Tuesday, nyc

I moved from Ohio to New York about one week earlier for grad school at NYU. I did not know a single person living there before I moved. As an instructor for a math course, my first office hours were scheduled for that Tuesday, and I was a little nervous.

As usual, I stayed up ridiculously late Monday night and slept in. I woke up around noon and heard my roommates listening to the radio news loudly - we didn’t have a tv. They realized I didn’t know, and tried to tell me, but their accents and phrasings were difficult:

“The towers have fallen.”

“What?”

“The twin towers. They fell.”

“What towers?”

They must mean something in some other country, of course. It simply did not make sense that the twin towers could have “fallen.” Things like this did not happen in my life. Still not quite grasping what was going on, I walked outside.

That’s when I understood. I lived about one mile from the towers. Being new to the city, the towers acted as a compass point for me - they said “this is south.” My south was replaced by a billowing column of blackness. The usually stale nyc air had been transformed into an acrid fog of burnt chemicals.

I had no idea what to do. I walked to my office and put up a sign that read, “Office hours canceled due to terrorism.” It seemed a bit melodramatic at the time, but it was true.

I called my parents to let them know I was ok. A week earlier I had shared a slice of pizza with my dad at a Sbarro under the towers. He later told me that he thought he wasn’t worried, since I would never be at the towers at 9am - but that he started crying with relief, to his own surprise, when he heard my voice.

The two or three other grad students I’d met had left. One walked across a bridge to escape Manhattan. I didn’t feel that I was in serious danger, so I stayed. I looked for a way to help. Now I understand how unrealistic that feeling was, but among the throngs of people in shock in the city, this desire to do something helpful was common. I walked south to Canal Street - as close as I could get without being blocked by police. People there were asking the same thing I was — “What can I do to help?” Some people organized lists of volunteers, but we never had anything to do.

For me, the rest of the day was spent trying to understand why this had happened, and appreciating the good will of the strangers around me who, for a day, felt incongruously like friends.

—

I have two other mental snapshots that stand out in my mind from the days that followed:

(1) Standing in the middle of Broadway and Houston, essentially the origin of the Cartesian coordinates of Manhattan, looking as far as I could see in all directions, and not seeing a single pedestrian vehicle. The streets were virtually empty, with occasional military activity. I lived beyond a few police cordons, so that I was allowed to be here as a civilian while most were not. It was one of the most surreal experiences I’ve ever known.

(2) For several days after that Tuesday, all the movies at a Union Square movie theater were free. It was something that seemed small and superficial in light of everything, but it felt like the act of a community that cared about each other, and were willing, despite the culture of New York independence, to be human and selfless.