On that Tuesday morning, I was sitting in a conference room on the 52nd floor of a midtown Manhattan office building along with twenty other people. It was about 9:00 and we were half listening to somebody droning on about company policies we already knew, but that our company thought should be explained again for good measure. It was a beautiful late summer day and as the speaker went on, I absently looked through the picture window south toward the picture-perfect view of the World Trade Center and downtown Manhattan, with New York harbor in the background. The area south of midtown is covered with low-rise buildings as the island’s bedrock drops far below the surface, before rising again in the downtown area. The view of downtown from there could just as easily have been from a plane as from an office. Whenever I saw the New York skyline, I thought there was no city in the world like it. Suddenly this view, which I loved and took for granted, changed in a way I couldn’t imagine.

The upper half of one of the World Trade Center towers suddenly became engulfed in a rising, pulsating, gray, black and orange ball of flames. Within an instant, this ball of fire seemed to come from nowhere and engulf the top twenty or thirty floors of one of the towers. Everyone in the room gasped at once and stared, not knowing what to make of what their eyes were seeing. We couldn’t be sure, but it appeared that a small jet veered off course and might have crashed into the tower. Everyone stared at the flaming building for a couple of minutes, transfixed by the sight before our eyes. Then another jet came into view. Like the first it also seemed the size of a Lear jet, but was flying directly at the second tower. To our amazement and horror, it ripped through the tower’s side. The resulting fireball this time seemed to explode out horizontally, rather than upward from the point of impact.

After the initial shock of watching it, everybody realized that the two planes didn’t crash by accident. It was also clear, but unsaid, that if some lunatic was aiming planes into tall buildings, our building was as good a target as any. It was the tallest building between southern midtown where we were and downtown. Somebody yelled “that was no accident, let’s get the hell outta here”, and everybody turned to the elevators and exit stairs.

One or two people decided this was an opportunity not to be missed. After getting my jacket from my desk, I headed toward the elevator lobby. As I went by, I peeked into the conference room to see if everyone had left. One guy, John Markowitz, was an amateur photographer and had gone back into the room. He didn’t view this so much as a calamity as a photo opportunity. Instead of picking up his belongings and getting out, he went to his desk, got his camera, returned to the room and started snapping away. “John” I yelled, we’ve got to get the hell out of here! We’re in the tallest building between here and downtown. If another plane comes, it just might come here.” Turning and smiling at me he replied, “these are gonna make great pictures. You go ahead.” “You might get killed here, come on!” “No, my kids will love these shots. Go on.” It was kind of baffling that he’d treat it like a family get-together to be remembered, not the witnessing from afar of thousands of people being incinerated and crushed in what was for them twenty minutes ago, just another day. But I couldn’t force him. “Okay, it’s up to you” I replied and thought, “he’s an asshole” and quickly walked to the elevator lobby, where a crowd was waiting to get down.

Our entire 56-story building was evacuating and the elevators were jammed. When we finally reached the street ten or fifteen minutes later, chaos was the order of the day. I didn’t see any panic or violence, but it looked as though everybody in Manhattan had flooded out onto the streets to escape, but not quite sure where to go. All public transportation, including Penn Station and the subway system, were shut down. Mobile phone systems were overwhelmed and useless.

The way people behaved was strange. Everybody acted strange, including me. Nothing like this every happened in New York, so there was nothing to go by. Some people from my office decided to find the nearest bar and wait it out. Others decided to stay put until they could go back upstairs. That didn't happen. Others just left to find their ways back home.

My biggest worry was the fact that my wife and two sons were coming into Manhattan that day for a medical appointment. They should have been there by now, but there was no way to reach them. I didn’t know the doctor’s exact address or whether they actually had gotten there safely. For the next two hours I wandered through the mobs on the streets around Penn Station, hoping I’d find them. To my utter amazement and relief, we finally found each other on 33rd Street. They’d reached Penn Station a few minutes after the attack, were disgorged onto the street along with thousands of other people and were within a block or two of me the entire time. Needless to say, they missed their appointment.

I hugged Beth and my sons, Dave and Jimmy. We were relieved to find each other and filled ourselves in on where we were over the last two hours. They saw the fire from the train while it was still in Queens and assumed with everyone else that a terrible accident had occurred. By the time we got back together, the feeling was that those crashes were deliberate. Dave and Jimmy couldn't grasp what was happening, but they weren't alone. In those two hours after the crashes, nobody really grasped what happened. Still though, they were eager to tell me what they saw and ask what it meant.

We didn’t really know what to do next. Some people said they were going to get out of Manhattan by walking over the East River bridges, but that seemed kind of foolish. If madmen were willing to fly planes into crowded office buildings, surely crowded bridges would also be great targets to their evil little minds. Not knowing what else to do, I thought if I could reach her by phone I’d contact my friend Marcella who lived on the Lower East Side not far from the World Trade Center, and see if we could stay with her and her family. During those hours, it felt as though anything and everything was possible and those attacks, as bad as they were, might have just been the start of something far worse.

While it might not seem logical now to head downtown, on that day there was no reason to believe any place was safe and the four of us, my wife, eight and five year-old sons and I walked toward the Lower East Side. When I finally got through to Marcella on my phone, she was still at work uptown. Her husband had already met her and they were about to drive to stay with relatives in Connecticut. In the event we were unable to get out of Manhattan, she said we could use their apartment and told me where in her office I could find the key.

As we talked a woman walked by crying, saying one of the towers had collapsed. I was in disbelief; I knew they were badly damaged, but the collapse of one of the towers I’d known for most of my life was beyond comprehension. I asked Marcella if she heard it and she said yes, it had. It was stunning. I didn’t want to hold her up, so I thanked her and let her go. It wasn't long before the surreal became absolutely real as the second tower collapsed.

I couldn't grasp that this day started out like every other day, predictable and forgettable. Without warning, everything went from totally normal to beyond comprehension. Nothing seemed familiar anymore. That thought stayed with me as we went about trying to figure what to do. We realized downtown must have been in absolute chaos. It seemed pointless to try to walk forty blocks uptown through the teeming streets to get a key, and them walk eighty blocks downtown to the apartment. We decided instead to remain in midtown and hope some order would be restored. After standing around for about seven hours, word started spreading that limited subway and railroad services were being restored. We started shuffling with thousands of others back toward Penn Station. At about 6:00 that evening, we were able to get a train out of Manhattan. The familiar train ride home did nothing to make this day like any other.

The next morning brought with it a superficial sense of routine. Maybe I should’ve stayed home, but I went to work. I got up, dressed and caught the train to Manhattan. I think I wanted to get things back to normal, which in hindsight, didn’t exist anymore. The streets seemed empty,especially compared to the day before. The atmosphere was funereal. Even though people were strangers, they all had the shared knowledge of those planes and the death they brought with them.

By dark coincidence, I was already doing several projects with the City Medical Examiner’s Office for my company. During that time, I became friendly with some of the deputy commissioners there who were working on them with me. Manhattan was still reeling from the day before. Streets were closed, emergency vehicles were all over the place and for the first time, the military were patrolling most public places, including Penn Station. It would soon become a routine sight, but on September 12, it was new and unnerving to see soldiers and national guardsmen walking in train stations with rifles.

My job had me going back and forth to the Medical Examiner’s office on a regular basis before the attack, so I had reason to go there that morning. I certainly didn’t expect business as normal and it wasn’t. Life had just been turned upside down and the people working there needed all the help they could get. When I got there, it was controlled chaos. The initial reports indicated that about 6,000 people were killed in the attack. The fact that the actual number turned out to be about half of that doesn’t change the chaos of that day. The deputy commissioners who I knew were busy trying to set up temporary morgues for the boxes of countless bodies and parts of bodies being brought in.

Everybody in the office, whether they were administrators, commissioners, technicians or medical examiners, had become temporary coroners, doing triage on human remains. When I walked in, they asked me to help document the boxes being brought in. I forgot the details of what I was doing, but I vividly remember watching tired firemen, police, emergency workers and others, covered with dust and dirt, hand-carrying boxes of fragmented body parts; arms, legs, heads, feet, torsos, organs, anything recovered from the attack, through the main lobby to the morgue area.

This wasn’t something I was used to working with every day. In fact, nobody there was used to dealing with this every day because nothing like this happened in the city in anybody’s living memory. I stopped to take a few minutes and get some fresh air. As I walked to the door, I saw the faces of rescue workers sitting in the lobby, staring ahead without looking at anything.

We’ve gone back to the routines we had before that day, but we’re living those routines in a different world. The world before September 11, 2001 is forever gone. I talk about 9/11 like everyone else, but I still can't watch scenes of the towers that day on television and haven't walked near that scar in the ground since that day.

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