It’s hard to really take in, after all these years, that most people have no memory of the day. The majority of people in the world were either not born, or not old enough to be aware of what was going on, and then many who would recall are either gone or their memories have faded. But I was in New York City on September 11, 2001, and I can say definitively: The constructed cultural narrative around the day bears almost no resemblance to the actual lived experience of anyone I know who was here that day. So maybe it’s worth telling a little bit of what I actually saw.

At the time, I worked at the Village Voice, which was the most famous alt-weekly media outlet, a then highly-influential news outlet for people who cared about culture and the arts and progressive politics. I suspect that much of my perspective on the day and the days that followed were informed by working in a newsroom alongside people who were witnessing the most dramatic aspects of the event.

I’d gone to bed at 2 or 3 in the morning, working on some problem with the website whose specifics I’ve since forgotten. I didn’t remember to turn off my alarm, so it went off as usual a little before 9AM. My alarm was set to play a local radio station, and as I started to wake up and get ready, they interrupted the broadcast to mention that a plane had hit one of the World Trade Center towers. It was mentioned like a serious traffic crash, something significant but not overly worrisome; there were always small planes around NYC airspace and it wasn’t that unusual to have accidents from time to time. Until a few months prior I’d worked at the Empire State Building, and one of the first bits of lore they shared when you worked in the building was about all the weird incidents with planes and dirigibles that had tangled with the building. I didn’t honestly think much about it, and assumed it was some hapless private pilot that had messed up while sightseeing.

Just a few moments later, it was clear that every single thing had changed.

I turned on the TV when I heard the news, a method of getting information that dated back to my 20th century habits, but which I would soon permanently discard. Every channel had changed over to a live broadcast of the burning towers, with all manner of confused response and very careful, measured language accurately describing only what was painfully obvious and clear, with a noticeable attempt not to speculate. I was in my apartment uptown in Spanish Harlem, and my roommate had already gone off a while earlier to his office in midtown.

I sat down on my couch with my laptop and started to see what I could find out online, and instantly my messaging app (in those days we used a tool called AOL Instant Messenger, where each new message from a different person got its own window on your computer) had blown up, and my screen was covered in brief messages from online friends checking in. Almost nobody in the U.S. used SMS or text messaging of any kind back then, and people you knew "online" were considered a sort of different, not really real relationship. So I cared about these people, and they obviously cared about me, but there was a sense of stigma or distance to the fact that these were the folks who were checking in on me. Though my first reaction on the day was to thank everyone for checking in, the feeling I remember most was from a few hours later, when I felt so desperately alone and deeply wished I had someone to hold on to. I had gone through the usual sorts of relationship dramas one endures in their early 20s, and had been through a breakup not long before, and the profound sense of not having anyone around was pervasive. Later, many of the people who checked in on me that day, who'd been those "imaginary" online friends, became the people who introduced me to my wife, who greeted my child, who held me when I grieved, who rejoiced as we built careers and lives together.

Shortly after the news had broken, I had gone outside into the street. We all did. Everyone poured out onto the sidewalks and into the streets themselves (all traffic was shut down in a way that we wouldn’t see again until Covid hit). We were in the parks and at the subway stations, lined up at the hospitals to give blood, and by later in the afternoon, lined up at the mosques in the neighborhood to stand guard together. I spent a while at a nearby bodega joining a few people who were handing out glasses of water to the dust-covered folks who had by then walked all the way from their offices downtown, still shell-shocked and with everyone fruitlessly asking around for a phone that still had service. I’ve still, to this day, never hugged as many strangers as I did that afternoon.

By later in the day, a few friends in the neighborhood had reached out, and my roommate came back home. He had watched, through the window of his office, the second tower fall. Not on TV. Not on video. He’d seen it firsthand, as it happened. Later I would find so many more friends who had been through similar trauma, let alone those who had loved ones in the towers. A thing that’s been lost to time in the many years since is that, for quite a long while, we thought the towers had already been full of workers that day. Tens of thousands of people might be in the area at its peak occupancy, and we were fearing, maybe even assuming that casualties would number that high.

That wasn’t the only thing we were wrong about. Everything in those first early days was focused on rescue, on recovery. People were mobilizing dogs and equipment and medical teams, and the reason everyone was giving blood was because of course they were going to find survivors. They were going to find those miraculous stories to give us hope. By a few weeks later, long after I’d stopped watching televised news, they were doing stories about how they had volunteers pretending to be survivors who would hide themselves in the wreckage of the collapsed towers, so that the dogs could "find" them, in hopes of keeping the rescue dogs from getting too depressed.

Love’s In Need of Love Today

But amidst the obvious, overwhelming grief, my strongest memory of that time was of a feeling that can only be described as a deep and abiding love. There was a profound, shared humanity, and extraordinary kindness was shared between complete strangers on an unconditional basis, for days and weeks on end. It sounds like a fairy tale, or the kind of thing that happens in a movie, or that would get dismissed as impossible by the "smart", cynical view.

It really did, happen, though. People went through an unimaginable trauma, and an impossible circumstance, and we genuinely spent hours or even days thinking it might be the end of the world, and the reaction that happened was that people came together spontaneously to take care of each other in ways both minuscule and profound. The worries seem so extreme with all the time that’s passed, but a thing to keep in mind is that, at that time, very few people had ever gotten their news on the internet before. They were just watching cable TV or reading newspapers. Suddenly, they were constantly updating the windows they had opened to different news sites (browsers didn’t have tabs yet) and they had no idea how to discern what was valid. If you think today’s boomers get their brains fried by Fox News and Facebook, imagine people a full generation older, some of them born before electricity was widely available, getting completely unvetted and unfiltered messages flooding their email inboxes. I’m not surprised that it only took one day for me to begin angrily posting about misinformation. Especially when rumors involved the security dog at the Empire State Building that I had become friends with.

Despite that chaotic information environment, the deep and abiding memory I have of the time is of New Yorkers extending each other an unimaginable kindness, grace, and compassion. On the day, there were grand gestures of giving people a place to sleep, or a change of clothes, or packing up food for someone who they had never met before so that they’d be able to eat as they tried to figure out a way home. But there were smaller things too, like people pushing a tired mom’s baby stroller through the beautiful early autumn weather, or what looked like almost a parody of interfaith harmony as people of different religions gathered to worship and spend time together, each dressed like an illustration in a kids’ storybook. It would be dismissed as unbelievably corny now, but people got together to sing things like the national anthem or God Bless America and it was perfectly earnest and heartfelt and even appreciated. Part of what was so amazing and what left such an impression was that everyone let go of their cynicism and everyone was brave enough to be vulnerable.

By the time they did a telethon fundraiser for first responders a few weeks later, it opened with Steve Wonder doing his wonderful classic, "Love’s In Need of Love Today", and I broke down in tears again, because we had finally arrived at a moment where it felt like everyone around me, everyone I saw on the street, was living the kind of pure and idealistic reality that he had always been singing about.

That was the emotional context, but there was also the visceral, sensory experience of being around those days. The most pervasive part was the acrid, searing smell of electrical fire, from the smoldering rubble pile that would keep burning downtown for the better part of a year. It pervaded everything, and you could be almost anywhere in town and the wind would change and then suddenly the smell would catch you off guard and you’d be crying again. Anyone who says they were here then, and doesn’t mention the smell… well, they’re flat out lying.

Every public space was papered in flyers listing those who were "missing", all in similar designs, featuring whatever photo people had most recently scanned of their loved one. In those first 48 hours, every subway stop and telephone pole and bus station was covered, and then the thin copier paper almost immediately began to break down. The decaying and torn posters with photos of people’s loved ones were reduced to tatters just as quickly as we all realized that nobody would be getting dug out of that rubble pile.

It only took days for public spaces to be fully occupied by soldiers with long guns, a full occupying force that was the first sign of the new militarized reality that broke through the camaraderie and care that everyone was showing to each other. Though I had stopped watching TV, I knew from walking by store fronts and overhearing conversations that the rest of the country had fully moved on to beating the drums for war and violence, using our city as their pretense. I grew increasingly protective and defensive about New York City, about what it means to those of us who live here, and to this day I have a white-hot resentment of how our town’s grief was used to justify hateful violence without our consent.

Everything After

You know the rest. You used to be able to go to greet people at the gate at an airport. They lied about Iraq and killed countless hundreds of thousands of innocents. Technological surveillance became the default expectation for everything we do, public or private. They made the cops into an army, all across the country. A thousand beautiful potential futures were thrown away. I wrote to my senator, saying "we could stop driving to work one day a week and never need Saudi oil again, and fight global warming!" (I didn’t call it "climate change" yet.) By the time I got an automated response, we were already at war and the postcard said "we support our troops".

In my own technological world, everything changed in a leap, too. Suddenly everyone knew what Google was, and that some people were sharing news online. The strangest part of working in tech was that, as my friends and I launched one of the first big blogging platforms in October of 2001, that same month the original iPod and Windows XP came out., meaning the first very primitive outlines of the online world we all live in now came into view while we were all still in shock and grief and confusion.

I don’t have any grand conclusion, except that the story you’ve been told about that day is probably bullshit. None of us ever called the day "9/11", it was always "that Tuesday" or "the attacks" or other things specific to the experience. Afterward, I spent months and even years talking to friends who couldn’t get their heads to forget the sound it made when human bodies hit the ground near them from 90 stories up. I remember coworkers who had to report from the site of the attacks every day for weeks, and they came back looking ghostly from both the dust that still settled on their clothes, but also the haunted look in their eyes from facing such unimaginable horror. I still think of that burning pile whenever I smell an electrical fire.

As I write this, I can look out our window and I see the towers of light and I know that the majority of people who are looking at them probably feel little, if anything, about what they represent. I’m not mad or resentful that these things have faded; time passes, and we’re fortunate that grief fades with it. But my life changed that day, instantly and forever. I saw the best of what people could be, rising out of the worst that people can do. I promised myself I wouldn’t forget that lesson, and that I’d try to live up to having gotten to live through such an experience with such privilege. I still do think about the promise, even if it’s not every day any more.

If you’ve ever been told a story about 9/11, ask that person how it smelled. Ask them the greatest kindness that they saw. Ask them how they changed.

In Previous Years

Last year, "It's unrecognizable":

[M]aybe I keep coming back because I am hoping that others might still recognize the little glimpses of humanity that I saw on the day of the attacks, and that I saw in abundance, in New York City, in the days that follow. It wasn't a myth, it wasn't just wishful thinking, there really was kindness and care in this place that I love so much. I don't think those who tell the loudest stories today would even recognize it.

Two years ago, "There Is Nothing To Remember"

So it's clear that the events of that day have fully passed into myth, useful only as rhetoric in a culture war, or as justifications for violence. Nothing epitomizes this more than the fact that, while the memory has faded in culture broadly, it's only brought to the fore in situations like those where most New Yorkers would be targeted.

Three years ago, "Twenty is a Myth":

I can't change how society overall sees this event. To my eternal regret, I couldn't change how we responded in any meaningful way. But I did get to make personal changes, permanently and for the better, and the loss and grief of that day does still motivate me to try to honor the moment by pushing for justice, and care, and an earnest engagement with the world.

Four years ago, Nineteen is When They Forgot

I do have the experience of having seen this city bounce back from unimaginable pain before. I have seen us respond to attacks on our public life by rebuilding and reimagining public space. I have seen us grieve our losses and rally behind those who cared for those injured, and preserve space in our cultural memory for their pain and sacrifice. By no means have we done enough for all those lost, but it is absolutely true that we can rebuild. We’ve done it before.

Five years ago, Eighteen is History

There are ritualized remembrances, largely led by those who weren't  there, those who mostly hate the values that New York City embodies. The  sharpest memories are of the goals of those who masterminded the  attacks. It's easy enough to remember what they wanted, since they  accomplished all their objectives and we live in the world they sought  to create. The empire has been permanently diminished. Never Forget.

In 2018, Seventeen is (Almost) Just Another Day

I spent so many years thinking “I can’t go there” that it caught me completely off guard to realize that going there is now routine. Maybe the most charitable way to look at it is resiliency, or that I’m seeing things through the eyes of my child who’s never known any reality but the present one. I'd spent a lot of time wishing that we hadn't been so overwhelmed with response to that day, so much that I hadn''t considered what it would be like when the day passed for so many people with barely a notice at all.

In 2017, Sixteen is Letting Go Again

So, like ten years ago, I’m letting go. Trying not to project my feelings onto this anniversary, just quietly remembering that morning and how it felt. My son asked me a couple of months ago, “I heard there was another World Trade Center before this one?” and I had to find a version of the story that I could share with him. In this telling, losing those towers was unimaginably sad and showed that there are incredibly hurtful people in the world, but there are still so many good people, and they can make wonderful things together.

In 2016 Fifteen is the Past:

I don’t dismiss or deny that so much has gone so wrong in the response and the reaction that our culture has had since the attacks, but I will not forget or diminish the pure openheartedness I witnessed that day. And I will not let the cynicism or paranoia of others draw me in to join them.

What I’ve realized, simply, is that 9/11 is in the past now.

In 2015, Fourteen is Remembering:

For the first time, I clearly felt like I had put the attacks firmly in the past. They have loosened their grip on me. I don’t avoid going downtown, or take circuitous routes to avoid seeing where the towers once stood. I can even imagine deliberately visiting the area to see the new train station.

In 2014, Thirteen is Understanding:

There’s no part of that day that one should ever have to explain to a child, but I realized for the first time this year that, when the time comes, I’ll be ready. Enough time has passed that I could recite the facts, without simply dissolving into a puddle of my own unresolved questions. I look back at past years, at my own observances of this anniversary, and see how I veered from crushingly sad to fiercely angry to tentatively optimistic, and in each of those moments I was living in one part of what I felt. Maybe I’m ready to see this thing in a bigger picture, or at least from a perspective outside of just myself.

From 2013, Twelve is Trying:

I thought in 2001 that some beautiful things could come out of that worst of days, and sure enough, that optimism has often been rewarded. There are boundless examples of kindness and generosity in the worst of circumstances that justify the hope I had for people’s basic decency back then, even if initially my hope was based only on faith and not fact.

But there is also fatigue. The inevitable fading of outrage and emotional devastation into an overworked rhetorical reference point leaves me exhausted. The decay of a brief, profound moment of unity and reflection into a cheap device to be used to prop up arguments about the ordinary, the everyday and the mundane makes me weary. I’m tired from the effort to protect the fragile memory of something horrific and hopeful that taught me about people at their very best and at their very, very worst.

In 2012, Eleven is What We Make:

These are the gifts our children, or all children, give us every day in a million different ways. But they’re also the gifts we give ourselves when we make something meaningful and beautiful. The new World Trade Center buildings are beautiful, in a way that the old ones never were, and in a way that’ll make our fretting over their exorbitant cost seem short-sighted in the decades to come. More importantly, they exist. We made them, together. We raised them in the past eleven years just as surely as we’ve raised our children, with squabbles and mistakes and false starts and slow, inexorable progress toward something beautiful.

In 2011 for the 10th anniversary, Ten is Love and Everything After:

I don’t have any profound insights or political commentary to offer that others haven’t already articulated first and better. All that I have is my experience of knowing what it mean to be in New York City then. And from that experience, the biggest lesson I have taken is that I have the obligation to be a kinder man, a more thoughtful man, and someone who lives with as much passion and sincerity as possible. Those are the lessons that I’ll tell my son some day in the distant future, and they’re the ones I want to remember now.

In 2010, Nine is New New York:

[T]his is, in many ways, a golden era in the entire history of New York City. Over the four hundred years it’s taken for this city to evolve into its current form, there’s never been a better time to walk down the street. Crime is low, without us having sacrificed our personality or passion to get there. We’ve invested in making our sidewalks more walkable, our streets more accommodating of the bikes and buses and taxis that convey us around our town. There’s never been a more vibrant scene in the arts, music or fashion here. And in less than half a decade, the public park where I got married went from a place where I often felt uncomfortable at noontime to one that I wanted to bring together my closest friends and family on the best day of my life. We still struggle with radical inequality, but more people interact with people from broadly different social classes and cultures every day in New York than any other place in America, and possibly than in any other city in the world.

And all of this happened, by choice, in the years since the attacks.

In 2009, Eight Is Starting Over:

[T]his year, I am much more at peace. It may be that, finally, we’ve been called on by our leadership to mark this day by being of service to our communities, our country, and our fellow humans. I’ve been trying of late to do exactly that. And I’ve had a bit of a realization about how my own life was changed by that day.

Speaking to my mother last week, I offhandedly mentioned how almost all of my friends and acquaintances, my entire career and my accomplishments, my ambitions and hopes have all been born since September 11, 2001. If you’ll pardon the geeky reference, it’s as if my life was rebooted that day and in the short period afterwards. While I have a handful of lifelong friends with whom I’ve stayed in touch, most of the people I’m closest to are those who were with me on the day of the attacks or shortly thereafter, and the goals I have for myself are those which I formed in the next days and weeks. i don’t think it’s coincidence that I was introduced to my wife while the wreckage at the site of the towers was still smoldering, or that I resolved to have my life’s work amount to something meaningful while my beloved city was still papered with signs mourning the missing.

In 2008, Seven Is Angry:

Finally getting angry myself, I realize that nobody has more right to claim authority over the legacy of the attacks than the people of New York. And yet, I don’t see survivors of the attacks downtown claiming the exclusive right to represent the noble ambition of Never Forgetting. I’m not saying that people never mention the attacks here in New York, but there’s a genuine awareness that, if you use the attacks as justification for your position, the person you’re addressing may well have lost more than you that day. As I write this, I know that parked out front is the car of a woman who works in my neighborhood. Her car has a simple but striking memorial on it, listing her mother’s name, date of birth, and the date 9/11/2001.

In 2007, Six Is Letting Go:

On the afternoon of September 11th, 2001, and especially on September 12th, I wasn’t only sad. I was also hopeful. I wanted to believe that we wouldn’t just Never Forget that we would also Always Remember. People were already insisting that we’d put aside our differences and come together, and maybe the part that I’m most bittersweet and wistful about was that I really believed it. I’d turned 26 years old just a few days before the attacks, and I realize in retrospect that maybe that moment, as I eased from my mid-twenties to my late twenties, was the last time I’d be unabashedly optimistic about something, even amidst all the sorrow.

In 2006, After Five Years, Failure:

[O]ne of the strongest feelings I came away with on the day of the attacks was a feeling of some kind of hope. Being in New York that day really showed me the best that people can be. As much as it’s become cliché now, there’s simply no other way to describe a display that profound. It was truly a case of people showing their very best nature.

We seem to have let the hope of that day go, though.

In 2005, Four Years:

I saw people who hated New York City, or at least didn’t care very much about it, trying to act as if they were extremely invested in recovering from the attacks, or opining about the causes or effects of the attacks. And to me, my memory of the attacks and, especially, the days afterward had nothing to do with the geopolitics of the situation. They were about a real human tragedy, and about the people who were there and affected, and about everything but placing blame and pointing fingers. It felt thoughtless for everyone to offer their response in a framework that didn’t honor the people who were actually going through the event.

In 2004, Thinking Of You:

I don’t know if it’s distance, or just the passing of time, but I notice how muted the sorrow is. There’s a passivity, a lack of passion to the observances. I knew it would come, in the same way that a friend told me quite presciently that day back in 2001 that “this is all going to be political debates someday” and, well, someday’s already here.

In 2003, Two Years:

I spent a lot of time, too much time, resenting people who were visiting our city, and especially the site of the attacks, these past two years. I’ve been so protective, I didn’t want them to come and get their picture taken like it was Cinderella’s Castle or something. I’m trying really hard not to be so angry about that these days. I found that being angry kept me from doing the productive and important things that really mattered, and kept me from living a life that I know I’m lucky to have.

In 2002, I wrote On Being An American:

[I]n those first weeks, I thought a lot about what it is to be American. That a lot of people outside of New York City might not even recognize their own country if they came to visit. The America that was attacked a year ago was an America where people are as likely to have been born outside the borders of the U.S. as not. Where most of the residents speak another language in addition to English. Where the soundtrack is, yes, jazz and blues and rock and roll, but also hip hop and salsa and merengue. New York has always been where the first fine threads of new cultures work their way into the fabric of America, and the city the bore the brunt of those attacks last September reflected that ideal to its fullest.

In 2001, Thank You:

I am physically fine, as are all my family members and immediate friends. I’ve been watching the footage all morning, I can’t believe I watched the World Trade Center collapse…

I’ve been sitting here this whole morning, choking back tears… this is just too much, too big. I can see the smoke and ash from the street here. I have friends of friends who work there, I was just there myself the day before yesterday. I can’t process this all. I don’t want to.