleton."  I can still remember the look on his face, as if he was thinking, "You're an adult.  You should know this."  Which I did, but I didn't think HE did!

I keep telling that story to other neighbors who may not have yet heard it, and it always gets a good laugh.  Last fall, he overheard me.

"Are you telling that story again?!"  I couldn't tell if he was embarrassed, or trying to figure out if I was infringing upon some copyright he might hold on that anecdote.  Seriously - I wouldn't doubt he knows something about intellectual property rights.

Just before Christmas, a section of the wood part of the fence separating our two backyards had blown over - again - in high winds, and I was trying to fix it, cheaply, by myself.  And he was watching me, supervising the whole operation from his treehouse right next to the fence, even offering me the use of his "contraptions," if they'd help.

"I've got a ton of 'em," he explained of his contraptions.

At one point, things weren't working the way I'd expected them to, and I hung my head in a moment of frustration.  "Oh, dear..." I sighed to myself.

"Yes," my wise little neighbor offered sympathetically, "sometimes that's all you can say."

Then last evening, at dusk, I took advantage of our unseasonably pleasant weather to go outside and putter about the backyard for a few minutes. Up in his treehouse, my next door neighbor saw me, and greeted me.

"What are you doing?" he asked, watching me do nothing in particular.

"Oh, just goofing off," I replied. "It's what I do best."

Without missing a beat, he affirmed: "Well, if it's what you do best, it's what you should be doing!"

I started laughing so hard at his uncanny sophistry, I had to come inside for fear he would assume I was making fun of him.

Quite to the contrary!  I'm telling you - with a neighbor like him, I don't need grandkids, do I?!
_____

Hizzoner's Last Subway Ride

I took this photo in 1988 at New York's annual India Day parade.  Ed Koch, a Bronx-born Jew with no Indian blood in him at all,
owned the crowd, even the ones booing him and giving him a double-thumbs-down (see background).

hiz-ZON-er; a colloquial contraction of the words "his" and "honor," in reference to the mayor of New York City, sparsely used before and more widely developed during the three-term administration of former mayor Ed Koch, and now used for any of the city's mayors.


I'd already begun writing this essay yesterday, but when word came this morning of Hizzoner's passing at the ripe old age of 88 from congestive heart failure, I immediately decided to switch gears a little.

I didn't embrace all of Mayor Ed Koch's politics, but by many accounts, he was the most straight-shooting, unapologetically blunt, charmingly opinionated, and blatantly in love with his constituency as any politician can - and should - be.  Nobody can deny that Koch was one of America's rare big city mayors who's left his city profoundly improved for their investment in it.

It's easy to forget how truly remarkable a feat that represents, especially considering the times in which Koch served.  Big cities all across the country were in turmoil, but none more so than New York, having stared bankruptcy in the face, reeling from white flight, whipped by the steady exodus of corporate headquarters, struggling with unprecedented crime and death associated with drug abuse, and buckling under the disarray of its rapidly decaying infrastructure.

Then along came Koch, a gregarious bachelor of relatively modest means, who refused to run away from the city's problems, or his critics.  In fact, he embraced them.  He'd famously barge into a crowd of New Yorkers on the street and pump them with questions he expected them to answer on the spot about his results as mayor.  "How'm I doin'?" became his slogan, his performance review, and his give-it-to-me-straight-I-can-take-it feedback form.

How a Liberal Became New York's Conservator

Although a staunch Democrat - and a Greenwich Village liberal one at that - Koch didn't hold rigidly to any party line.  Indeed, in one of his mayoral campaigns, he ran as both a Democrat and a Republican, and crushed his main opponent, who was running, ironically, for the Unity party.  Koch resisted affirmative action, reasoning it was unfair to minority workers whose job performance was equal to or better than that of whites.  He supported the death penalty, and worked to reduce the welfare rolls, but engineered one of the biggest public housing programs in the city's history. A Jew more socially than theologically, he strongly criticized Jesse Jackson for his anti-semitism, even though doing so cost him political clout among New York's black voters.

Unfortunately, his last term in office was tainted by corruption among his staff.  His successful efforts at weeding out complacency in the city's welfare department caused civic leaders in minority neighborhoods to question his Democratic credentials.  Gay rights activists bitterly accused him of being a closet homosexual as he dragged his feet during the AIDS crisis.  When it came time for his fourth mayoral primary race, left-wingers and the city's blacks overwhelmingly switched their allegiance to David Dinkins, an elegant tennis aficionado who became New York's next mayor, and first black in that office.

I remember seeing Koch at an India Day parade in the late 1980's, after scandals in his administration had taken a hit on his popularity. Some people in the crowds lining Fifth Avenue were booing him, and in a photo I took (above), you can see somebody giving him a double-thumbs-down.  Still, Koch was soaking it all in, and, with his arms high in the air, waving at them like he was a victorious conqueror!  He even loved it when his constituents felt comfortable booing him.

Once he was no longer "Hizzoner," Koch became a partner in a Manhattan law firm, wrote movie reviews, taught some college classes, and replaced the retired Judge Wapner on two seasons of The Peoples Court.  Impolite journalists occasionally floated questions about his sexuality, but Koch, who would freely share his opinion on everything else, kept that part of his life fiercely hidden.  Several years ago, he announced he'd bought a burial plot in Washington Heights' Trinity Cemetery, Manhattan island's last remaining active graveyard, saying that when he died, "the thought of having to go to New Jersey was so distressing to me."

Mayor of Eight Million Stories in the Naked City

The New York I remember most is the New York of graffiti-splattered subways, trash piled high on the curbs, taxi cabs so dented they looked like yellowed wads of aluminum foil clattering down avenues, and pristine black Cadillacs prowling the seediest neighborhoods.  I remember the jarring juxtaposition of sleek steel skyscrapers next to rickety brick walk-ups, back before so much of Midtown and Downtown recovered its Fortune 100 mojo.

Friends called you up and let the phone ring just once so you'd know they'd gotten home safely from a dinner party.  It was a New York of Benzi boxes (for your car radio), Brownies (Department of Transportation officers in brown sedans chiding rubberneckers through bumper-to-bumper traffic), leaks in tunnels, rusty bridges, and putting on your jewelry after you got to the office.

Brownstones were what upwardly-mobile white people were selling for a pittance so they could escape to the bucolic suburbs.  Homeowners literally couldn't give away burned-out shells of row houses in Harlem.  Brooklyn was considered no-man's land, as were what's now the hip enclaves of SoHo, Chelsea, the East Village, and TriBeCa.

This was also the New York City of Ed Koch's mayoral tenure.  But it wasn't the city he wanted to leave to posterity, so he set in motion an approach that was equal parts haphazard, unrealistic, painful, conceited, expensive, and in-your-face for resuscitating the wounded warrior his hometown had become.

Being the irascibly belligerent place it's always been, perhaps New York City would have somehow managed to pick itself up from the brink of insolvency and reinvent itself into the wildly popular place it has once again become.  Perhaps if another person had been mayor instead of Koch, the Big Apple would have been able to reclaim its status as the world's capital in an even shorter period of time.  After all, Koch would have been the first person to tell you he wasn't perfect.

But Ed Koch is the person who won three consecutive elections during one of the most pivotal times in the city's history.  It was his love for his hometown, combined with his independent spirit and his plucky - some would say goofy - tenacity, that either egged on his detractors to prove their own worth, or championed his supporters to ignore naysayers and keep forging ahead towards the light at the end of the tunnel.  Even if it might turn out to be an oncoming subway.

Disagree with his politics if you must, and I do disagree with some of them, but Koch's ability to convince New Yorkers that they were exceptional and resilient speaks volumes to the impact one person's personality and charisma can have in turning around a sinking ship.  Granted, New York's renaissance isn't entirely due to Hizzoner, but if anybody else had done anything less than what he did, the city it seems everybody now wants to visit - if not live in - would be a far lesser place.

The Race to Replace?

Perhaps fittingly, then, the year in which Koch died is also a mayoral election year in New York, and it's shaping up to have some real fireworks that Koch would have probably relished.

First, you've got your left-wingers like Christine Quinn, a married lesbian, who worked her way up the non-profit ladder, and today exhibits a firm grasp on how New York's socially liberal apparatus runs.

Then there's a mish-mash of lesser liberals like John Liu, the city's comptroller, whose campaign has been caught up in corruption charges.  Bill DeBlasio, the city's public advocate, is a tall white guy married to a short black woman, whose son sports a head of hair - a tall, wide, round, stunning afro - the likes of which we haven't seen since the early Koch era.

Thanks to Rudy Giuliani, and now Michael Bloomberg, Republicans in the Big Apple feel comfortable in thinking they have some skin in this mayoral race yet again.  And it's not like they don't have at least two high-profile candidates that could put up strong numbers against any liberal opponent.

First is Joseph Lhota, who just resigned as chairman of the city's Metropolitan Transportation Authority for his mayoral run, and who acquired significant name and facial recognition during and after Hurricane Sandy's flooding of the city's subways.

Then there's grocery store magnate John Catsimatidis, who earned his billions in the energy industry, but portrays himself as a folksy, hometown New York businessman trying to make a profit in the notoriously expensive and regulation-heavy city.  So far, he's the most unlikely person to win the race, considering the substantial girth of his that he proudly swaddles in cheap suits, his utter lack of political experience, and his penchant for schmoozing more with fellow Greeks at ethnic events than with the city's vainglorious power brokers.

Surprisingly, however, Catsimatidis is a licensed jet pilot, and his bleached-blond daughter is married to a grandson of the late President Nixon.

It's unknown who Koch would have ended up officially endorsing for this year's mayoral race, but my guess is it would probably have been Quinn, not so much for her liberal credentials, but because she likely has the most bona-fides for City Hall's extreme rough-and-tumble politics.

But I would not have been at all surprised if Koch gave Catsimatidis some consideration, at least if the Greek tycoon managed to squeak through the Republican primary.  Although Catsimatidis is a lot of things Koch never was - stupendously wealthy, married with kids, one of whom is hitched to a Republican icon, and - oh yeah - a Republican himself - Koch once supported New York's current billionaire mayor, Michael Bloomberg, when he was still running as a Republican.  And Catsimatidis has the same affable bluster and chutzpah that endeared Koch to so many New Yorkers during those grim years a generation ago.

Indeed, no matter how unattractive or odd they may be, genuine people seem to bring out the best in New Yorkers, and that's what Koch was.  A genuine person who hid almost nothing.

That's why, even though he was a liberal, conservatives like me can still look back on the guy with a fair degree of admiration and respect.  If I was then the person I am today, I probably wouldn't have voted for him, at least in his first mayoral run.  But for the time, and the place, he proved himself to be somebody the city truly needed.  And nobody can deny him that legacy now.

If New York can possibly be epitomized by one person, I can't think of anybody more appropriate to be that person than Ed Koch.

"Ya done good, Yerroner."
_____