September 11 from a Rooftop
Twenty four year old Michael, asleep on the futon; in his
Lower East Side apartment felt the ground shake. One of his four roommates, Scott, walked into
the three room apartment past Michael’s bedroom to wake his girlfriend,
Jessica. Then, he tried to wake Michael, but Michael had three bottles of Bud
Light and four shots of Jose Cuervo, one of which the bartender poured down his
throat at Coyote Ugly, last night. Michael heard Scott say one of the Twin Towers
was on fire and to go to the roof. He heard next, the second World Trade Center Tower is on fire. Go to the roof. In
sweatpants, Michael headed to the door and took the old red elevator to the 16th
floor. The elevator had no windows. He couldn’t see outside. It was rickety. There
was a peek hole to see if anyone was waiting on a floor. No one was waiting.
The elevator didn’t stop until the 16th floor.
Michael was on the roof with his
four housemates. All he heard were sirens and saw both towers on fire. One was
smoking badly and he saw flames. Are they
going to be able to put that out? How did this happen? Is it going to fall
down? They sat and watched the towers burn. Was it a bomb or gas explosion?
Was this another terrorist attack like the one in 1993 on the World Trade
Center?
When Michael returned to his first
floor apartment, he turned on his 12-by-12 inch TV. He put on Channel 4. In the
minutes before the report, the station was airing a McDonald’s breakfast
commercial. Then Katie Couric and Matt Lauer reported that a plane hit the
Towers. A witness, Jennifer Obersteen, was telling them on air what she saw.
The Towers, live, was on the screen. Obersteen told them she saw smoke and
fire. She thought a bomb caused the explosion.
Other networks broke in. At ABC News, Don Dahler, a National
Correspondent, was five blocks north of the World Trade Center and heard a loud
shriek from what could’ve been a jet or airplane.
CNN told viewers there was an
unconfirmed report that a plane hit one of the Towers. Sean Murtagh, a CNN producer,
witnessed the attack, and told viewers the plane looked like a two engine,
large passenger commercial jet. It was
teetering back and forth, wing tip to wing tip.
Michael tried to call his parents on his cellphone to let
them know he was OK. He couldn’t get through. He called his girlfriend, Colleen,
who lived in Harlem. She was safe.
He went back on the roof. The first Tower fell
and smoke rose up. He couldn’t see the whole Tower, but he could see the impact
sites. Then the second Tower fell. It just didn’t make any sense. I could watch it on TV like a thousand times but it’s not
the same as watching it live, he would later realize.
The subway system was shut down and
there were no buses. 1st Avenue runs north towards Harlem and was
opened for ambulances. 2nd Avenue goes south towards the Towers.
Fire truck, after fire truck sped by approximately 60 miles per hour: as fast
as Michael had seen in Manhattan.
People wandered out in the street dazed
and coated in dust. Some had more dust than others. Those were the ones who
walked up 2nd Avenue, away from the towers. They were walking over the Brooklyn Bridge or
the Manhattan Bridge or the 59th Street Bridge to get to Queens.
About thirty minutes after the
Towers fell, the five housemates left the apartment. They stopped at Gulf
Station at 2nd Avenue and 1st Street so Michael could
call his parents from a payphone. He couldn’t reach them. He called one of the
only other numbers he could think of — his college roommate, Ted. Michael asked him
to leave a message for his parents, tell them I’m OK.
They then went to their usual place,
Little Poland on 2nd Avenue and ordered a combination of the special:
two eggs with toast including bacon or sausage, and coffee or orange juice for
around five dollars. It was comfort food.
As they left Little Poland, they saw
a friend from the neighborhood. He told them a blood donation center was set up
at Bellevue Hospital on 26th and 1st Avenue. The line,
they discovered was so long, they were turned away. But not many people were
coming in. There was no one to give blood to.
---
The next day Michael went to the 6th train subway
station to go to work. At the police station there, missing person’s pictures
covered the walls.
In the Seagram Building on E. 53rd
Street, where Michael was a waiter at the French restaurant, Brasserie, there
was a bomb threat. People evacuated the Seagram and buildings around it. They had
to walk on the grassy median because the street ran north and south. Michael
didn’t go to work for three or four days, after.
Following the attacks, the one thing
that continued to linger in the city, was the smell.
Every day you could smell it. It was
the worst burnt charred rubber smell you could ever smell in your life.
Sources
I interviewed my cousin, Michael Chiavaroli, through Skype
on September 24, 2013. He lived in an apartment on the Lower East Side of
Manhattan. He currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.
This
is a Youtube clip of the Today Show on the morning of September 11, 2001. It
shows what was on Channel 4 right before the news of the Towers broke out. It
features Katie Couric and Matt Lauer. They were on the phone with a woman named
Jennifer Obersteen who was near the Towers.
This
is a Youtube video of the Towers being shown on ABC. Charles Gibson and Diane
Sawyer didn’t claim that the cause was a plane, or that it was deliberate. They
called Don Dahler who thought a plane attacked the Towers, but it wasn’t
confirmed.
This
is a Youtube video of CNN on the morning of September 11, 2001. The two anchors
call Sean Murtagh, a CNN producer on the scene. He thought the cause looked and
sounded like a plane.
No comments:
Post a Comment