I went to high school in Soho, which is about a mile or two from the site. It was sophomore year and I remembered that I was freaking out because I had a math test that day and I wasn’t getting it. I was in 2nd period English when all the sudden, the entire 5 story building just shook. Which is werid because earthquakes aren’t a thing in Manhattan. 5 minutes later, the bell rang and I left class. I saw a bunch of kids running up to the 5th Floor and for some reason, I followed. When I reached the 5th floor, that when we saw the 1st Tower was on fire. And as we are trying to figure out what happened, the second tower got hit. At that point, school security came and rounded us up and escorted us to the school auditorium on the 1st floor. When we arrived, I looked at the window. Our school is located on Ave of the Americas and I just saw panicking people running uptown and then a giant smoke of gray just came and overtook them, covering them all.
All we had were radios and we were trying to get news on what’s going on. The line for the pay phone was long and by the time it was my turn, I was waiting for about a hour. I called my mom, who worked in Queens and got no answer. She later told me she had to walk the Queensboro Bridge from her job in Long Island City to our apartment in Washington Heights. I try to call my dad’s taxi company but could reach any line. My dad said later on he was in Midtown and PD cleared the area forcing him to go home.
After I finish with the phone, two NYPD officers from the local precent came and were there to make sure no one leave the school as the streets were in chaos and all the subways were shut down. Of course, some kids found ways to sneak out and left the school to do who knows what. I stick with my friends as we were trying to get more news. At about 5pm, the ACE trains were running again at Canal Street and we were allowed to go home.
The way the streets were, I can’t honestly remember. It was just so Surreal that I can’t remember how it was but I do remember that the station was Uber packed with people. It took almost an hour and a half to get into a train. After I got home, we were told that school was closed for a while. We had the rest of the week off.
We went back to school on Monday. Some kids lost parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins from the attack and they started to do the pledge of allegiance for the rest of the year. It made it worse when the AA 587 crashed a few months later as we thought it was another attack and sadly and surprisedly, it was wrong since most Latinos in my school were Dominican and most lost someone in that flight.
I run a website called American September where I collect “Where were you on 9/11” stories from all 50 states and all around the world. It all started basically because of my innocent 9/11 memory as a kid. Once I realized what had really happened and how little I understood in the moment, it really changed my life:
“On September 11th, 2001 I didn’t know the world had changed. I was a first-grader at Reeves Elementary in Long Beach, Mississippi; the school decided we were too young to turn on the television and show us what was happening so they left that to our parents. Kids were being checked out of school and my father came to eat lunch with me in a half-empty cafeteria. We sat in silence, I still didn’t know.
The day I clearly remember is September 12th. My father sat me in the car on a foggy morning before school and said “The World Trade Center is gone.” I asked, “What’s the World Trade Center?”
At school, our teacher tried to comfort us, but no kid my age could possibly understand all of what happened. Sometime in the weeks that followed my school entered a penny donation fundraiser to help recovery efforts at Ground Zero. The class that raised the most pennies won a pizza party. As a six-year-old kid I heard “help” and “pizza” which were two things I did understand.
I put in a big effort and when I asked neighbors or family members for donations I would say “Do you want to donate money to New York? People are trapped in the World Trade Center!” I didn’t know they were all dead, the money we were raising went towards recovering body parts for funerals not finding survivors. No one wanted to tell an innocent kid they were all dead. After an awkward hesitation, they filled my jar up and thanked me.
I remember going to the bank with my dad to turn the donations to pennies and telling the teller what it was for, I remember dragging a red Radio Flyer wagon filled with massive jars of pennies into school like a hero and telling everyone it was going straight to New York, and I remember the sad joy on my teacher’s face when I showed her what I had done and told her not only were we going to help those people in New York we were going to win that pizza party.
Along with my money, I drew up the design for a robot with big claw arms and a slot in it’s back for pennies. For each penny inserted my robot found a body. I encouraged my teacher to send my designs to New York with the money.
My robot never made it to New York, but the pennies did. We won the pizza party and I felt second only to the President’s perfect opening pitch in patriotism.
A few years later in a random moment, it hit me that all those people were dead, I had saved no one. I was mad no one told me, I was angry that I acted like such a foolish kid.
I don’t feel mad or foolish remembering it anymore, I was an American boy who wanted to help people and eat pizza. I felt like a hero walking into school wheeling that red penny wagon behind me. America needed heroes.
It took me a while to grow up… but when I did I really found a purpose in life which is remembering that day.”
If anyone wants to share their 9/11 stories, please feel free to. Here’s the Page: https://www.americanseptember.com/share-your-story.html
My first real job at a call center at a bank doing collections. People kept telling me a plane crashed into the WTC. Im thinking what does that have to do with paying your bills. I couldn’t grasp the magnitude of it. I pictured a small aircraft that did “minimal damage”. People kept telling me i didn’t understand and finally they shut off the phones and wheeled out a TV like you would see in your middleschool class on movie day. They turned it on and before I could even process what I was seeing the second plane hit. An audible gasp came across the room as everyone was silent trying to compute what they were seeing. The ride home I was numb. When I got home I couldn’t quit watching CNN as we watched the towers fall. The soot in the air and the alarms going off from the firetruck and car alarms.
The office was shut down for a few days before going back to work. We still didn’t call NY or parts of PA near Somerset for a good month or so. We did come back to flat-screen TVs in the break room that played CNN daily
In the morning I woke up and took a pregnancy test. It was positive! I went to work (in an elementary school) and told one close friend that I was pregnant – it was pretty exciting! An hour later the whole 9/11 tragedy started to unfold, and by that evening I was sitting at home wondering what kind of world my baby was going to grow up in.
In my 5th grade classroom. All of a sudden kids were getting pulled out of class left and right, didn’t understand what was going on until I got home and saw my mom watching the news.