Rosie DiManno: The towers fell on September 11. Then we watched New York rise up - Toronto Star

When Rosie DiManno arrived in Manhattan on Sept. 11, 2001, she found a terribly wounded city — but one already getting up off its knees.

Rosie DiManno is a Toronto-based columnist covering sports and current affairs for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: @rdimanno.

NEW YORK—The morning breaks in brilliant sunshine, sky a crystalline blue. On a late summer’s day, the city is its normal pulsating self.

But then, from the Airfone on American Airlines Flight 11, a call is received.

“The cockpit is not answering,” flight attendant Betty Ong tells airline officials on the ground. “Somebody is stabbed in business class, and I think there is mace. We can’t breathe. I don’t know — I think we’re being hijacked.”

For 25 minutes, Ong stays on the phone, calmly relaying critical information. Her final words, as the plane streaks towards the World Trade Center: “Pray for us. Pray for us.”

At 8:46 a.m., Flight 11 crashes into the North Tower.

Seventeen minutes later, United Airlines Flight 175 hurtles into the South Tower.

It took 15 years to build the twin towers, tallest skyscrapers in the world when they were completed. It took 15 seconds, between them, for the towers to buckle and collapse.

By nightfall, two more WTC buildings had fallen. Then another.

A fireman is dwarfed by the wreckage of the World Trade Center complex on Sept. 12, 2001.

Followed by two decades of the “war on terror.” Although it hasn’t ever really ended. And while it felt in the days that ensued as if the world itself was ending, the sun still came up on the morning after, even if it couldn’t be seen through the billowing, sulphurous smoke and steam that looked like an atomic mushroom cloud overhead. 

A quarter-century has passed since then. An entire generation has grown up with no real memory of the strutting twin towers, ugly monoliths on the Lower Manhattan skyline, yet they represented American power and ambition and modernity, pillars of strength, seemingly inviolable. New Yorkers came to feel a kind of affection for their looming presence.

Suddenly, unbelievably, gone, 10 million square feet of office space crumbling amidst an inconceivable tragedy, deadliest terrorist assault in world history and for the United States, surpassing the toll of Pearl Harbor. On that day of infamy, 2,753 people perished at the WTC, including 658 employees of financial company Cantor Fitzgerald, the firm’s headquarters between the 101st and 105th floors of the North Tower, human beings atomized, disappearing into mist and particles. Among the dead were 441 emergency responders — 343 firefighters, 60 of whom were off-duty but rushed to help, running headlong into the maelstrom, 23 police officers. And 79 employees from Windows on the World Restaurant atop the North Tower, most of them immigrants, along with 91 guests.

And 19 al-Qaida hijackers with the sick bravado of martyrs who’d commandeered four commercial planes — American Airlines Flight 77 hitting the western face of the Pentagon at 9:37 a.m., smashing through three of the five concentric rings of the sprawling military installation; United Airlines Flight 93, believed directed toward Washington, D.C., forced by resisting passengers to crash into an empty field outside Shanksville, Pa., at 10:03 a.m.

In all, 2,977 lives lost on the day of the jackals. Thousands more in subsequent years from medical conditions caused by inhaling toxic dust, the suffocating debris at Ground Zero.

Marcy Borders, seen here in one of the iconic images of the day.

Victims like Marcy Borders, who was using a photocopier on the 81st floor of the North Tower when the building exploded in flames. She emerging at ground level just as the South Tower convulsed, covered from head to toe in ash and grit, her eerie image captured in an iconic 9/11 photo, “The Dust Lady.” 

“I looked like a ghost that day,” she recalled a year later. “Now I feel like one.”

Borders died in 2015, at the age of 42, succumbing to the stomach cancer that she blamed on breathing the poisons from 9/11.

So many images captured by news photographers in an era before cellphone videos, documenting the scene, the hellscape, the stunned and begrimed faces of people as they staggered over the rubble, streaming across the Brooklyn Bridge. A snowstorm of paper sheeting down like some morbid tickertape parade, mixed with pulverized bones and tissue and disintegrated concrete, whooshing through the canyons of the Financial District.

Briefcases, thousands of shoes, twisted bicycles, luggage from the planes, charred computers, chunks of jet engines, remains of passengers still strapped in their seats, an avalanche of broken glass. Severed limbs. Yet 15,000 walked away from the towers and that was a miracle. Others jumped, dozens of them. A firefighter, Daniel Suhr, was killed when he was hit by a man who’d fallen from one of the towers.

You will remember ”The Falling Man” — plunging head-first from the North Tower, his body perfectly aligned between the vertical stripes of the building’s edifice. That photo is rarely published anymore, just as footage of the planes burrowing into the towers — aired on perpetual loop in the immediate thereafter because our eyes couldn’t believe what we were seeing — is no longer shown except on days of commemoration, on anniversaries of the horror, like today.

Is it better to erase those memories, even as parents and spouses and siblings of the victims have since gone to their graves?

Is it better to erase memories like this?

This is what I remember as a Star reporter who arrived in New York that evening with photographer Bernard Weil, who’d driven pedal to the metal — the airspace closed — from Toronto as we listened to the radio bulletins, talking our way past barricades and roadblocks on blocked bridges. We’d imagined chaos but reality was far worse. The Star’s fashion editor Bernadette Morra and photographer Vince Talotta were already in the city, where they’d been covering Fall Fashion Week.

It was a terribly wounded and frightened city.

Meeting up with my friend Christie Blatchford, columnist for the National Post, we walked down Broadway to Canal Street, stepping into a Burger King turned makeshift police HQ. A drug squad cop, Det. Donovan Martin, tried to discourage proceeding further south but then handed each of us a Con Edison hard hat that he assured would get us waved through barriers ahead.

Deeper into the pitch-black we ventured. “Go right up there and turn right,” a fire captain said. “You’ll see something you’ve never seen before.”

Ground Zero, epicentre of the conflagration, was an apocalyptic landscape, the crater 70 feet deep. Hundreds of fires hissed and crackled. Viewed dimly through the smoke was a ghostly apparition — a hollow, Gothic, almost lacy-looking façade that had peeled away from the South Tower, rising jaggedly and skeletally up to 150 above ground level, slouching crookedly but still defiantly standing. The “Tridents,” as this massive steel ribbing came to be called.

The three-pronged “tridents” of the center’s facade became a Gothic apparition over Ground Zero. 

Legions of firefighters, caked in moondust, crawled about the carnage like an army of ants, dumbfounded by everything around them, desperate to find survivors, including their own colleagues. Fire Chief Eugene Garvin would say the next day: “We lost the tough guys.” Fellow chiefs and deputies, three elite rescue companies entirely wiped out.

Silhouetted against the night by giant generator-powered floodlight, firefighters and rescue crews used pickaxes and grappling hooks to attack The Pile.

Tangled girders. Twisted rebar. A crushed and embedded ladder truck. The husk of a city bus. Fire hydrants torn from the sidewalk. Crumpled automobiles. Pretzeled lampposts. An accordioned U.S. postal van. Miles of fire hoses trained on the raging flames — half the Hudson River emptied until the last of the subterranean fires, deep in the bedrock, were doused a hundred days later.

Only 20 people would be recovered alive.

Just outside Dante’s Inferno, the ancient graveyard of St. Paul’s Chapel — which had somehow survived the catastrophic blow to its seemingly impregnable neighbour — became a refuge for the firefighters and rescue crews as the hours passed that night. Exhausted yet unflagging, they leaned against the crooked tombstones, tears visible behind their face shields, eyes ringed red. One firefighter, lying on his back, removed his oxygen nozzle to lament, “My boss and all my buddies died and I don’t think there is anything else to say.”

Heavily damaged Brooks Brothers at One Liberty Place had been turned into a slapdash morgue and triage centre, though there’d be no living victims to treat. A retired NYPD officer who’d driven 90 minutes from a New Jersey suburb whispered hoarsely: “We haven’t found any full bodies.” 

Graffiti scrawled across the soot-covered windows: God Bless The Dead. AMERICA — The LAND THAT I LOVE. And a row of crosses.

New York City Police officer Moira Smith, 38.

So many paragons of courage that day, that night, at what Edward Cardinal Egan aptly christened Ground Hero, sacrificing themselves: Abraham Zelmanowitz, who refused to leave a wheelchair-bound co-worker on the 27th floor of the North Tower so the man wouldn’t die alone; Rick Rescoria, head of security at Morgan Stanley, who helped usher hundreds of employees out of the South Tower, then ran back in search for stragglers; Moira Smith, NYPD cop, who rushed into the lobby of the South Tower to aid but stayed behind to aid in evacuation, named Police Officer of the Year; Father Mychal Judge, chaplain for the FDNY, who raced to offer prayers and give last rites in the North Tower lobby before the building pancaked on top of him, becoming the first officially certified fatality of the day.

On the morning after, as Christie and I trudged back to our hotel, what I remember most is the eerie silence of the traumatized city — except for fighter jets overhead — and the tender kindness of strangers in a city famous for its rude disregard of everybody.

By Day 2, New York was already getting up off its knees.

Workers hoisted over the wreckage of the South Tower in the days after.

Inside the National September 11 Memorial & Museum complex, located at bedrock of the sacred ground of the World Trade Center site, situated between the two footprints of the twin towers, repose remains of the 9/11 victims. Out of roughly 20,000 remains recovered, thousands of positively identified bone fragments and preserved tissue have been returned to their families for private burial. The rest are entombed here, seven stories below ground, in a reverential place that can’t be accessed by the general public.

The methodical work of advanced DNA testing and genetic genealogy continues. The most recently identified — the 1,654th identification made by the New York City medical examiner’s office — was just last month, an adult woman whose name was withheld at her family’s request. But 40 per cent of the 2,753 ground zero victims still haven’t been linked to remains.

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In the Memorial Hall, a mosaic wall of tiles in different shades of blue — one square for every Sept. 11 victim in New York, Washington, Pennsylvania and six who died in the terrorist van bombing attack on the World Trade Center on Feb. 26, 1993 — is a commemorative art installation titled “Trying to Remember the Color of the Sky on That September Morning.” The artwork revolves around the idea of memory and perception, with an inscription from Virgil’s “The Aeneid”: “No day shall erase you from the memory of time,” each letter forged from pieces of recovered World Trade Center steel.

The unparalleled complex of memory, oral history and education contains 83,000 artifacts, from first-person testimony to digital exhibits to “The Calls” — voices from the control tower dispatches, the planes, the pilots, harrowing calls and voice mails.

In the vast plaza outside, two massive recessed reflecting pools sit in the exact footprints of the twin towers.

On Friday, the names of all the victims will be read aloud by family members as church bells toll, with seven moments of silence marking when the towers were struck and fell, the attack on the Pentagon, Flight 93 and the 9/11-related deaths of first responders since. In the evening, twin beams of light will reach four miles into the sky.

President George W. Bush, surrounded by fire fighters at Ground Zero on Sept. 14, 2001.

On the third day after 9/11, I watched as President George Bush climbed atop a mound of rubble amidst the devastation in New York and, as the crowd chanted “USA! USA!,” used a bullhorn to tell them: “I can hear you! The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.”

I remember thinking how small he looked, how impotent.

Three weeks later, I was crossing the heavily mined Amu Darya River, on a raft, and stepping foot in Afghanistan.

On Oct. 7, Bush launched the US-led war against Afghanistan, Operation Crescent Wind, that toppled the Taliban.

On Aug. 31, 2021, just before midnight, the final U.S. military aircraft left Kabul in chaotic retreat.

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Opinion articles are based on the author’s interpretations and judgments of facts, data and events. More details

Rosie DiManno is a Toronto-based columnist covering sports and current affairs for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: @rdimanno.