A quarter century later, memories of World Trade Center attack remain vivid

Westchester County’s official Sept. 11 memorial, The Rising, is located at Kensico Dam in Valhalla. Several local towns have erected their own memorials. STAFF PHOTO

People trying to get home. Family members desperately trying to call loved ones and get them there, too. A Tuesday morning routine shattered and quickly filled with something else, for many an inescapable certainty that everything had changed. Suddenly, as one writer put it, it was a different world. 

On this day marking 25 years since the most deadly attack on American soil, several people from northern Westchester shared their memories of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks on the World Trade Center.

At the edge of hell: a morning near Ground Zero

By Ed Baum

“I’M FINE! I’M FINE! I’M FINE!” I barked into the phone from my office on the 18th floor in the Financial District. My wife, Lise, was on the other end at our home in Katonah. It was 9:35 a.m., and she was meeting with a local cabinet maker about a project. She hadn’t turned on the news.

Minutes earlier, it had just been the start of  another Tuesday.

Around 8:50 a.m., I walked up the subway steps at the corner of Wall Street and Broadway in front of Trinity Church. The sky was perfectly clear, but something was unmistakably off, eerily different. It was filled with paper scraps floating through the air like confetti.

“Is there a ticker-tape parade today?” I asked a colleague whom I had run into on the downtown local from Grand Central. We were, after all, standing in the Canyon of Heroes.

Instead of following our usual route down Wall Street, we turned north up Broadway. Two blocks later, a crowd had gathered at a corner. People were pointing up to the Twin Towers. A bike messenger held up his transistor radio tuned into a news station. “They said a small commuter plane just flew into one of the towers,” he said.

We heard the sirens of the first fire engines heading to the site. We weren’t in range to see where the plane hit the tower. We lingered a few minutes, then turned east in the direction of our office.

Steps off Broadway, we crossed Chase Manhattan Plaza. Amid the towering Dubuffet sculptures, a carpet of office debris covered the ground. I picked up an unopened envelope. It was addressed to an insurance company at 1 World Trade Center, 103rd Floor. 

It was just after 9 a.m. Then a massive explosion in the sky reverberated through the Financial District. I will never forget the sound. 

We rushed to our office building to seek safety — and answers. 

“A second plane hit the towers,” a security guard said as we went through lobby turnstiles.

At that instant we knew our country was under attack.

As soon as I reached my office on the 18th floor, I called my wife to reassure her I was safe. I checked in with my boss down the hall and my own team members. All were accounted for,  but the building was under a stay-in-place order from the NYPD.

I went alone into a conference room to collect myself and called home again. Through the bank of windows, day suddenly turned to night. All I could see was a cloud of smoke and debris. As I learned minutes later, the South Tower had collapsed. 

Twenty-five minutes later, the North Tower was also gone.

“That’s impossible! That can’t be true!” I said in disbelief to Lise, who told me the news.

On the 107th floor was Windows on the World, created by my father, Joe Baum, the final legacy of his 50-plus-year career as a restaurateur. Decades before, my father shared blueprints of the World Trade Center with my family, attesting to the towers’ tensile strength and resilience. We once toured the roof of the building together while Windows was under construction, in awe of the breathtaking expansive view. 

As the morning’s events unfolded, our two sons at John Jay Middle and High School were pulled out of class because records showed I worked in lower Manhattan. A school official contacted my wife who said she had heard from me and I was safe. The guidance staff shared the reassuring news with our sons.

Back at work, on the advice of the NYPD, we gathered employees in the basement cafeteria for their safety. No one knew what other horrors this day would bring. My boss began to address the group. Then a sudden change in plans: a police official interrupted her to say that authorities now wanted everyone to evacuate the 24-story building and proceed north under the cover of the elevated FDR Drive. About 11:25 a.m., I walked out to Wall Street and joined throngs of office workers walking up West Street under the highway.

At the foot of the ramp to the Brooklyn Bridge, a driver, a young man still wearing his blue New York Stock Exchange vest, pulled over. “Hop in! As many of you who can fit! I’m heading up to 14th Street.” Four or five of us piled into his hatchback. It felt like a lifeline. 

We drove up the highway. At Canal Street I looked out the rear window. To the north, a glorious blue sky, just as my morning had begun. To the south, an enormous, demonic black cloud enshrouded everything in sight. An unimaginable splitscreen of light and dark, heaven and hell.

Over the next several hours until Metro-North service resumed, I sought  refuge with other survivors at a family member’s apartment in the East 20s. In shock and disbelief, I was unable to  process the enormity and tragedy of what had unfolded.

Eventually, I walked to Grand Central. Around 3:30 p.m. in the afternoon, I stepped from the platform into the train vestibule; the solid steel of the carriage floor under my feet comforted me. I felt profound gratitude as I anticipated the departure of the unscheduled northbound train — a tangible sign that life could resume and a harbinger of New York City’s resilience and helping each other heal —  knowing it would once again return me safely to my family. 

Ed Baum, a founder of The Recorder, was a communications and marketing  executive in downtown Manhattan for Citibank.

A school principal recalls a morning like no other

By Paul Wieman

It was the very start of the school year, and our students were involved in grade-level activities, and were not on campus that day.

The ninth grade was headed for a day of fun at Chelsea Piers, just blocks away from the World Trade Center. We were fortunate in that the trip left late enough that we could turn the buses around and have them return to campus just minutes after they left. 

Similarly, the juniors were on the final day of their trip to Washington, D.C., which was also under attack. Although it took several wrenching hours to get in touch with them (all communication systems had shut down), we learned that all students and chaperones were safe in their hotel, told to remain there and await further word.

The sophomores were not in harm’s way, but rather in a YMCA camp in western Connecticut, returning home that afternoon. Although many students were understandably anxious about the fate of their parents, we were fortunate to have the school counselor as one of the chaperones on this trip, and she helped our students through these difficult hours.

Given how our students were dispersed, and that we had parents and close relatives who worked in or near the World Trade Center, it was a difficult and anxious and scary day, to say the least. We were fortunate that no parents were injured or killed, but we did not know that until later in the day. Those were anxious hours for our students, faculty, and administration, and we did not have the comfort of being together or even being able to release our students to go home.

I have one vivid memory of standing outside at the end of the day, waiting for the sophomore buses to pull in, alongside scores of parents, mostly quiet, just eager to see their children and hug them as tightly as possible. As I waited, four fighter jets roared overhead, flying low, and arcing over southern Westchester to return to Manhattan to continue their patrols. 

Amazing, I thought to myself. If this had happened 24 hours earlier, I would be wondering why, perhaps annoyed at the noise and showmanship. But today, no such thought entered my mind. I was thankful, deeply thankful, that flying overhead were the most sophisticated military machines in the world, designed to protect all of us. I felt safe. Thank you.

Those were my private thoughts. What I said to the parent standing next to me was, “It’s a different world.”

And then I went home and hugged my two children as tightly as I could.

Paul Wieman of Katonah, a Recorder columnist, was the upper school principal at Rye Country Day School.

Amid the chaos, a midtown office worker’s exodus

By Jenny Rynott

It was a beautiful, sunny morning, the crisp smell of fall was in the air as I made my way to work in midtown Manhattan to the American Airlines sales office. Shortly after I settled into my office, I received a call from one of our customers to let me know that one of our airplanes had flown into the north tower of the World Trade Center. All employees gathered as we watched, live on the news, a United Airlines airplane crashing into the south tower of the WTC. We quickly received word of the unimaginable: our Systems Operations Control Center confirmed that indeed, an American Airlines flight crashed into the North Tower of the WTC just minutes earlier, and we were ordered to evacuate the building.

The day quickly descended into chaos as millions of people attempted to leave the city. Just one of many amid a mass exodus, I ran for my life, slowed down by my bulky, Y2K laptop — 10 times heavier than the devices we have nowadays — and my stilettos. I tried to make my way towards the west side, where the boats to New Jersey left.

As I crossed Fifth Avenue, I felt the earth shake as the South Tower collapsed. My first thought was that the city was being attacked. The moment comes back to me in slow motion, a scene out of a movie: the lines of fleeing cars came to a stop, everyone lowered to the ground, covering their heads, some screaming that it was the end of the world. One homeless man screamed “Keep moving people, this is not a movie, it’s real life!” as people stopped at 42nd Street to watch the news unfold. 

Once I arrived at the West Side Highway, I realized the line to get on a boat was as far as my eyes could see down the highway. Thankfully, I was able to get onto one of the first boats out of the city and into New Jersey.

Once in New Jersey, I walked for a long time, not able to get home as all the bridges and the public transportation were closed. As my flip phone was running out of battery, I received a call from a cousin, who then sent two friends of hers — New Jersey residents — to come find me. These good Samaritans brought me to their home, where I was able to call my family and let them know I was OK. My mom in Honduras had seen the news and was beyond anxious, not having heard from me all day. 

In addition to the terrible events of that day, I reminisce on the heroic efforts of my fellow coworkers and how we united to pick up the pieces post-tragedy. As American Airlines employees, people like my husband joined The Care Team to work with the families of the deceased who were on those fateful flights.

That September morning, so beautiful before the first plane hit at 8:46 a.m., transformed into a day I think now sends shivers down my spine. The once-blue sky now blanketed Manhattan with dark smoke, all rising from what would become known as Ground Zero. In the nights that followed, the Tribute in Light illuminated the sky, honoring the victims, the heroes, and the families whose lives were forever changed.

Twenty-five years later, Sept. 11, 2001, is a day I will never forget. 

Jenny Rynott was an American Airlines employee. She lives in Yorktown.

End of the line: on a subway to Lower Manhattan

By Thomas McShane

I arrived at my midtown office about 8:30 a.m. As an attorney, I was scheduled to appear in New York State Supreme Court in Foley Square at 9:30 a.m. While I was sitting at my desk preparing for the appearance, a colleague walked into my office and told me her mother had called from Philadelphia reporting that a plane had flown into one of the Twin Towers. Since the window behind me in my 20th floor office faced south, I turned and could see smoke rising from one of the towers. I assumed the crash involved a small airplane.  

I finished packing my bag and left the office to make my scheduled court appearance. When I reached the token booth in the Chanin Building, I asked the token clerk if the plane crash was impacting service on the 4,5 or 6 trains. She assured me it was not because the crash was “on the West Side”. I deposited my token and caught the express train. 

The train proceeded without interruption to the 14th Street stop where passengers boarded and departed the train in typical fashion. The train then continued south. But before reaching the City Hall stop, the train stopped. By this time, passengers who had phone service began sharing scattered information about the crash. 

Over time, the reports became increasingly horrific. Two huge passenger planes had crashed into the towers. The city had been attacked. 

After about an hour, the conductor explained that we were going to leave the train by walking through a series of connected train cars so that we could reach the City Hall stop. When I reached the platform, I asked a police officer what to expect at street level. He stated that both towers were “gone” — something I could not comprehend. Surely, he was mistaken. 

When I reached the street, I saw streams of people, some covered from head to toe in white ashes, walking north. I looked west in search of the two towers. They were not there. I made my way to the court building where I was scheduled to appear, and the assembled court officers waved me away saying there would be no court proceedings that day. I then joined the hundreds of people walking north, making my way back to my midtown office. There I found my colleagues furiously trying to learn the fates of friends, relatives and business colleagues. 

Thomas McShane is an attorney who lives in Katonah. 

Trying to reach my husband in the South Tower

By Jill Becker

Nursing my son, I was in bed healing from a cesarean delivery. I was told not to walk down the steep steps to the kitchen, so my husband, Adam, left me breakfast by my side before he headed downtown to the Twin Towers. Grateful my mom and dad came every day to help.

It was early. Just before 9 a.m., my husband called. He wanted to let me know that a small plane hit the North Tower. He was fine. He’d be working out of the South Tower in the firm’s ancillary office; they were temporarily closing the North Tower. 

All was good. 

It never occurred to me to turn on the TV because we didn’t have one in our bedroom. It was 2001. No iPhone. No Twitter or Facebook. Just my husband’s voice telling me not to worry.

So I didn’t. I went back to playing with my son, in no hurry to be anywhere else.

Then the phone rang again. This time it was my dad. He wanted to know if I had heard from Adam. I said I had, that he was fine. “Was that after the first plane, or after the second plane?”

I froze. I knew something was terribly wrong. I hung up, grabbed the baby and ran down those forbidden stairs to turn on the TV. 

I called Adam. I couldn’t get through, just a message saying lines were busy. I kept calling. Nothing. My body felt erased, replaced by pure energy, like static “snow” on a TV. I couldn’t breathe. Time stopped. 

I kept calling. Nothing. 

In a moment between dialing, my mom called. They were on their way. I said they shouldn’t come, the Tappan Zee Bridge wasn’t safe. Anyway, they were closing it. “Not before I’m getting across!” she said, and hung up. 

I was glued to the TV. It was a time beyond words.

After what seemed like an eternity, around 9:55 a.m., Adam called. He was safe. He’d been just outside the South Tower when the second plane hit it. He had to run through shattered glass and debris to take cover. But he was safe. 

I was one of the lucky ones. 

I will always think about those people who heard from loved ones calling to say goodbye and especially those who never got any call at all.

My son is 25 now. 

I remember. 

Jill Becker lives in Bedford.