demagogue on 11/9/2011 at 16:26

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Cool morning (temperature-wise).
I walk out of 110 W. 3rd St. about 8:45, to make Civ Pro at 9:05.
A plane apparently flies right over my head, but I don't notice.
Walking up MacDougal.
Ahead on the corner of Wash Sq park, see one of my classmates stop and looks south.
I get to the corner and look at what he's looking at.
There's a black smoking crater in the North Tower of the WTC, about 20 blocks south.
"The hell..?"
He tells me a jet flew right over us and ran into it.
Having no sense of scale, I think it's some wayward Cessna.
It's not on a flightpath to anywhere... Maybe the pilot was depressed?
A small crowd starts to gather on our corner.
I grab a guy's cellphone and call home: "Hey, I just saw a plane run into the WTC. Maybe it'll make the local news; watch for it." ... still thinking it's a small plane.
Not sure what to do, I see my watch it's 9:02 and I should go to class now I guess...
As I turn, there's a 2nd explosion, so I stop to watch again.
"The hell...!?"
Is it some delayed fuel explosion? Was there a coordinated bomb attack?
Takes a few seconds to even notice the smoke might be coming from the other tower... sort of hard to tell. There's smoke everywhere.
It's only now that a taxi passes behind us with the window down and the radio mentions two hijacked jumbo jets running into the towers. (That answers the 2nd explosion), and it's the first time I toss out the idea it might be an accident or Cessna sized. It also mentions reports of other hijacked planes.
It's right then I see my CivPro professor walking up, good old Patrick Woolley (I loved spelling his name: double-u, double-o, double-l, e, y). We run up to him and tell him about the incident (he didn't see a thing the way he was walking), and we walk with him all the way into class... Unbelievably, we actually sit down for the full 1-1/2 hour class.
As usual I sit in the back, next to the windows, beside my friend Will Taft V (great-great-grandson of the president.)
People are reading CNN sites on their laptops, so I catch glimpses of the story through that.
About an hour in, I hear, no feel, a deep long rumbling coming from the windows, but don't know what it is yet.
As soon as class is over, I run to my dorm to watch the news. It's announced that classes are canceled for the rest of the day... Turns out they'll be canceled for the next week and a half.
My roommate is already watching the news.
We decide to go up on the roof of the dorm, and watch things from there.
When I get there, there is smoke everywhere around the site. I can already feel the noxious fumes burn a little when I breathe in, like the smell of burning tires. (For the next few days we start wearing bananas or our collars over our mouths.)
Someone mentions they can't believe the first tower fell, which made me go cold since I couldn't even tell, through all the smoke, that one had already fell. Then a few seconds later a gust of wind blew the smoke a bit and a patch of blue sky appeared behind the South tower... then I felt a real chill to my bone. Now I knew what that rumbling was I heard in class.
Someone had binoculars, but they advised people not look through them, lest they see the people jumping out.
I took 2 photos.
Right about then, the North tower starts its slow, deliberate collapse into oblivion. It's like the roof detached, then fell through the center, peeling the walls out like a banana. But what I remember was how slow and deliberate the whole thing was... It took a few seconds to collapse. And I remember someone on the street yelling "ohhh noooo!! oohhh myyyy gooood!!" which in any other context would have been ridiculous to the point of parody... but here it expressed the utter helplessness that something was happening right in front of you and you couldn't do a damn thing about it.
The plume of ash and concrete was immense.
It was then that security came up on the roof and pulled everyone off and closed it off.
I went back down to the street, and watched cars and people coming from the south, up 6th Ave, absolutely caked in grey ash, with only (for the cars) a sliver of clear glass on the windshield where the wipers had wiped them.
Then later in the day I (also unbelievably) had coincidentally scheduled a meeting with Tom Nagel, the great moral philosopher of our time... He emailed me if I wanted to cancel, but I thought it wouldn't be inappropriate to talk to a great moral philosopher that day, so I said no, let's meet. I first met him in the bathroom a few minutes before our meeting, which is sort of funny ... one of his most memorable parables in one of his books was a spider living in the stall he was now using. After seeing it for a few weeks, he felt so sorry for it that he finally helped it free, only for it to quickly starve and die afterwards... all to say it's not for us to say what's a "valuable" or "pathetic" life for the spider in the toilet; if he's happy and alive there, maybe he's right where he wants to be our "help" only hurts him, a curious meditation on liberalism and the "value" of life. Despite all the lives affected that day, I couldn't help but also think a little about that tiny spider from a decade ago too and his brief, uneventful life... I didn't say anything about it, though. I just waited until we were back in his office to have a normal chat. I had wanted to talk about doing law and philosophy stuff at NYU. We ended up talking a lot about the meaning of ethics and our duties to each other in light of events like this. A really special moment being with him that day.
The rest is just a kind of week long haze after that... Watched news on tv like everyone else in the country. The blare of sirens of emergency vehicles went on at all hours. Everything from 14th street down (including my dorm) was shut off from traffic, and everything from Canal street down was put under marshal law occupation. We all let in downtown refugees to stay for a night or so, classmates who couldn't get back to their apartments.
As it got dark, there was an ominous orange glow over the site, and in the daytime black smoke still billowing, fires that kept burning for a month straight.
People massed into Wash Sq Park to lay down candles... I couldn't really bear to go outside that first night, but I could watch them from my window overlooking the park. And I saw the Empire State building was left in total darkness, the building's equivalent of wearing black.
Then I remember the next day, standing on 6th Ave while firetrucks would perpetually race by, and people on the street would literally clap for the trucks. We had to go up past 14th street just to get a newspaper with a 9/11 headline, since nothing below that even got deliveries (the one I kept was the Village Voice which had a full page photo and the one word headline: Bastards!). We listened to everybody's stories about where they were... some people were stuck in subways for hours since they just shut down and some of them were trapped by tunnels that had literally collapsed.
The other chilling thing was the walls all up and down 6th Ave were covered with printed wanted posters "Have you seen X", with the person's picture, which was at first a way for family members to get in contact with people in the WTC dislocated (since the subways were down, and maybe they lost their cellphone), but quickly evolved after the first day into memorial posters, less about getting in contact with the persons and more in remembrance of them since by that point they were obviously lost.
Going back to school was out of the question for a while. The entire law school was just shut down and locked up. So all of us, basically the entire NYU student body, was put in a week long daze of milling around the streets like zombies... nowhere to really go and nothing to do.
When classes did start up about 10 days later, about a dozen people from my class had just dropped out (only 2 weeks into school), and there was a grim air everywhere for months to come... on top of the general grimness of being a 1L.
But there was also a curious resolve and energy in what we were doing... Suddenly studying law was a very important thing to be doing. The world was going to hell, and the rule of law was one of the few things keeping us from falling into the abyss. While I can't say I decided to get into international law only because of 9/11 -- I was already gearing myself up in that direction -- but after it, there was no turning back.

Edit: Since 9/11 was a local thing for me, I never got sucked into the pop culture vortex it turned into like it seemed a lot of people did. While some people were rallying behind shoving Afghan sheep herders into Guantanamo, I was already working on the legality of the detentions, rights of the detainees, what the military tribunals thrown together to try them could and couldn't do, the illegality of the Iraq war & how disarming WMDs should be done, and what the "new Middle East" should look like... 9/11 for me was always about presenting us a choice between the rule of reason vs lashing out, and the only way out was to choose reason. I guess that's why 10 years on I can post my memories about it without irony and mixing in the whole ambivalent pop swarm around it -- the Dixie Chicks, the crusading, "Mission Accomplished", IEDs, country music swells as dance music fades... I couldn't feel wrapped into it or even hardly comprehend the way the rest of the country was taking it, rallying or critical, since for me 9/11 was first of all about the posters and firetrucks racing up and down 6th Ave. and the inescapable toxic air, which they never experienced. I always had the feeling most everyone else was getting a spun version, and was taking it exactly the opposite way from what it should have meant, choosing to lash out instead of calling us to reason. What I mean is, I never gave into the spun version and don't want to now either... I prefer to keep it as the concrete thing it was to lower Manhattan for a few weeks in late 2001, because that's what it was for me.

Vernon on 11/9/2011 at 17:08

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bye choad I'll miss you (I won't)

Kuuso on 11/9/2011 at 19:04

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I saw it on the news, watched for fifteen minutes and went back to play computer games. I was 11.

Ulukai on 11/9/2011 at 19:39

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I was on chatting in IRC, in #thief of all places. Or maybe it was #Hanse. (I was a graduate of 23 looking for a job, and it was a day of procrastinating). I recall Paz and Thwark were there.

I vividly recall that Paz was somewhat amused/disgusted at the BBC's initial understated response which was along the lines of, "Plane hits world trade center - Foul Play Suspected"

demagogue on 11/9/2011 at 20:01

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Yeah this was a totally fucked up part about it for me too, because I had just started playing Deus Ex right at that time, and had just walked around the whole Battery Park area in the game that weekend (the only reason we didn't go up the WTC was because we ran out of time & I thought I could just do it next weekend or so; "It's not going anywhere")... And when it happened one of my early thoughts was... Seriously? Like the video game? But even the terrorists in DX didn't go out to kill civilians...