Thursday, October 1, 2026
On the morning of Sept. 11, I was in my office on William Street facing Dutch Alley. One of the employees came onto the floor screaming and crying the World Trade Center is on fire. Someone slapped her to calm her down.
We all thought there was a garbage can on fire and she was panicking for nothing. A person put on their radio and we all learned a plane had crashed into the building. I commented it must be a terrorist attack because what pilot would crash into a building with a river next door for a safer landing. (My husband had told me about landings when he took flying lessons a few years earlier.)
My boss and I went back to work until a loud noise and the building shook like we were in an earthquake. My windows popped open from the pressure. We were so glad the day before our office windows had both the frozen locks and the cracked glass replaced. If it hadn’t, we would have been torn to pieces from the flying glass.
Building officials had everyone go to the lobby. My boss and I had a deadline so we continued to work until someone came up, gave us blue hospital masks and told us we had to evacuate. They were afraid the building might have a gas leak.
I called my sister’s office and asked if I could bring some co-workers there to wait for transportation out of the city. The railways and the buses were not running. Within moments my sister called and told me she was sending her staff home and that we should come to her apartment.
We set out from my office with our masks on and trudged through the beige snow as it continued to fall. We passed long lines of police cars, ambulances and fire engines going toward the Towers. It was so amazing as we came out from under one of the bridges and the cloud of dust was gone and the sun was shining.
As we passed through Chinatown covered in dust, the storeowners came out to offer us bottles of water and fruit. It was so appreciated. I thought, “Who says New Yorkers aren’t neighborly?”
When we got further uptown, we found an open restaurant to wash our faces, dust ourselves off and eat before we got to my sister’s. We sat at my sister’s for hours watching TV and waiting for my co-worker’s sister that lived near the railroad tracks to let us know when the railroad started again.
The only other significant thing that I remember from that day was when I arrived at my sister’s she told me to call my husband because he had been unable to reach me. I tried to use my cell phone but the cell service interrupted and said there was no service because of a tornado. I used her landline.
The next few days (home in North Bellmore) were filled with anxiety. My son told me how the principal had called classmates to his office only to see them leave crying. He knew I regularly ate at the Trade Center and didn’t know if I was alive. My daughter was at school in Maryland and they had their crashes down there to deal with. Where was mom?
My husband dragged me to a special service at our temple for the survivors and I learned about temple members that lost their lives. My friend’s neighbor died because he was a visiting lecturer that morning at the Trade Center and my mom’s friends daughter was alive because she was fired from her job there the day before but lost her fiancé.
A woman in my certified accounting class was alive because she got to her job at the Trade Center late because of a toothache keeping her up the night before. I wondered what happened to my fellow commuters that worked there. Were they alive or dead? We never exchanged phone numbers, so I’ll never know.
Returning to work the following week, I met people on the train going into the city to look for their love ones in hospitals. William Street was now a conduit for wires so we had to go up and over the wooden stairs to cross from the subway to my office. Some of my coworkers tried to go out and take some pictures.
The church had a wall covered in notes and flowers. A store window on Broadway was blown out but the neatly stacked shirts in the window remained covered in the beige snow.
The view of the Towers was blocked by buses to prevent people from taking pictures, and when my friend took a picture of that the policeman standing near by confiscated her camera and told her it was by order of Mayor (Rudy) Giuliani.
Frankly, as a local worker effected by this event I was angered. All the political people were being featured nightly by the mess on the news, but we couldn’t take a picture.
It should be noted that our picture of a store with beige snow was lost and although there is a museum about the event the storefront was not included.
My office window had the beige snow on it through the day. I left the job eight years later.
It’s that snow that caused several of my medical issues; Environmental Protection Agency (Administrator) Christine Whitman said it was safe. I’m lucky, I didn’t get cancer but many have suffered and have died from the beige snow.
To read more from the Herald's Remembering 9/11, 25th anniversary special section, click here.
