Tower #1 — My Time in the Trade Center
I never cared much for that big building. I tolerated it. Being there felt like more of an obligation than a pleasure. But I remember so much of my time in it.
I’ve kept my time in the World Trade Center mostly to myself. I was lucky — my time in Tower 1 (1986–87) came fourteen years before that awful day, and six years before the first attack on the buildings.
This fall, I visited New York to speak at a conference, downtown, near the Battery. My hotel overlooked the beautiful memorial and the new Freedom tower. I’d been down there before, and felt short bursts of emotion — some sadness, some pride. A colleague who I shared breakfast with said as much — he had worked in the building too, and seemed to hint that he couldn’t really confront what had happened there.
But as I walked back to my hotel on that humid, misty early October evening, with the memorial by my side, police officers milling about, and water falling nearby, those memories came flooding back, hard and heavy.
Though I visit Manhattan regularly, this time seemed really different. My mother had recently passed. Going through my belongings at home after her death, I accidentally came across my entry card to the Trade Center, long forgotten in a bedroom drawer.
Back in ’86, I was a junior credit analyst for the New York branch of Japan’s Sumitomo Bank, helping the banking team analyze our loans to clients like Goodyear and Air Products. Sumitomo, one of the world’s largest banks at the time, occupied a few high floors in Tower 1 of the World Trade Center. After a daily morning van ride down Manhattan’s East Side Highway, I needed to take two elevators to get up to work. One to the 79th floor, still another to the 95th, where I worked in Tower 1.
It was my second job out of college, and to this day, the only one I ever landed through a headhunter. A grumpy one, if I recall correctly. She worked at the Bankers Register, and didn’t hold me in high esteem. Maybe that’s because I accepted a truly junior role, paying a modest $26,000 salary. I was thankful though, and I loved those little brown calendar books she’d send me for years after.
In ’86, downtown Manhattan was a fine place for a 23-year-old — The Odeon was in full swing, banking seemed like a solid career choice, even the Mets were good. In fact, they were great, and our team at Sumitomo wandered over to a colleague’s loft in Lower Manhattan to watch the Mets World Series victory parade from the roof. I would occasionally get a lunch invitation to Windows on the World, atop Tower 2, too.
But most of my memories were shaped by being way up in Tower 1, looking out uptown from our open, Japanese-style offices. “Open” meant we didn’t have private offices. We had stacks of loan and deal documents piled up on top of grey metal desks, though — so many that some actually piled up between the pillars, obscuring some of that great view.
That view could be spectacular: on a good day, the view from the 95thfloor of Tower 1 was magnificent — genuinely breathtaking sightlines up the Hudson, far beyond the GW Bridge. Even the Empire State seemed small in comparison.
On a cloudy day, it wasn’t so different from being on a jet in the rain — you’re basically up in the clouds. On windy days, the building swayed and creaked, too. The creaking was so loud it could disrupt a meeting.
Other memories: the ’87 stock market collapse (not as dramatic as today’s 24-hour news cycles); a spiky-haired rocker who played Hendrix’s “All Along the Watchtower” for hours in front of nearby Century 21 on a tiny speaker, wailing away on a cheap electric guitar; cardboard Japanese bento boxes delivered daily, and (on some days) special Japanese lunches at a nearby banking society, just a block from the Tower. There was an older guy who would wander and scream in the plaza below the Tower as we commuted home, too. He likely had Turret’s syndrome, and I say that with no disrespect.
Mostly, I remember the people on my team, and the collegiality we shared. We didn’t have privacy, but we definitely got to know each other well. Squeezed together in evenly spaced rows of desks, to this day I may have not known any group of co-workers like I knew my Sumitomo colleagues.
John Garnett was my boss — a kind, decent, intelligent man who challenged me coming in, but was a great supporter. He had fought in Vietnam, and was a real leader I looked up to. He passed before his time, of melanoma. I also remember a true international spirit: we were all Americans, working for a Japanese bank, reporting in to Tokyo. While our world was shaped by the American credit market — and we participated in virtually every major credit syndicate in the US market — our strategy, direction, and culture definitely came from Japan.
I think the international community is still key to understanding the World Trade Center. Of course it is a great American and New York icon, but it was also a major locus for international business. The business community within was diverse and global.
It’s not easy to connect these memories to that awful morning so many years later. I’d moved on, to graduate school, and across the country and back. I watched the news on the ’93 attack from the comfort of an office in Los Angeles. I think Sumitomo and others left the building after ’93, no doubt spooked by the first attack.
By 2001, I was a father and a husband, living on the Upper West Side, with a downtown view that included the Twin Towers, several miles away.
That clear morning of September 11th, my wife burst into the bathroom, where I was getting ready for work. Something awful had happened, CNN was reporting a plane had hit Tower 1. My mother was coming to town that morning, to see our infant son, who I remember cradling in my arms as smoke billowed from the Towers. She never made it to New York that morning — her shuttle flight never got out of DC.
And there was so much confusion — the mobile phones didn’t work, the Blackberries did. We weren’t sure if more attacks were coming: a truck on the GW bridge was rumored to be another attack — chaos, fear, and inaccurate news all around.
At the Trade Center, I had friends who walked out of the buildings without incident, and close family friends who we lost, including one who worked at Cantor Fitzgerald, in Tower 1, not far from my Sumitomo desk.
The wind was blowing downtown that day and a few days after. While we could see the smoke downtown, the air was clear uptown. That changed later in the week, and we sensed smoke and acrid, hazy air from a tremendous tragedy.
And to come back to the present, walking past the memorial on that hazy, humid October evening: I felt a heavy sense of that tragedy, of so many souls lost. But I felt a sense of pride, too. Pride that we can remember, restore, and look forward. And hope that future generations won’t ever forget what happened at the Twin Towers.
Looking up at that beautiful new Freedom tower, and walking into the Oculus for the first time, all that destruction somehow morphed into feelings of restoration, of confidence in New York, and ultimately, American pride.
