There are days in our lives that slowly fade into the distance. Details disappear. Conversations become harder to recall. Places change. Faces blur. And then there are days that never really leave you.
September 11, 2001, is one of those days for me.
At the time, I was making a weekly commute from our home in the Detroit suburbs to my office in Midtown Manhattan. I had the routine down. Driveway to office took about four hours. Airport. Flight. Car. Manhattan. Office.
I had done it countless times. But this commute would be different. I landed at LaGuardia shortly after 8 o’clock that Tuesday morning. I remember the weather. Beautiful. Sunny. Warm.
One of those clear September mornings when the sky seems impossibly blue.
My car was waiting, and we headed toward Manhattan. Somewhere along the drive, I looked toward Lower Manhattan and noticed smoke coming from the World Trade Center. It was unusual enough that I asked my driver to turn on the radio.
Within minutes, we heard the first report: A small plane had apparently crashed into the World Trade Center. At that moment, it sounded like a terrible accident.
I called my wife, Susan. I remember telling her something had happened at the World Trade Center and that she should turn on CNN to see what was going on.
Then everything changed.
As we continued toward Manhattan, another report came across the radio. A large passenger plane had crashed into the other tower. There was no longer any question. This wasn't an accident. I don't know that any of us fully understood what it was yet. But we knew the world had suddenly become a very different place.
We kept driving.
When we reached the entrance to the Midtown Tunnel, there was only one car ahead of us. Then the tunnel was closed. Police officers approached and told us we had to turn around. They needed to clear the roadway for the seemingly endless line of emergency vehicles racing toward Manhattan.
Fire trucks.
Police cars.
Ambulances.
Men and women heading directly toward something the rest of us were desperately trying to understand.It took time just to get our car turned around. My driver looked at me. “Where do you want to go? I remember my answer. “I need to get to my office.” My office was at 40th and Lexington.
Today, that response sounds almost ridiculous.
Two planes had just flown into the World Trade Center, Manhattan was being sealed off, emergency vehicles were racing toward Lower Manhattan—and somehow my mind was still operating on the routine of an ordinary Tuesday morning.
I needed to get to work.
So I asked him to take me to a train station. We began driving north through Queens. Behind us, through the back window of the car, I could see the towers burning. People had come out of buildings and homes and were standing in the streets, staring toward Manhattan.
Everyone was looking at the same thing. No one understood what we were watching. At the train station, I grabbed my suitcase and backpack. My laptop was inside. I was wearing a suit. I ran to the ticket window and asked whether trains were still running into Manhattan.
They were.
I bought a ticket for Penn Station and headed toward the tracks. Then an announcement came over the station intercom. The FBI had suspended train travel into Manhattan. I turned to the person standing next to me. “What are you going to do now?”
He told me he lived near the World Trade Center and needed to get home. He said he was going to walk into Manhattan across the Queensboro Bridge.
So I made a decision. I would follow him. And I started walking. Suitcase in one hand. Backpack and computer on my shoulder. Suit and dress shoes. The September sun beating down. I remember sweating profusely. And I remember walking.
When we reached the Queensboro Bridge, cars were no longer being allowed into Manhattan. In the opposite direction, hundreds of cars were trying to get out. People were fleeing the city toward Queens.
I was walking toward it.
There are moments from that day that remain almost like photographs in my mind. What happened next is one of them. I was making my way across the bridge when I heard someone nearby say: “Oh my gosh.”
I turned and looked to my left. And I watched one of the World Trade Center towers collapse. Not on television. Not in a photograph. Not in one of the countless replays we would all eventually see. I watched it fall with my own eyes. From the Queensboro Bridge.
Twenty-five years later, I still don't know how to adequately describe that moment.
Shock doesn't seem like a big enough word. How could something that enormous simply disappear? How could something that had always seemed permanent suddenly be gone? I stood there watching.
And then I kept walking.
When I reached Manhattan, there were hundreds of people gathered near the bridge, almost in a beehive formation, desperately trying to get into cars heading off the island. I walked through them. And then I stepped onto Second Avenue.
It was empty.
That may be one of the strangest things I remember about that entire day. Second Avenue in Manhattan. No traffic. No horns. No taxis. No buses. For blocks. Just silence and people walking.
So I kept walking.
As I moved south, sometime around 50th Street, I began seeing people walking toward me from downtown. They were covered from head to toe in the gray-white dust from the collapsed buildings.
Their hair. Their faces. Their clothes. Everything.
They walked almost silently. Some looked injured. Most simply looked stunned. I remember thinking that they looked like ghosts.
People who only hours earlier had gone to work on an ordinary Tuesday morning were now walking north through Manhattan covered in the remains of buildings that no longer existed.
I kept walking.
My hotel was near 42nd Street, not far from the United Nations. As I approached, I saw what I remember as tanks blocking access along 42nd Street. With the United Nations nearby and no one knowing whether more attacks were coming, security was everywhere.
For the first time, I wondered whether I would even be able to reach my hotel. Then, through all the confusion, I heard a voice. “Mr. Small, is that you?”
I turned. It was one of the bellmen from my hotel. I had stayed there often enough during my weekly commute that he recognized me. I asked him how I was supposed to get through the security perimeter.
“Follow me,” he said.
Two words. Follow me. There are grand stories of heroism from September 11. There should be.
Firefighters climbing staircases while everyone else was coming down. Police officers running toward danger. First responders making sacrifices that are almost impossible to comprehend.
But when I think about September 11, I also remember the smaller moments of kindness. A bellman seeing a familiar face in the middle of chaos. “Follow me.” He got me through.
When I entered the hotel, the staff told me they didn't have a room for me yet but hoped they would later in the day. The lobby was filled with diplomats and security details connected to the United Nations. I must have looked like I had just walked halfway across New York—because I had.
I asked whether I could use the workout room to take a shower and get out of my sweat soaked clothes. They gave me a key. I went upstairs. And then, for the first time that morning, I turned on a television. Until then, almost everything I knew about what was happening had come from radio reports, things people were saying and what I had witnessed with my own eyes.
Now I began to understand the magnitude of it.
The airplanes. The towers. The Pentagon. The uncertainty about what else might happen. The people trapped inside. The people missing. The people running. The people who had gone to work that morning and would never come home.
I stood there watching television, trying to comprehend what I had just walked through.
Then I showered, changed my clothes and went back downstairs. I asked the front desk if they could hold my suitcase. They couldn't. There was fear that bombs might be hidden in unattended luggage. Even something as ordinary as checking a suitcase had suddenly become dangerous.
So I walked outside carrying my bags again. And there he was. The same bellman. He saw me struggling with my luggage and offered to take my bag. He told me he would keep it and promised it would be there when I came back. I handed it to him. And, of course, it was there when I returned.
I started walking again.
Eventually, I made it to my office at 40th and Lexington. No one was there. I don't blame them. But by then, I had nowhere else to go. So I went upstairs to the 19th floor. I sat in my office. We didn't have a television, so I listened to the radio.
And from my window, I looked south toward where the World Trade Center had stood that morning. Forty blocks away. I had started the day believing I was making another routine business trip to New York City.
Instead, I had watched one of the defining events of our lifetime unfold in front of me.
Twenty-five years later, certain details have inevitably softened. But others remain remarkably clear;
- The blue sky.
- The smoke from the first tower.
- Susan on the other end of the phone.
- The emergency vehicles racing toward Manhattan. The announcement at the train station.
- The weight of my suitcase.
- The heat of that walk.
- The cars streaming out of Manhattan.
- Someone saying, “Oh my gosh.”
- Turning my head.
- Watching a tower fall.
- The empty streets.
- The people covered in dust.
- “Mr. Small, is that you?”
- “Follow me.”
And the strange feeling of sitting alone in an office high above Manhattan, listening to the radio and trying to understand what had just happened.
I also remember something else. People helping people. Strangers talking to strangers. Someone showing me how to get into Manhattan. A hotel employee helping me through a roadblock. First responders racing toward a place everyone else was trying to escape.
For a brief moment, titles didn't matter.
Politics didn't matter. Status didn't matter. Race didn't matter. Religion didn't matter. We were simply people trying to help other people get through an unimaginable day.
Nearly 3,000 people would not get to walk home that night.
Thousands of families would receive a phone call—or wait desperately for one—that would forever divide their lives into before September 11 and after September 11. That is important for me to remember when telling my own story. I was inconvenienced. I was frightened.I witnessed something horrifying.
But I made it home.
So many others did not. Twenty-five years later, that's what stays with me most. The gratitude. The sadness. The extraordinary courage. The small acts of kindness. And the understanding that an ordinary morning can become something entirely different in a matter of minutes.
September 11, 2001, began for me as another four-hour commute from my driveway in Michigan to an office in Manhattan.
It became a day I have carried with me for a quarter century.
I can still see it.
I can still hear it.
And I can still remember walking.
When I didn't know what else to do, I kept walking.