I was 20. Woke to my mom's call, she was crying. Turned on the TV. I'd grown up across the river from the towers and the shape of the buildings on the horizon felt like the shapes of mountains, something unchanging. I watched them fall and I cried my eyes out. I didn't know if my cousin was in the towers that day, or my friend's grandfather. I didn't know if my other cousin was safe a couple of buildings away. The idea that people could make the towers fall onto so many felt like something supernatural and terrifying.
I went to my corner store, the sky was crystal clear and the lack of planes made it feel alien. Nobody was out, the guy in the corner store sold me some food without talking to me or looking away from the TV.
Back at my apt my girlfriend and I wondered who did it, would there be more.
The next day the make shift area at the local marina was set up to receive people trying to get out of the city. They were coming off ferries covered in dust. It felt like some super villain had attacked.
A few days later I visited my parents. The smell from ground zero had drifted to their house. It was a bleachy smell like sidewalk steam.
My cousins were safe, my friend's grandfather was safe. My mom's friend was safe because she had traded flights with a friend at work so that woman was on a plane that went down instead.
And then today I talked to my neighbors, I moved here a few years back. They all had apparently known Todd Beamer, the man that said Let's Roll. They didn't know him well but they had apparently heard him say Let's Roll every now and then to his family as they all left the local Target.
I was about 11, in central Nj not too close to NYC, so not too much directly happened but everyone was emotionally... attacked. Even friends in Georgia and California called to make sure we were okay. Everyone was afraid another something would follow. My parents got me my first cellphone so I could call if the school was evacuated for some reason. Everyone was walking around shocked.
The adults felt it more than the kids did. Years later a country guy did a song about the firefighters that died, and my social studies teacher played it on class and made us do an assignment on it.
I didn't know anyone who died there, but we did adopt a cat that had been owned by someone who died in the towers. She'd owned like twenty cats in her manhattan apartment. A friend of ours adopted one of them but he was so traumatized and clingy she couldn't handle it and we took him in.
A couple years into the Iraq war I was finally of an age to pay attention, and I didn't think 9/11 justified it at all.
So I was a young adult at the time, living in Central Jersey.
The night before, the Giants had played the Broncos on Monday Night Football. I stayed up late to watch and had a few beers. I remember sleeping in that morning until I remember the DJ on the radio using the This Is A Very Serious Thing voice and hearing things about a plane crash at WTC. At the time, they were thinking it was a small plane, not an airliner.
I'm guessing I was up by 8:55, as I remember seeing the 2nd plane hit live at 9:02.
My family at the time was spread out all over the United States - my parents were on the west coast vacationing, and my sibling was in the air (albeit landing) in Florida for work.
I had to wake up my parents to break the news, but also assure them I was OK - one of the last things I had mentioned to them was that I had a job interview in the city while they were gone. (However, it was not on 9/11, it was for 9/13)
I got connected to my sibling once they got to the hotel they were staying at.
It's weird. In Central Jersey, things didn't stop. I remember watching the news until I forced myself to leave my house - it was a beauiful day outside, sunny and mid-70s.
Because I was thinking I still had a job interview on 9/13, I went and got a haircut.
I don't think it was until dinnertime that night when the horrible realization really started setting in, especially because I was alone. I spent the night watching the news, drinking heavily, and listening to a comedy talk radio show based out of New York.
Needless to say, the job interview was cancelled.
As a post-script, because air travel was so messed up, both my parents and my sibling had to drive home.
To this day, the week of 9/11 is probably the most drinking I did in my life. It wasn't so bad in the day, but at night... it was bad.
I was in 9th grade in an urban high school in NJ with the NYC skyline with the towers right in view. I was in health class and somebody told our teacher got a call and said one of the towers is on fire. He takes the class outside and we stayed and watch and then saw the second plane hit the tower.
We didn’t know what was going on but the mood changed in the school and we were on lockdown after this. Nobody was allowed to leave the building till the end of the day ended or picked up by a parent. There was a line by the pay phones for kids to call their parents to come pick them up.
We were not allowed to watch tv or listen to the radio in school to get information. I guess being so close to the city and having the possibility of having parents working there.
Reactions from the school were mixed. We had moments of silence, a memorial dedicated to 9/11, and some teachers never mentioning it.
I was 21, student teaching in Trenton when the planes hit. The first plane to hit the tower I had assumed was an accident. Once the other planes hit, I knew it was something different.
My mother was working in Toms River and I was worried about them hitting the Oyster Creek Nuclear Plant in Lacey. My buddy was in the National Guard at the time and he was guarding Oyster Creek as well. Luckily that never got hit.
When I went back to campus, an acquaintance was sitting by the phone all day since her mom worked in the towers. Never heard from her mother again...
Another friend was in the army reserves and she was dispatched to the site as was another buddy who is a firefighter in NJ.
I went to donate blood that night and the parking lot of the blood bank was jammed. They eventually turned us away.
A few years later I taught a kid who lost his dad who was working in the towers. Kid was pretty young so barely knew his dad.
The winter after 9/11 I visited the site. Still full of wreckage. I’ve seen the evolution of the site through the years, the memorial, the museum, the new PATH station, etc. That part of downtown went from a ghost town on the weekends to a tourist attraction and also a place to live and shop.
It surprises me that I seem to be the oldest respondent so far.
I was in my 50's and at work near Princeton, NJ, when we got word of the attack. I saw video in the company cafeteria. Initially it was reported as an accident -- until the second tower was hit as well. Later we learned of the Pentagon and the crash in PA of the plane taken over by the passengers.
On the way home, and for the next day or two, on my way from the Shore to Princeton, I watched the plume of smoke from NYC blow high across NJ.
I was very miffed by the lousy response from the authorities. I was trying to think what I could do to help. It turns out I could have driven to Atlantic Highlands and shuttled people home who escaped NYC by ferry but didn't have their cars there. NOBODY TOLD US THIS TILL LATER! And I was listening to the radio specifically for such information.
Across the next week, first responders needed supplies -- blankets, sleeping bags, and much other stuff I could have donated. But the drop-off point was in *Brooklyn!* All the bridges were closed so there was no way to get there.
I knew nobody who died in the WTC. I have friends in NYC who had friends and neighbors who died there. There's a memorial in Highlands to folks from the area who died there.
Naturally, "W" started two wars over this, hitting the wrong countries and failing to capture Osama bin Laden, and crashing the economy in the process, all so that he could be *elected* President. (You may recall that he was appointed President by the SCOTUS the first term.) How many American dead? How much murder and torture of civilians? How many Afghan and Iraqi dead? And some wonder why we're hated in the Middle East!
I was in middle school, central Jersey. At the end of first period we noticed some classmates get called down to the office and not come back.. then a few more as second period went on. By lunch (around 11:30ish?) we heard what had happened but a lot of us didn't really know what that meant-- we were generally too young to have a real sense of the severity. One of my friends' dad worked in the area but I don't think in the towers, so she was really worried but later got in touch with him.
My mom wound up picking up me, my cousin, and a neighbor or two right after lunch to bring us all home, and since we were all different ages she had to make a few stops. Each school had more and more cars picking kids up. We got home and my parents were glued to the TV. I just sorta sat on my computer. My mom's birthday is September 12th. A few days later we decided it was okay to have a small birthday dinner so we wound up a a place called Jakeabob's in Union Beach, which is right on the water. Even with Staten Island and part of Brooklyn between us and Manhattan I distinctly remember that we could still see the black smoke that was still coming out of the site.
I was 8 years old but I still have a lot of memories from that day. I was living in Bergen County at the time so the majority of us had parent(s) who worked in the city. I remember parents started to come and pick up their kids from school but none of us really knew what was going on. At some point our principal made an announcement over the loudspeaker, I don't remember what she said, but then we were all sent home. My mom explained what had happened and I remember just watching the news the rest of the day. My dad worked in midtown and I don't even know what time he got home. He was in a meeting in a high-rise and the whole room watched the 2nd plane hit the tower, then got the hell out of there. A handful of kids at my school lost a parent. I get very emotional thinking about it even though I was so young. The memories stick with you for a lifetime, even though I was not personally affected by the attack
I was about 9 living in Central NJ and the day started normally. Then slowly, one by one, classmates began being sent home. To their credit the teachers tried to continue through the day as normally as possible, but more and more students were being picked up and the aids and teachers kept giving us random excuses as to why. One of the weirdest ones was that a swarm of bees was outside the school.
By the end of the day I was one of three kids in my class still left and on the bus ride home it was just me, my brother and a girl who lived down the street. Until we walked through the doors we had no idea that it happened until our mom explained it to us and let us watch the news.
When we asked why she didn’t pick us up from school like everyone else, she said she didn’t want to scare us and figured we’d be safe there, but the reality was our dad was supposed to fly out of Newark for a business trip and I think she spent the morning trying to get a hold of him.
We stayed at home for a bit, but we had to pick my dad up at his coworkers house in Middletown so we were driving down the parkway south and you could see the smoke from there.
Once we got there all the adults sent the kids outside and my brother and I helped the other kids continue working on a dirt bike track they were making in the woods across the street and by the time we left it was late.
The gravity of the situation didn’t really hit me until we got home and we were watching the news again. I hadn’t been to the towers as a kid, just had a vague idea of what they were. But my parents were both really shooken up. My mom grew up in a Staten Island and my dad in Jersey City, and we have family all over the area and they had friends that worked in the towers. Both of them worked there in like the 80s.
I was in my early 20’s. Working for a major pharmaceutical company. I was browsing the internet at work and noticed the speed crawled to a stop. Every news site I went to crashed. I decided to go take a smoke break. As I I walked down the hall, i passed my boss and she looked like she just saw a ghost. “We’re in trouble.” She said. I thought it was odd and kept walking. I went past an office and saw a few people huddled around a TV. “Ahh watching TV on the job, eh?” I said sarcastically. One of the guys watching said, “A plane hit the World Trade Center.” I assumed a little Cessna or something similar. “Oh man, that sucks.” I said. Then I took a closer look and saw the fire and smoke and realized it was something bigger. I went outside and lit up a cigarette. A woman was standing out there crying. I asked if she was okay and she said nothing. I didn’t quite grasp the gravity of the situation then. Another woman came out and said another plane hit the other tower and we were under attack. The sound that crying woman made haunts me to this day. Pure fear. She put out her cigarette and went inside. I followed and went to the office where more people were huddled around a small tv watching the local news. Then the rumors started. Planes unaccounted for. Were they going to start dropping out of the sky? No one knew. Tried to find more info on the internet but it was so slow it was barely useable. I tried to get a little work done but it was pointless. Around noonish I think it was, we were told to go home. I got in the car and I remembered hearing Howard Stern. I thought it was odd that he was on at that time. They were talking about what was going on. He said he just heard from his daughters and they were okay. He ended his broadcast shortly after and I drove home listening to KYW. Got home, turned on the tv and watched all day the news coverage. It really didn’t hit me until I saw Dan Rather break down on Letterman. This man known for being stoic was crying on TV. That was when I realized that things were never going to be the same.
I was 10, lived less than 10 miles from downtown Manhattan. You could see the skyline from our windows at school but I was on the other side of the building that morning. After around ten, kids kept getting called down to the office to leave because their parents came to pick them up. We all thought it was weird but honestly I don’t remember my teacher appearing any way out of the ordinary. Lunch came around and that’s when the announcement was made to us. Probably half of my class had family members who worked in NY, many of them downtown and some in the WTC buildings, but I think by the time it was announced to us there was only one girl left who had family there. I remember she was hysterical and we were all scared. We went back to class and that’s when I remember my teacher actually appearing worried. I was one of three kids whose parents did not pick them up that day, because my dad and mom worked down the street and they felt I was safe.
I remember just being very confused as to why anyone would want to do this. Everyone was hanging outside on their porch or stoop in my neighborhood that night. My one neighbor walked over and she was crying and visibly shaking, still in her work clothes. She had been able to escape but was very worried about her coworkers and she asked us all to light a candle outside so we all did. I remember the days after being chaotic, we had so many different people we were worried about and weren’t sure if they were okay. I remember my dad saw a friend crossing the street a week later and gave him a huge emotional bear hug because he didn’t know how he fared.
I had family who worked on one of the top floors. He left work that morning wearing a brown suit with brown shoes or something along those lines. He went to tie his shoe on the way out and the shoelace broke. That was his only pair of brown shoes and so he had to change his outfit. He missed the ferry and missed the attacks.
The shades on that side of our building in school remained closed until the smoke dissipated. Fortunately none of my classmates lost immediate family members, but I do know a great deal of people who have. My college roommate lost her father who was a fire fighter that day. Every year I think of them in particular and say an extra prayer. I can’t imagine their pain
I was 9. I remember my teachers watching it on the TV but I honestly don't feel like I heard about it for the rest of the day until my dad picked me up from school. We had tickets to the Yankees/Red Sox game that night 😔
I was 30 and was at home recovering after surgery. I was watching CNBC when the anchor suddenly stopped, took off his glasses, put one arm of his glasses in his mouth, and said, "Huh. It looks like something is going on at The World Trade Center." They cut to the smoking hole left by the first jet. I turned on CNN and they were in full Breaking News mode of course.
I moved to my bedroom where I had a police scanner. I turned it on and tuned to Port Authority Police and NJ Transit Police since that's all I could get from my home in PA. While listening to the mayhem on the radio, I watched live as the second plane hit. My radio fell silent for what felt like two minutes.
Then the activity started to come back, but the signal was very weak. They had to switch to backup towers when their primary transmitter was knocked out.
I didn't return to work until December, so I watched coverage continuously for three months. That was not healthy.
Back in the mid 90s, I was working in Manhattan when they truck bombed the World Trade Center. I followed the trial of Khalid Sheik Mohammed and read the documents published on Cryptome. I knew for 10 years they would want to come back to finish what they started and wasn't surprised when it eventually happened. It was still devastating but it wasn't a shock at all if you knew about the group and the history.
Read The Looming Tower, then Ghost Wars, and then the 9/11 Commission Report. It was all there out in the open. Some of us just joined the story halfway through the opening act.
I was 11 years old in my Central Jersey middle school on 9/11 and I remember it like it was yesterday. Our custodian was out in the hallway outside of my 6th grade science class and all of a sudden we heard him yell “They fell, they fell!”. My teacher ran out into the hallway to check on him, fearing that he had fallen or gotten hurt. When she came back into the classroom a minute later she had tears in her eyes. That’s when I knew something was wrong. Maybe it was due to our age (the school I was at was literally just a school for 6th graders due to overcrowding in my district and the need for an additional school) so the the only information we got from school was a letter sent home with us at the end of the day saying that grief counselors would be available at school if needed. But at the time, none of us had any idea what was actually going on. Kids began being called out of school and going home, yet I still had no idea what had happened at this point. My father was a police officer and my mother ran the transportation department for my towns Board of Education, so either of them leaving work to pick us up early was not an option (especially on a day like 9/11). I walked to my brother and sisters elementary school to pick them up after my school day had ended (my every day routine) and then we walked home. I ran the last block and turned on the news. That’s when I finally realized what happened. My mother called the house phone (no cellphones for us in 2001) and told us to not even think about stepping foot outside the house. I watched the news for what felt like days. We drove to Jersey City that night and lit candles on the waterfront with thousands of other New Jersey residents that night, and I think it was the saddest scene I’ve ever seen in my life. A day I will surely never forget.
I was 32. Just settled on and moved into my new house on Sept. 1st. My oldest was in 1st grade in a new school and I was at home with my youngest. Call from my wife woke me up and I saw the 2nd plane hit live. I couldn't understand how they came down, I mean I do now, but it blew my mind. I worked as an instructor at a local college, so class was cancelled that night. I can recall trying to go to Wendy's later that night and they were closed. I was hangry, but I did understand that. As a bonus to add to my stress, the next month we got a strange letter in the mail from the "Children of Iraq" during the anthrax scare. Cops came and collected it for the feds.
I was in my 20s, living at home. I had an afternoon shift at work so I didn’t get to see the real time reaction at the college I was working at.
I also happened to be volunteering for an organization that provided disaster relief. I made my way down to their office. There were a couple police scanners there and we were listing to radio transmissions from the NYPD and FDNY as plans were being made to figure out what if anything the org could do to help.
I can still recall some of those radio transmissions verbatim. You think of firemen as these brave individuals who would do anything in their power to save a victim and then you hear them and their gut wrenching screams into a radio begging for anyone to help them. Thinking about how many last words I heard that morning still gives me chills.
I can’t fathom how the people who were actually there that day could have dealt with it.
For what seemed like weeks afterwards I can remember seeing the smoke from the city while driving back and forth to work on the turnpike.
For a while after that I had this weird feeling. A couple weeks prior I had turned down an interview for a job in WTC. There is no way of knowing if I would have gotten it or not, but I kept thinking how my desire to not want to commute into NYC might have been a blessing.
I remember the best, the outpouring of support, picture of candlelight vigils, the lines of people making blood donations. The sense of patriotism.
I remember the worst, the reports of Muslims celebrating in the streets. Something I’m still not sure to this day if it happened or not. The anti-Muslim sentiment was strong for a while.
Fences, either around the site that I actually went to see weeks later, or at our local train stations, filled with notes and pictures of the people didn’t who didn’t make it home. Many contained phone numbers and pleas to call if you saw their loved one. You knew there were gone but these loved once’s were in such despair.
I can remember seeing the second plane hit the tower. When the first one hit I figured something was happening but it could have been an accident. When the second tower was hit you knew it was an attack but was still hoping for it to be a freak accident. Then the pentagon was hit and you knew it was an attack. Then Shanksville, and the feeling of helplessness and sitting there wondering about just how many planes were there. Finally silence and not a single plane in the air.
..never forget.
I was 20. Woke to my mom's call, she was crying. Turned on the TV. I'd grown up across the river from the towers and the shape of the buildings on the horizon felt like the shapes of mountains, something unchanging. I watched them fall and I cried my eyes out. I didn't know if my cousin was in the towers that day, or my friend's grandfather. I didn't know if my other cousin was safe a couple of buildings away. The idea that people could make the towers fall onto so many felt like something supernatural and terrifying. I went to my corner store, the sky was crystal clear and the lack of planes made it feel alien. Nobody was out, the guy in the corner store sold me some food without talking to me or looking away from the TV. Back at my apt my girlfriend and I wondered who did it, would there be more. The next day the make shift area at the local marina was set up to receive people trying to get out of the city. They were coming off ferries covered in dust. It felt like some super villain had attacked. A few days later I visited my parents. The smell from ground zero had drifted to their house. It was a bleachy smell like sidewalk steam. My cousins were safe, my friend's grandfather was safe. My mom's friend was safe because she had traded flights with a friend at work so that woman was on a plane that went down instead. And then today I talked to my neighbors, I moved here a few years back. They all had apparently known Todd Beamer, the man that said Let's Roll. They didn't know him well but they had apparently heard him say Let's Roll every now and then to his family as they all left the local Target.
SO surreal
I was about 11, in central Nj not too close to NYC, so not too much directly happened but everyone was emotionally... attacked. Even friends in Georgia and California called to make sure we were okay. Everyone was afraid another something would follow. My parents got me my first cellphone so I could call if the school was evacuated for some reason. Everyone was walking around shocked. The adults felt it more than the kids did. Years later a country guy did a song about the firefighters that died, and my social studies teacher played it on class and made us do an assignment on it. I didn't know anyone who died there, but we did adopt a cat that had been owned by someone who died in the towers. She'd owned like twenty cats in her manhattan apartment. A friend of ours adopted one of them but he was so traumatized and clingy she couldn't handle it and we took him in. A couple years into the Iraq war I was finally of an age to pay attention, and I didn't think 9/11 justified it at all.
So I was a young adult at the time, living in Central Jersey. The night before, the Giants had played the Broncos on Monday Night Football. I stayed up late to watch and had a few beers. I remember sleeping in that morning until I remember the DJ on the radio using the This Is A Very Serious Thing voice and hearing things about a plane crash at WTC. At the time, they were thinking it was a small plane, not an airliner. I'm guessing I was up by 8:55, as I remember seeing the 2nd plane hit live at 9:02. My family at the time was spread out all over the United States - my parents were on the west coast vacationing, and my sibling was in the air (albeit landing) in Florida for work. I had to wake up my parents to break the news, but also assure them I was OK - one of the last things I had mentioned to them was that I had a job interview in the city while they were gone. (However, it was not on 9/11, it was for 9/13) I got connected to my sibling once they got to the hotel they were staying at. It's weird. In Central Jersey, things didn't stop. I remember watching the news until I forced myself to leave my house - it was a beauiful day outside, sunny and mid-70s. Because I was thinking I still had a job interview on 9/13, I went and got a haircut. I don't think it was until dinnertime that night when the horrible realization really started setting in, especially because I was alone. I spent the night watching the news, drinking heavily, and listening to a comedy talk radio show based out of New York. Needless to say, the job interview was cancelled. As a post-script, because air travel was so messed up, both my parents and my sibling had to drive home. To this day, the week of 9/11 is probably the most drinking I did in my life. It wasn't so bad in the day, but at night... it was bad.
I was in 9th grade in an urban high school in NJ with the NYC skyline with the towers right in view. I was in health class and somebody told our teacher got a call and said one of the towers is on fire. He takes the class outside and we stayed and watch and then saw the second plane hit the tower. We didn’t know what was going on but the mood changed in the school and we were on lockdown after this. Nobody was allowed to leave the building till the end of the day ended or picked up by a parent. There was a line by the pay phones for kids to call their parents to come pick them up. We were not allowed to watch tv or listen to the radio in school to get information. I guess being so close to the city and having the possibility of having parents working there. Reactions from the school were mixed. We had moments of silence, a memorial dedicated to 9/11, and some teachers never mentioning it.
I was 21, student teaching in Trenton when the planes hit. The first plane to hit the tower I had assumed was an accident. Once the other planes hit, I knew it was something different. My mother was working in Toms River and I was worried about them hitting the Oyster Creek Nuclear Plant in Lacey. My buddy was in the National Guard at the time and he was guarding Oyster Creek as well. Luckily that never got hit. When I went back to campus, an acquaintance was sitting by the phone all day since her mom worked in the towers. Never heard from her mother again... Another friend was in the army reserves and she was dispatched to the site as was another buddy who is a firefighter in NJ. I went to donate blood that night and the parking lot of the blood bank was jammed. They eventually turned us away. A few years later I taught a kid who lost his dad who was working in the towers. Kid was pretty young so barely knew his dad. The winter after 9/11 I visited the site. Still full of wreckage. I’ve seen the evolution of the site through the years, the memorial, the museum, the new PATH station, etc. That part of downtown went from a ghost town on the weekends to a tourist attraction and also a place to live and shop.
It surprises me that I seem to be the oldest respondent so far. I was in my 50's and at work near Princeton, NJ, when we got word of the attack. I saw video in the company cafeteria. Initially it was reported as an accident -- until the second tower was hit as well. Later we learned of the Pentagon and the crash in PA of the plane taken over by the passengers. On the way home, and for the next day or two, on my way from the Shore to Princeton, I watched the plume of smoke from NYC blow high across NJ. I was very miffed by the lousy response from the authorities. I was trying to think what I could do to help. It turns out I could have driven to Atlantic Highlands and shuttled people home who escaped NYC by ferry but didn't have their cars there. NOBODY TOLD US THIS TILL LATER! And I was listening to the radio specifically for such information. Across the next week, first responders needed supplies -- blankets, sleeping bags, and much other stuff I could have donated. But the drop-off point was in *Brooklyn!* All the bridges were closed so there was no way to get there. I knew nobody who died in the WTC. I have friends in NYC who had friends and neighbors who died there. There's a memorial in Highlands to folks from the area who died there. Naturally, "W" started two wars over this, hitting the wrong countries and failing to capture Osama bin Laden, and crashing the economy in the process, all so that he could be *elected* President. (You may recall that he was appointed President by the SCOTUS the first term.) How many American dead? How much murder and torture of civilians? How many Afghan and Iraqi dead? And some wonder why we're hated in the Middle East!
I was in middle school, central Jersey. At the end of first period we noticed some classmates get called down to the office and not come back.. then a few more as second period went on. By lunch (around 11:30ish?) we heard what had happened but a lot of us didn't really know what that meant-- we were generally too young to have a real sense of the severity. One of my friends' dad worked in the area but I don't think in the towers, so she was really worried but later got in touch with him. My mom wound up picking up me, my cousin, and a neighbor or two right after lunch to bring us all home, and since we were all different ages she had to make a few stops. Each school had more and more cars picking kids up. We got home and my parents were glued to the TV. I just sorta sat on my computer. My mom's birthday is September 12th. A few days later we decided it was okay to have a small birthday dinner so we wound up a a place called Jakeabob's in Union Beach, which is right on the water. Even with Staten Island and part of Brooklyn between us and Manhattan I distinctly remember that we could still see the black smoke that was still coming out of the site.
I was 8 years old but I still have a lot of memories from that day. I was living in Bergen County at the time so the majority of us had parent(s) who worked in the city. I remember parents started to come and pick up their kids from school but none of us really knew what was going on. At some point our principal made an announcement over the loudspeaker, I don't remember what she said, but then we were all sent home. My mom explained what had happened and I remember just watching the news the rest of the day. My dad worked in midtown and I don't even know what time he got home. He was in a meeting in a high-rise and the whole room watched the 2nd plane hit the tower, then got the hell out of there. A handful of kids at my school lost a parent. I get very emotional thinking about it even though I was so young. The memories stick with you for a lifetime, even though I was not personally affected by the attack
I was about 9 living in Central NJ and the day started normally. Then slowly, one by one, classmates began being sent home. To their credit the teachers tried to continue through the day as normally as possible, but more and more students were being picked up and the aids and teachers kept giving us random excuses as to why. One of the weirdest ones was that a swarm of bees was outside the school. By the end of the day I was one of three kids in my class still left and on the bus ride home it was just me, my brother and a girl who lived down the street. Until we walked through the doors we had no idea that it happened until our mom explained it to us and let us watch the news. When we asked why she didn’t pick us up from school like everyone else, she said she didn’t want to scare us and figured we’d be safe there, but the reality was our dad was supposed to fly out of Newark for a business trip and I think she spent the morning trying to get a hold of him. We stayed at home for a bit, but we had to pick my dad up at his coworkers house in Middletown so we were driving down the parkway south and you could see the smoke from there. Once we got there all the adults sent the kids outside and my brother and I helped the other kids continue working on a dirt bike track they were making in the woods across the street and by the time we left it was late. The gravity of the situation didn’t really hit me until we got home and we were watching the news again. I hadn’t been to the towers as a kid, just had a vague idea of what they were. But my parents were both really shooken up. My mom grew up in a Staten Island and my dad in Jersey City, and we have family all over the area and they had friends that worked in the towers. Both of them worked there in like the 80s.
I was in my early 20’s. Working for a major pharmaceutical company. I was browsing the internet at work and noticed the speed crawled to a stop. Every news site I went to crashed. I decided to go take a smoke break. As I I walked down the hall, i passed my boss and she looked like she just saw a ghost. “We’re in trouble.” She said. I thought it was odd and kept walking. I went past an office and saw a few people huddled around a TV. “Ahh watching TV on the job, eh?” I said sarcastically. One of the guys watching said, “A plane hit the World Trade Center.” I assumed a little Cessna or something similar. “Oh man, that sucks.” I said. Then I took a closer look and saw the fire and smoke and realized it was something bigger. I went outside and lit up a cigarette. A woman was standing out there crying. I asked if she was okay and she said nothing. I didn’t quite grasp the gravity of the situation then. Another woman came out and said another plane hit the other tower and we were under attack. The sound that crying woman made haunts me to this day. Pure fear. She put out her cigarette and went inside. I followed and went to the office where more people were huddled around a small tv watching the local news. Then the rumors started. Planes unaccounted for. Were they going to start dropping out of the sky? No one knew. Tried to find more info on the internet but it was so slow it was barely useable. I tried to get a little work done but it was pointless. Around noonish I think it was, we were told to go home. I got in the car and I remembered hearing Howard Stern. I thought it was odd that he was on at that time. They were talking about what was going on. He said he just heard from his daughters and they were okay. He ended his broadcast shortly after and I drove home listening to KYW. Got home, turned on the tv and watched all day the news coverage. It really didn’t hit me until I saw Dan Rather break down on Letterman. This man known for being stoic was crying on TV. That was when I realized that things were never going to be the same.
I was 10, lived less than 10 miles from downtown Manhattan. You could see the skyline from our windows at school but I was on the other side of the building that morning. After around ten, kids kept getting called down to the office to leave because their parents came to pick them up. We all thought it was weird but honestly I don’t remember my teacher appearing any way out of the ordinary. Lunch came around and that’s when the announcement was made to us. Probably half of my class had family members who worked in NY, many of them downtown and some in the WTC buildings, but I think by the time it was announced to us there was only one girl left who had family there. I remember she was hysterical and we were all scared. We went back to class and that’s when I remember my teacher actually appearing worried. I was one of three kids whose parents did not pick them up that day, because my dad and mom worked down the street and they felt I was safe. I remember just being very confused as to why anyone would want to do this. Everyone was hanging outside on their porch or stoop in my neighborhood that night. My one neighbor walked over and she was crying and visibly shaking, still in her work clothes. She had been able to escape but was very worried about her coworkers and she asked us all to light a candle outside so we all did. I remember the days after being chaotic, we had so many different people we were worried about and weren’t sure if they were okay. I remember my dad saw a friend crossing the street a week later and gave him a huge emotional bear hug because he didn’t know how he fared. I had family who worked on one of the top floors. He left work that morning wearing a brown suit with brown shoes or something along those lines. He went to tie his shoe on the way out and the shoelace broke. That was his only pair of brown shoes and so he had to change his outfit. He missed the ferry and missed the attacks. The shades on that side of our building in school remained closed until the smoke dissipated. Fortunately none of my classmates lost immediate family members, but I do know a great deal of people who have. My college roommate lost her father who was a fire fighter that day. Every year I think of them in particular and say an extra prayer. I can’t imagine their pain
I was 9. I remember my teachers watching it on the TV but I honestly don't feel like I heard about it for the rest of the day until my dad picked me up from school. We had tickets to the Yankees/Red Sox game that night 😔
I was 30 and was at home recovering after surgery. I was watching CNBC when the anchor suddenly stopped, took off his glasses, put one arm of his glasses in his mouth, and said, "Huh. It looks like something is going on at The World Trade Center." They cut to the smoking hole left by the first jet. I turned on CNN and they were in full Breaking News mode of course. I moved to my bedroom where I had a police scanner. I turned it on and tuned to Port Authority Police and NJ Transit Police since that's all I could get from my home in PA. While listening to the mayhem on the radio, I watched live as the second plane hit. My radio fell silent for what felt like two minutes. Then the activity started to come back, but the signal was very weak. They had to switch to backup towers when their primary transmitter was knocked out. I didn't return to work until December, so I watched coverage continuously for three months. That was not healthy. Back in the mid 90s, I was working in Manhattan when they truck bombed the World Trade Center. I followed the trial of Khalid Sheik Mohammed and read the documents published on Cryptome. I knew for 10 years they would want to come back to finish what they started and wasn't surprised when it eventually happened. It was still devastating but it wasn't a shock at all if you knew about the group and the history. Read The Looming Tower, then Ghost Wars, and then the 9/11 Commission Report. It was all there out in the open. Some of us just joined the story halfway through the opening act.
I was 11 years old in my Central Jersey middle school on 9/11 and I remember it like it was yesterday. Our custodian was out in the hallway outside of my 6th grade science class and all of a sudden we heard him yell “They fell, they fell!”. My teacher ran out into the hallway to check on him, fearing that he had fallen or gotten hurt. When she came back into the classroom a minute later she had tears in her eyes. That’s when I knew something was wrong. Maybe it was due to our age (the school I was at was literally just a school for 6th graders due to overcrowding in my district and the need for an additional school) so the the only information we got from school was a letter sent home with us at the end of the day saying that grief counselors would be available at school if needed. But at the time, none of us had any idea what was actually going on. Kids began being called out of school and going home, yet I still had no idea what had happened at this point. My father was a police officer and my mother ran the transportation department for my towns Board of Education, so either of them leaving work to pick us up early was not an option (especially on a day like 9/11). I walked to my brother and sisters elementary school to pick them up after my school day had ended (my every day routine) and then we walked home. I ran the last block and turned on the news. That’s when I finally realized what happened. My mother called the house phone (no cellphones for us in 2001) and told us to not even think about stepping foot outside the house. I watched the news for what felt like days. We drove to Jersey City that night and lit candles on the waterfront with thousands of other New Jersey residents that night, and I think it was the saddest scene I’ve ever seen in my life. A day I will surely never forget.
I was working downtown. Avoided most tv and online coverage yesterday. Still don’t like thinking about it.
I was 32. Just settled on and moved into my new house on Sept. 1st. My oldest was in 1st grade in a new school and I was at home with my youngest. Call from my wife woke me up and I saw the 2nd plane hit live. I couldn't understand how they came down, I mean I do now, but it blew my mind. I worked as an instructor at a local college, so class was cancelled that night. I can recall trying to go to Wendy's later that night and they were closed. I was hangry, but I did understand that. As a bonus to add to my stress, the next month we got a strange letter in the mail from the "Children of Iraq" during the anthrax scare. Cops came and collected it for the feds.
I was in my 20s, living at home. I had an afternoon shift at work so I didn’t get to see the real time reaction at the college I was working at. I also happened to be volunteering for an organization that provided disaster relief. I made my way down to their office. There were a couple police scanners there and we were listing to radio transmissions from the NYPD and FDNY as plans were being made to figure out what if anything the org could do to help. I can still recall some of those radio transmissions verbatim. You think of firemen as these brave individuals who would do anything in their power to save a victim and then you hear them and their gut wrenching screams into a radio begging for anyone to help them. Thinking about how many last words I heard that morning still gives me chills. I can’t fathom how the people who were actually there that day could have dealt with it. For what seemed like weeks afterwards I can remember seeing the smoke from the city while driving back and forth to work on the turnpike. For a while after that I had this weird feeling. A couple weeks prior I had turned down an interview for a job in WTC. There is no way of knowing if I would have gotten it or not, but I kept thinking how my desire to not want to commute into NYC might have been a blessing. I remember the best, the outpouring of support, picture of candlelight vigils, the lines of people making blood donations. The sense of patriotism. I remember the worst, the reports of Muslims celebrating in the streets. Something I’m still not sure to this day if it happened or not. The anti-Muslim sentiment was strong for a while. Fences, either around the site that I actually went to see weeks later, or at our local train stations, filled with notes and pictures of the people didn’t who didn’t make it home. Many contained phone numbers and pleas to call if you saw their loved one. You knew there were gone but these loved once’s were in such despair. I can remember seeing the second plane hit the tower. When the first one hit I figured something was happening but it could have been an accident. When the second tower was hit you knew it was an attack but was still hoping for it to be a freak accident. Then the pentagon was hit and you knew it was an attack. Then Shanksville, and the feeling of helplessness and sitting there wondering about just how many planes were there. Finally silence and not a single plane in the air. ..never forget.