Transcript for the Piece Audio version of "109 on 9/11"

109 on 9-11

Jack Cadwallader: You’re listening to "109 on 9-11. My name is Jack Cadwallader. The interviews you’re about to hear were conducted a few months after September 11th, 2001.

----PATH Train Announcement----

Jack Cadwallader: That is the sound of a ghost. It is the sound heard inside the World Trade Center before 9-11.

----Sounds of escalator squeaks; carts rolling by; voices; footsteps; subway entrance----

PATH train announcements, escalators squeaking, subway turnstiles turning – Workers would hear these sounds on their way to and from work. But what if the World Trade Center wasn’t your place of business? What if it was your backyard? What if you constantly heard these sounds on your way to breakfast? Or while shopping? Or if you were just cutting through the mall to go see a friend up the road? For them, or us, these were the sounds of our neighborhood – the everyday sounds of our lives – the sounds that will haunt us for a long time to come. We are residents of Lower Manhattan and this is our story…

JC: The building we live in is 109 Washington Street: a sixteen unit tenement, well over a hundred years old. Hi, my name is Jack Cadwallader. I live in Apartment 5.

RY: Hi. My name is Roxanne Yamashiro. I lived at apartment number 10.
LM: Hi. My name is Lesley McBurney. I live at apartment 7.
ES: Hi. I'm Erwin Silverstein, apartment 6.
FR: Ciao! I’m Flavio Rizzo, apartment 15.
VC: My name is Verushka Cantelli, apartment 15.
NK: My name is Nancy Keegan, apartment 1.
JP: This is Jim Pedersen, apartment 9.
EM: This is Ed Metropolis, 109 Washington Street, Apartment 13.

JC: The residents of 109 Washington weren’t always friends. In fact, before September 11th, most of us were strangers. But when you think you’re going to die, relationships can change quickly.
Let’s start with Eddie.
Of all the people in the building, I think Eddie changed the most.

EM: It changed me to a point that other people commented on my behavior. They seem to have indicated that I was a kinder, gentler me.

JC: I can testify to that. I used to hold my breath when I’d pass Eddie in the hall, knowing full well that he’d never say hi to me. Now, in the hallways, we tell each other the latest neighborhood news. And every once in a while, if we have the time, Eddie would tell us the history of Lower Manhattan.

EM: Well, basically I was born in the neighborhood, and I’ve lived there the majority of my life, I was born in the building. You know, I’ve seen the Trade Center being built, now I’ve seen it all destroyed.

My mother, my grandmother lived there, my grandfather lived there, my aunts lived there. Everybody lived in the building at one time. We had my apartment, the apartment next-door, the apartment down the hall. My grandmother lived on the site of the current World Trade Center. Yeah, all of us in the same vicinity.
Our neighborhood was not the commercial area it is right now. It was basically all residential – tenements, and small-rise buildings; immigrant population, basically Middle East and certain portions of Europe – there was a large population of Slovaks, Polish people, and some Russians.
Prior to the World Trade Center that whole area was known as "Radio Row." Basically if you needed any electronic part of any type that was the area to get it. There were large jobbers and wholesalers abounding everywhere –a lot of craftsmen related businesses.
And the site that the World Trade Center is on right now, a majority of other family members lived in that particular area, and of course all the houses there were condemned. They weren’t condemned because of their condition, they were condemned because of a Federal project coming through. And also when the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel was built, that area was condemned also. A lot of people moved out voluntarily, but several of my family members held out, and essentially were bought out
So, as a child I did play in the World Trade Center. I of course saw it being built from the roof. And there was a situation with blasting 24 hours a day, huge land movers moving 24/7. We also climbed to the top of the World Trade Center. We walked all the way up. There were no elevators, so we snuck past guards. You know, you’re a small kid, you think that’s a lot of fun. And it was interesting. We saw it all being built, and now I’ve seen it all destroyed. So it’s run the full gamut.

JP: This is Jim Pedersen. I'm a resident of 109 Washington Street, Apartment 9, New York, I’ve lived there since April of 1991, and I'm a freelance classical musician.

JC: Here’s Jim. Whenever I see Jim now, in my head I picture the way he looked after the South Tower fell: covered from head-to-foot with gray ash. Every time he spoke puffs of dust floated from his mouth.

JP: I answered an ad in the Village Voice back in March of '91, and had wanted to move back into Manhattan from Brooklyn. And this was before the tourist explosion happened, and also before people were actually living down there. So it was pretty deserted. And I was walking west on Rector Street, and came up to Washington Street and turned the corner, and there, three blocks away was the World Trade Center just stopping the end of the street in such a dramatic way. It was all lit up and I remember saying to myself, "Wow!"

RY: Hi. My name is Roxanne Yamashiro. I live, or I had lived, at 109 Washington Street, apartment number 10. I'm originally from Hawaii, and I've been in New York for almost nine years. I've been in that building for about 8 years. I'm a freelance film editor.

JC: Roxanne. She was up on the roof watching the North Tower burn when the 757 flew over her head and plowed into the South Tower. When I saw her that day, I thought she was going to have a nervous breakdown. She couldn’t stop shaking. Anyway, how do I describe Roxanne so you’ll recognize her voice later on? Well, she’s a petite Japanese-Hawaiian with an accent to match. And later you’ll be able to recognize Roxanne’s voice because it’ll start to quiver--like she did on September 11th.

RY: Initially my first year in New York I was hopping around, subletting, staying at friend’s places, and then finally I saw an ad for an apartment - I think they termed it as Tribeca. And I thought this was a kind of isolated, desolate neighborhood. And there wasn't that many amenities nearby, but I liked it. It was funny because in the morning, being so near the Financial District, there's a lot of activity, but by the time you came home from work everything was closed and shut down. So it was a little bit of a ghost town feel. And what was interesting on those days, say you didn't go to work, and you explored the neighborhood, you saw all these shops you didn't know that was there because they weren't open by the time you came home.
Eventually things started to change. I think what initiated the change was that Guiliani changed the zoning law, so that a lot of these buildings were converted into luxury condos and apartments.

JP: As more and more people moved down there, and more and more tourists were around on evenings and weekends, I kind of missed the quiet desolation that I was initially attracted to, but to have the World Trade Center as your focal point of your life was a pretty amazing thing. I would use that as a reference point. People would say "Where do you live?" and I'd say, "I live down by the World Trade Center."

ES: Hi. I’m Erwin Silverstein, I live at 109 Washington Street, Apartment number 6. I work for the Board of Education. And I've lived at 109 Washington Street about three and a half years I would say.

JC: Erwin. My next door neighbor. Like Eddie, he’s a born New Yawker. You’ll be able to recognize Erwin. He’s articulate. I’ll just let Erwin speak for himself.

ES: I guess in the three, three and a half years I've been there, the neighborhood's changed a lot! But I think because there are so few people still living relatively in the financial district, it's still got this wonderful sort of like in the middle of everything, but out of the way kind of feel to it.

RY: The good thing was that it brought a market. The bad thing was that people were starting to move in, and it lost its…you lost that kind of "pioneer" feel, like you were one of these privileged people out in this area, and you were staking your claim in this No Man's Land.

FR: Ciao! I’m Flavio Rizzo and I used to live on…well, I still live, 109 Washington Street, apartment 15. I teach Italian privately, but I’m supposed to be a writer, a film director.

VC: My name is Verushka Cantelli, and I also live at 109 Washington Street, apartment 15, and I’m studying at the graduate center, and I’m also teaching Italian language at Hunter College at BMCC.

JC: Flavio and Verushka. Both teach Italian. Both love America. Both sport gorgeous accents. You’ll have no problems keeping Flavio and Verushka straight.

FR: I came to the neighborhood because a friend of mine recommended me a very quick sublet. And I kind of don’t know New York still. So when I saw the place, I thought, "Oh my God. This is such a privilege to have the opportunity to stay here for such a good price, and with such a beautiful neighborhood." And I thought this is like my idea of New York. The idea that maybe in a few steps you have such different buildings all over. It was incredible for me.

VC: I remember the first time I went to visit him. I remember looking around and saying, "Wait a minute. Are we still in Manhattan?" Because it seemed so different from the rest of Manhattan that I had seen. It was very quiet.

ES: I think the World Trade Center was one of these buildings that you kinda love to hate, but I think over time in fact it got better. And it got better not because it was a truly distinguished piece of architecture, I don't think it ever really was. I think it got better because it worked so well, strangely enough for people and for Lower Manhattan. It was great to go to the top of it, and kinda look down at the Woolworth Building, particularly on a foggy night, and watch the clouds swirl around it. And of course looking up, straight up, was just wonderful, because the buildings just went on and on and on and on.

JP: I know a lot of people talked about how inhuman those buildings were, but I absolutely loved them. I thought they were beautiful in a very spare way. And certainly a huge magnetic presence. I'm gonna miss that dramatic gesture at the end of this dumpy little street that we lived on, to have this huge, what, fifteen hundred foot wall at the end of our street - with absolutely no ceremony leading up to it, not even one step up into the building.

FR: I think that Verushka will confirm that I was completely crazy about the World Trade Center. I was so crazy about it that people hate me for that. Because I was always saying – always – maybe at least once a day, "Oh my God, how beautiful are the Towers?" And all my friends who stop by to visit me from Italy and everything, they were at least still making jokes about it. They used to call me, like, "Ciao Flavio. How are you? How beautiful are the Towers?" [Laugh]

VC: Yeah. He used to say it all the time. But they were very beautiful, especially at night. It was beautiful just to walk around the Towers, because if you didn’t look up they seemed just like, like regular buildings, And then if you looked up it just never ended, you know! They were so gigantic.

FR: Yeah. And also, from the roof of course it was wonderful…You could see Trinity Church. one of the oldest buildings I guess, in New York, and then from there it’s like you feel like nothing, like a small, small thing.

LM: Hi. My name is Lesley McBurney. I live at 109 Washington Street, apartment 7 which is also my favorite number.

NK: My name is Nancy Keegan. I live at 109 Washington Street, Apartment 1. I’ve lived there for five years and I’m an actress and a bartender.

JC: Ah. Leslie and Nancy. They’re not sisters, and they don’t live in the same apartment. But-- they’re both friends, both actors, both bartenders, and both pretty-- when I first met them I couldn’t tell them apart, and you may not be able to tell them apart either. Here’s Leslie.

LM: I actually remember the moment I saw the ad in the Village Voice. And it was an ad that just said, "Tribeca." So [laugh] I kept taking the train south, and south and more south, and more south, and I had never ever been even remotely around that area. I liked the layout of it, and I took it. And I was pretty psyched about it.
I was under the impression that no one that I knew at all lived anywhere near me. And there was a co-worker of mine – a bartender named Leigh, who was standing outside the doorway. And, you know, we looked at each other and we were like, "What the hell are you doing here?" [Laugh] And we discovered that we lived in the same building, Then Nancy moved in and then had the lease transferred.

NK: I found the apartment through a friend and co-worker. She was moving in with her fiancee. I found it a bit of an odd neighborhood, but I liked it very much. My apartment’s in the back of the building, which makes it very quiet.

LM: The laundry thing was probably the most difficult technicality of living down there. And if you catch me on a bad day when I’m cranky, and I’m lugging my laundry in the middle of the winter to the Laundry Loft, or I even went to 7th Avenue and 20th sometimes. And then I thought, "This is ridiculous! I’m going miles and miles to do my laundry.

RY: You know, the running joke was that I would bring a bag to work, and people would think it was my workout bag, but really it was my laundry, 'cause there's just no laundry facilities nearby. So it was a little inconvenient in that way, and also there was no real market, per se, you had to go across the highway. And the choices there wasn't the greatest.

LM: I did my errands in the Trade Center. And then I would realize that this is a world-famous, amazing financial mecca. and a symbol of New York.

JC: Unfortunately, it’s not so wonderful living next to a symbol that everyone knows when some people were trying to destroy it. On a cold February day in 1993, I woke to the sound of a loud boom. Terrorists, were trying to blow up the World Trade Center from the basement.
They failed of course, but for the next week, we discussed—with some sort of macabre curiosity-- what would have happened if the crippled towers did tip over—and landed on top of us. Which floor would turn us into dust, we wondered: the 90th? the 102nd?
We played this game with amusement because, after all, the Trade Center did not tip over, so we now considered the towers invincible.
Then, of course, came September 11th.

ES: September 11th was really unusual. I'm rarely at home as late as I was that day. I got up that morning and I thought to myself, well I'll go vote in the primary. So I went out for a run that morning. And when I came back into the entrance of the building, there was a wheelchair in the entranceway, and they were assisting Sophie, who in my three and a half years there I had never seen.

JC: Sophie is Eddie’s 95-year-old mother. She has Alzheimer’s Disease.

ES: Ultimately, as it turned out I was the only one who knew Sophie had left the building that morning, and was not there at the time of the tragedy.

EM: Now my mother a week before, had a doctor’s appointment. And for some strange reason the appointment was cancelled and it was changed to September 11th. She’s picked up in a van usually around eight or eight-fifteen, okay. So evidently the van driver had shown up, and my mother and the home health care worker were picked up by the van and started heading toward her doctor’s appointment, which is in Midtown on the east side.

ES: I went upstairs, showered, changed, left the building. As I opened up the front door and stepped off the stoop onto Washington Street, the moment my right foot touched the ground the North Tower exploded. And I kinda looked down at my foot thinking I might have stepped on something. And I stared up. People who were on the street stopped. Everyone was staring upward.

RY: That morning I actually got up early. And I had the television on, and I actually saw a shadow. And this has happened before - Like a plane will go by, and it blocks out the sun for a bit. And I heard a "Whoosh." And I heard a crash. But we live so near the Battery Park Tunnel that I thought it was one of those big trucks that might have had an accident. Then on the television it was "Late Breaking News" a crash into the World Trade Center. I said, "Oh my god!" So I put on jeans or something and ran up to the roof.

VC: That morning I heard something. I heard something that made me think that something had happened outside. Not a loud noise, just a few voices, but nothing to worry about. I wasn’t scared or anything. So as I woke up it was 8:48, I remember looking at the time. And I opened the window and I looked to my right and I saw pieces of metal still burning on the floor. I was sure it was like a car that exploded. Flavio said, "No Verushka you’re mistaken. Look up toward the Tower." And as I looked up I saw the smoke and the flames coming from the top of the first tower that was hit.

FR: It was kind of a crazy, funny thing to see Verushka worried about small pieces of stuff on the ground when the huge problem was up. She didn’t realize. And I turned on the tv and I said to myself, you know, we should go up to the roof and see what was going on. And so we did. There I found Roxanne, and she was shocked, and we were taking pictures. You know, it’s strange how we felt like that we could actually take pictures, because it was so separate from us.

LM: I was very concerned about being alert for a rehearsal that morning. And I heard something that sounded like a truck crashing and in my groggy sleep I thought, "Oh, it’s a truck full of tar." because I started to smell it. So, Something funky’s happening, so I think I must’ve flipped on the news. And found out that a plane just hit the Trade Center. My family’s always very concerned about me being here anyway, so I think I called either my mom or my dad in Minneapolis. And [I] said, "I’m overreacting, but a plane just hit the Trade Center, I just want to let you know I’m okay. So don’t worry."

FR: So what I said to Roxanne and to Verushka was that, "I will go down just to make a couple of telephone calls and I will be back. I came down and in three minutes I found eight messages from all over the world – One friend from Switzerland, three friends from Italy, one from Sweden, whatever. And everybody incredibly scared and everything. And all those friends that used to make fun of me, those friends that used to call me and say, "Ciao Flavio. How are you"? How beautiful are the Towers?" now they are calling me for a completely opposite reason – about the Towers.

----FLAVIO’S MESSAGES----

NK: The phone rang. I think my machine picked up, and it was my mother, screaming, "Nancy wake up! Wake up! Something’s happened to the World Trade Center!" I immediately called to my friend Lesley, who lives upstairs in the front of the building. She was awake, had just woken up, and said, "Nancy, Nancy! You have to get up here right now! There’s a fire in the Trade Center!"

LM: So Nancy comes up and we’re hanging out, literally out my fire escape.

NK: We were on her front fire escape, and were staring up at the North Tower, which was on fire. And we didn’t know what was going on. People were calling us. They knew how close we lived. Some of our neighbors were on their fire escapes or walking on the street – the ones that hadn’t left already for the day for work.

ES: I walked over to West Street and Rector to get a better view, and people stood around me and I guess the main thing is it was, and I think still is so surreal. It was the most beautiful day. The sky was so blue. The air was so crisp and clean. At any point if they would have said to us, "Cut! The take is over. All the extras can go home." we would have all just gone home.
And people were just watching, and It looked like a garden torch, and somebody had lit the upper part of it. And I don't think anyone thought the tower would fall or anything else would happen.
And then somebody said, "There's the tire from the plane." I didn't understand what that meant. And then somebody pointed, and at the corner of Rector and West Street there was this giant tire. And then I looked up, and in fact there was one uncovered torso, and one that apparently was covered. But again it still looked surreal. There was nothing terribly frightening about the body honestly. It wasn't bleeding. And I looked down and I saw what looked like a very big distributor cap, a part of an engine, and I thought to myself, "That must be from the plane." "Cause it was too big to be from a truck or a car.

After a little while behind us, there was a noise, there was a rumble. And it began to get louder. And I guess out of the corner of my eye I began to notice a shadow. It was almost like in slow motion everybody began to swivel and look to the east down Rector Street and up. And well, there was this plane!

RY: Verushka and I were on the roof. And there was a plane! There was a plane that flew over us. And it was the second plane.

VC: As we were looking up I heard a huge noise of a plane. I remember that so close.

ES: And even though this plane was probably moving three to five hundred miles an hour at that point, it was all in slow motion. And it took the longest time for this plane to kind of bank and turn onto Washington. And it was very low, and it was very loud, and I heard somebody say, "Oh, it's a United Airlines plane."

VC: I remember the color – It was a United Airlines, but it was gray. And that made me think for just a second that it might have been a military plane that was coming to help us, you know, to bring water or do something.

RY: You know, I knew it was like a regular passenger plane. And I was thinking, "Oh look, a plane! It's gonna spray water on the fire." None of us knew what was happening.

ES: And we watched as this plane morphed itself into the World Trade Center. It went into the South Tower, and it disappeared as though it had parked itself. And I don't recall the tower trembling much even when it was hit. I think there was a loud noise, maybe I block it out.

RY: I remember the sound of those, like revving up the engine or something. The "Whoosh" and then the uhhh, like someone stepping on the gas. So the plane flew over us and just so deliberately crashed into the second building. [Crying]

ES: But then all of a sudden, I think things sped up, and the South Tower exploded like a volcano. It's as though you had gone to your gas stove and turned on the burner, because that's what the flames looked like at that point.

RY: And I think the only other sound after that was us screaming - the both of us, Verushka and I. And just seeing that just so deliberately crashing into that tower, at that moment we just knew that we were under attack. And it was the most frightening thing. I really thought for a split second there that this is the end. And I thought, you know, bombs would be next.

VC: At that point I didn’t even realize Roxanne was with me, I just turned around and started screaming and started running so fast down the stairs. And I was sure that the plane did not explode, that the plane had continued and it was coming back, so it was even scarier to think that it would hit the Tower and that it flew away, and now it was coming back to do it again.

ES: I think people began to move away - and I do use the term "began to move away" because people…people didn't panic. I think people needed to get away because they were afraid there may have been more planes coming.
And people were nice. They were so helpful. People didn't push each other, people didn't shove. And people were already coming out covered with ash, and crying…and somebody else would grab their hand and say, "Come along."
And I guess I walked down to Battery Place, and when I got to Bowling Green people were coming out of the Lexington Avenue station - perfectly calm, perfectly normal, didn't know a thing had happened. They were going to work. So I went down into the station and I got on the train. And ten minutes later I was sitting at my desk in Downtown Brooklyn!

FR: I was speaking on the telephone with my brother at the time. So I heard a huge sound of the aircraft. And all of a sudden I heard like a huge "Boom!" And my brother said, "What is going on?" And then one second after I heard Verushka screaming, "Aaaaaauuuughhhh! That’s a bomb! That’s a bomb! That’s a bomb!" And I said to my brother, "There is a bomb. There is another bomb." Click. And I ran toward Verushka, and Verushka was completely in shock. She was trembling, and she was white in the face and she was completely scared, and she was so worried, that to calm her down I was thinking maybe I should hit her. Literally. Slap her. Yeah. Which is something of course I never did in my life. [Laugh] But I didn’t know how to, you know, calm down.

VC: I remember he was saying, "Just calm down!" And I remember telling him, "You have no idea what I’ve just seen up there."

FR: Yeah. And then I saw, let’s say, five seconds after, Roxanne coming down, slower, and completely white. She was like…she was looking at me like she wanted to say something and she couldn’t really.

VC: What I remember now – She screamed with me, but I screamed and I was somehow releasing all that terror that I had experienced up there, but she didn’t. She kept it inside. She was crying but yet it didn’t seem like she was so afraid. And when I saw her I felt even sorry, because I should’ve turned around to her and just said, "Let’s leave!" but I didn’t. I was so scared at that point that I just turned around and left. I ran so fast. I just ran to those stairs.

JC: Meanwhile, Jim was preparing to leave the building.

JP: Apparently the plane basically flew up our street and over our building. And then a second later I felt and heard the next crash and the lights flickered on & off. And at that point I said what the heck is going on? But then, maybe 30 seconds later Roxanne knocked on my door. And I opened the door, and Roxanne was back in her apartment and she could barely talk. And she was so upset. I don't think she was even crying. She was shaking, and I think she managed to finally say, "Something terrible has happened." I guess I didn't - I mean I didn't sort of understand what was going on. It took a little while to process.

FR: And then of course we came down and we saw everybody there – Jim, Esther, Jack – and so we started to talk, looking at this thing going on and it was like separate from us. We didn’t even think that it was like people dying.
But one image I have. All those people that , I guess, maybe were late at work, or I don’t know, maybe had friends in there. And I saw maybe three or four of them crying and crying, and I thought, "Oh my God!" Those people…We are looking at this thing that’s like separate from us but those people in this moment - they know!

VC: One guy was screaming, the name, I guess, of his wife. "Roseanne! Did anybody see this woman? Where are you?" And I remember the police officers telling him, "Sir, you have to move away. Move away."

RY: There was this old woman who lived on the top floor. I know her name is Sophie – I was knocking on her door, and no one answered. And luckily her immediate neighbor, who I don't know - came out of his apartment, and I said, "Can we go out to your fire escape?" And we went to the fire escape and we tried to open her window, but it was shut, and we peeked in and I could tell that there was no one there.

JC: Sophie, as you recall, had left the building at 8:30 that September 11th morning for a doctor’s appointment. This appointment was now going to backfire on her son, Eddie.

EM: At that particular point it seems as though the home health care worker had panicked and had taken off, leaving my mother just with the van driver. So the van driver – he had to abandon the van, because there was debris everywhere else. So he simply pushed her in the wheelchair up the FDR Drive to I think the Sixth Precinct, and simply deposited her there.
Meanwhile, I’m in the office in New Jersey, and I hear co-workers indicating, "You know, a plane hit the World Trade Center." So I’m stuck in New Jersey. They had closed off all the tunnels. There’s no way I could’ve gotten back in.
Probably like 10:30 or 11 o’clock. I’d gotten a call on my cellphone, and it was the police precinct. And the exact words were, "This is the Sixth Precinct. We’ve got your mother here. Can you come and pick her up?" And I’m wondering, "Well am I picking up a body, or am I picking up a live person?" I says, "What do you mean you’ve got her?" He said, "Yeah, she was wheeled in here and left here because they couldn’t get back to your apartment. But she’s okay. She’s in our rec room, and, you know, we’ll keep her here."

RY: One of our neighbors said "What we really should do is evacuate the building. And he said, if anything hits this building, it'll just go up in a tinderbox, 'cause it's so old. So at that point I said, "Okay. This is a good idea to get out of here!"

JP: I thought, I’m gonna get out of here for a week. I have friends that have an empty apartment on the Lower East Side, I'm gonna go see if I can stay with them for a week, just until all of this kind of settles down.

RY: So I went back into my apartment. And I needed to get my cat out, so I had the hardest time getting Cody into her carrier. And finally what I did is I put the carrier upright, and just kinda shoved down into it. And I left the apartment, and no one was out in the hallway, so I made the assumption that people were out of there. I had keys to my friend's apartment who lived in Soho and I said, "Well, let me just go there."

JP: And fortunately had a suitcase from a vacation that I'd just come back from, still packed, threw my cat in a backpack, got what I thought was my teacher's cello, and strapped that on my back. And I remember thinking, "Okay, in the next week I'm gonna need these papers, I'm gonna need these phone numbers." I was pretty methodical, because I didn't really feel that I was in any danger at the time. And at that point I went across the street, asked one of the policemen if she knew whether they were gonna be evacuating the neighborhood or not, and she said she didn't know, which was a perfectly understandable response at that point. [Laugh] And I turned around and I saw Lesley out on the fire escape talking on her phone.

FR: And I saw downstairs Jim waving to Lesley. And he was saying to her, "You know I’m out of here." And he was there with his cello.

JP: And I shouted up to Lesley that I was out of there. And that's also when I realized that the night before I had taken my teacher's cello out of my case and put it back in her case. And so what I thought was her very expensive instrument was actually my not very expensive instrument. And so I was going back upstairs A-to give my phone number to the rest of the people in the building; and B-to also grab her cello. And I was stepping up on the stoop there to get in, and I looked one more time to my left to the World Trade Center, and I noticed - that's when the building started to come down. I saw the building collapse.

JC: While many us were still inside the building, Roxanne and her cat Cody had escaped. She was on her way to a different kind of adventure.

RY: So Cody & I went to Wall Street station. So, surprisingly the train came, we got on, and really within a couple of minutes it came to a screeching halt, and you could feel the pressure drop. My ears popped. And they made an announcement that there was smoke up ahead so that they couldn't go any further forward, and that we were stopped there for a while.

JC: The people on the train had no clue that the South Tower was falling.

NK: I think I was sitting on the couch talking to Lesley while she was in the window looking at the two burning buildings. And I was saying, "Maybe we should get out of here. [Laugh]." Although it didn’t seem like we were in immediate danger. It just seemed that they were indestructible – the Towers. I think I always thought that was a very safe place to be after the ’93 bombing, that nothing else was ever gonna happen there.

LM: Then Nancy was on the phone with someone or had just hung up. She was sitting on my couch, and I was leaning out the window. And I see debris start to fly off of the first tower. And I screamed in escalating volumes in hysteria, "Nancy! Nancy! Nancy! Nancy!"

NK: She started screaming – screaming my name, and I ran to the window and looked out, and that was the beginning of the first collapse.

FR: And at the moment also me and Verushka were at the window, we looked up again and we saw a helicopter going around the Tower, and we thought, "That would be a nice picture again." Stupidly. So I was out of my apartment now, walking up the stairs.

NK: And all of a sudden I saw huge, huge masses of smoke, and giant chunks of building, just sides of the building, twenty stories basically coming straight down the street towards us. And we screamed, and the first thing we did was lie on the floor. And we were just holding each other. Saying, "Oh my God! Oh my God!"

FR: So I was, like twelve steps before the roof, and Verushka maybe at the second step. And we started to hear something. And Verushka, she said to me, "What is going on? What is going on?" And I was now almost opening the door of the roof. And I said maybe, "Mmmm Mmmm! I shouldn’t do that!" And this sound [was] becoming more and more – very slow. Very slow.

NK: And the apartment filled up with dust and ash and there was this huge rumbling sound. And we thought our building was collapsing on top of us. And I, I thought we were dying. I really thought we were dying. I’ve never experienced that feeling before of such intense panic, that I think you could only be in that situation, you can’t even imagine it. It’s an unreal, human feeling.

FR: And then there was another guy, apartment 14, he opened the door. We went toward his apartment. I pushed them into a corner inside the apartment of this guy. And we stayed there tight all together. And the sound was coming over slowly. It was like for me three years, it wouldn’t stop. And then at the maximum point, I felt the building shaking incredibly. And then, silence.

JP: I can't remember a sound from the tower collapsing. It's an image with complete silence to it. Except for my screaming. I believe I said something like, "Oh my God!" very loudly. I remember people running down the street. I remember trying to get up the nerve to tell people to come into the building with me, but I was not able to get the key in the lock very quickly. And by the time I got the door open, the dust cloud had already come down the street. And I was down in the hallway with my cat howling, and couldn't see because the dust was so thick, and choking to death, I could barely breathe.

FR: Then at that point I said, Okay. Let’s run. Let’s go." And so this guy and Verushka followed me, and I was the first one. So I was running so fast toward the entrance. But after maybe one floor, I saw this huge cloud of dust going fast toward me. And in one second I was "Roumpph!", completely covered.

JP: And the fire…smoke detector going off,--and hearing everybody upstairs running around in a panic, because I don't think everybody in the building knew what was going on. It turns out I guess people thought the building had caught fire. And I just made sure the front door was closed, because I didn't know what might be coming down the street, if we were gonna get showers of glass and steel. I mean I didn't even consider that it might implode the way it did.

FR: And I arrived at the second floor, in which I found other people and they said, "You know we shouldn’t go there, because maybe there is a fire going on." And I said, to myself, I said "I don’t care. We have to get out. I couldn’t see, so I was touching the walls, touching around – just to understand where I should go. And once I was really close to the main door, all of a sudden from this cloud materialized a man. And I was "Huuhhh! What’s that?" There was Jim, with his cello, in front of the main door completely covered of [with] dust. He was completely white. Dust, like we are talking about inches and inches all over his body. And he was looking at me. And I was looking at him like a ghost. And we were both in such a huge, abnormal situation, and of course he understood that I was going toward the door to open it. And he said to me – slowly – "Do not open the door." And then again – "Do not open the door." And while he was doing that all the dust was coming out of his mouth. And then I took a little bit of his arm and I said, "Let’s go another direction. Let’s find another solution."

NK: Then we were on the second floor, and someone said, "Let’s go in this apartment." - which was mine, and said, "Let’s go out the back fire escape."

FR: And in those moments one of those guys, he jumped on the bed and tried to throw away the air conditioner against the floor trying to find a way out. And when he opened the window it was midnight, even more than midnight, it was like no lights at all. And it was incredible, because a few minutes before it was such a beautiful day and everything, And then everybody, started to think of a way out, and everything. I remember Jack went to the main window and he started to scream, "Hello! Hello!" trying to find out if somebody could hear us or help us in any way.

NK: But then we realized you can’t get to the street from our back area, where the fire escape leads to – it’s enclosed. And we realized then we had to go out the front. It was our only way of getting out of the building, and we had to get out of the building.

JC: Meanwhile, Roxanne is still stuck on the subway… close to the collapsed towers.

RY: So the train wasn't that crowded. I know at that point I was standing, and there was several other people standing. And then later they made an announcement that everyone should move to the front of the train. And then they stopped us and they made an announcement that we should just stay where we were, and sit tight. And at this point it was getting a little scary because smoke started to filter into the car. So you could tell, everyone was scared. You could see the panic on their face.

LM: Then I thought that I should go [and] at least try and get my cats, because, I didn’t want to leave there without them. So I went up and I couldn’t find my cats, and I poured some water in a bowl and food. And I’m so angry because my cats are kind of chubby, so I’m so used to feeding them a very set amount, when I should have just ripped open the bag and left it there. I couldn’t find them. And then I thought, "Oh gosh, I should close my windows." So I shut the windows. I grabbed my wallet, which allowed me to get into the building. I took a cellphone which was a lifeline for days. And my keys I grabbed, and that’s it.

JP: Jack calls me "The grey ghost" now - I was completely covered with dust. I went into Nancy's bathroom to try to wash my mouth out, because the taste and the grit in my mouth was so horrible, and at that moment, I maybe got one mouthful of water and then the water stopped. I guess the consensus was after a few minutes of initial panic going away that we needed to get out of the building. And we all left, pretty much most of us together, although I thought Roxanne left with us, but apparently she left before we did.

RY: So we just sat there. And the cars were filling up with smoke, and when you see smoke, you suspect fire. So I was thinking of the worst case scenario - The train will catch on fire, or we'll somehow suffocate through smoke inhalation. And we were in there for God knows. I think it was over an hour. So finally, finally, they said what they're gonna do is they're gonna go backwards. We would inch back and then stop and then inch back and stop. And then finally at some point the train actually moved, and so then we went back to the Wall Street station. And we had to line up and walk through the trains to the station. And the people were great. I mean, people saw me with the carrier, and asked if I needed assistance. And there were older people there, and people asked, "grab my arm." and they'll assist the older people out.

FR: And then all of a sudden, I don’t know why – We were just four people inside the apartment – Me, Nancy, this guy of apartment 14, and Verushka – and I said "We have to get out. I don’t care what is outside that door. Let’s go." And I opened the door, and when I opened the door it was unbelievable. For me it was like walking on the moon. And I thought, "Oh my God! This is huge. This is like the final bomb!"

JP: I remember thinking the place looked like a nuclear bomb had hit it - you know, the white dust all over the place. And you probably couldn't see more than half a block ahead of you.

RY: And then I went up the stairs and I was so confused, I thought, "Where am I? But then finally something caught my eye where I realized, "Oh my God! This is street level!" So what had happened while we were down in the station caught in the train was that the towers had collapsed. So I didn't know this. I'm sure none of the other people did.

NK: So I was only with a few of the neighbors at this point, ‘cause somehow we got into different groups. And with my dog, was walking down the street with Flavio & Verushka,.

VC: Nancy was with us. At the time she was shaking. She was holding the cat in one bag and the dog, and the dog was going crazy, so she asked me to hold the dog, and I was walking with the dog, she was walking with the cat.

FR: Then I saw you (were) tired and I took the dog. And when I took the dog, the dog had to do what he had to do…Not pee! [VC: the second one!] [Laugh] Yeah! And then Nancy said to people around, "You know, you don’t mind if I don’t clean?" [Laugh] This was very funny!

JP: I remember seeing Nancy just with the clothes on her back, and Lesley, I don't think she even had anything with her. And Jack was talking about going to the river where the air would be cleaner. And since I was going to the Lower East Side I was going east. And without a doubt the most heartbreaking image that I have from the whole experience is us parting ways and not knowing if I would ever see you guys again. And why didn't I think to give my phone number to somebody! [Laugh]

LM: So we all fled togetherI remember Jim turned left, and we turned right. Oh, and I had my juice! I was concerned about liquid obviously, and I ran out of the apartment, besides my cellphone, my camera, my wallet, and whatever else, a half-full carton of Dole fruit juice! Like a nut-job! [Laugh]

NK: I think Flavio and Verushka and I had separated by the time we got to the Fulton Fish Market, and my next goal was basically to find a phone to call my mother, but I couldn’t get through to Pennsylvania where my family was. And I tried calling my friends, that I had already spoken to that morning. It took me a little while to get through to them even, and when I did I said, "Please call my mother, please call my mother. And they did. It took them about 45 minutes to get through to her. And I know my mother thought I was dead for a good two hours.

JP: I did run into one man who was actually talking on his cellphone and I begged him to let me use his phone after he was through with his call, and he said, "Well, I can't call out, but I'm talking to my mother right now. If you want her to call, I'll have her do that." So he had his mother call my mother to tell her that I was okay, so…It was probably an hour there when my mother was pretty much a basket case, but she remembers getting the phone call, and both women had a good cry together,

LM: Then we went down the West Side Highway. And then I remember hitting the bar by the water where there was no further we could go. And then that same sound happened again. And Jack said, "There goes the second one." And I said, "The second what?" He said, "The second tower." I had no, no idea that that was what had happened at all. And I remember leaning up against the bar and watching like this rolling wall, if that makes sense, of solid debris. And you didn’t know if it was gonna reach you! And there’s an odd fascination of looking at it and being, "Huh! I wonder if this is gonna kill me!"

JP: I would say maybe 20% of us were covered with the dust most of these people were people who were trying to get home. And it was pretty obvious to anybody who would look at me, and hear my cat howling, and my backpack and see me loaded down with all the stuff, that I was actually running away from my home. At one point we passed an apartment building and I guess the super was hosing people down or giving them water if they wanted it. So I finally got to wash my mouth out and wash my face off. Probably around that time was when the second building came down. You know, I heard this noise and I thought it was another explosion or something like that.

JC: Meanwhile, down in Battery Park, five of us are ferried across the Hudson River in a Coast Guard work boat…

LM: Then the ferry ride was very odd. I remember before even getting on the boat my first thought was, "How can I escape if necessary?" And just being shipped away, and seeing against this gorgeous blue sky the absence and the smoke, and the silence, and the… "unbelievableness" of it all.

JC: … and, while we’re being ferried, Roxanne is coming out of the subway.

RY: So I went out and I just at that point joined the mass exodus out of Lower Manhattan. And I still didn't know that the towers had collapsed. I remember everything was filled with ash and seeing those bagel carts abandoned, and just the weirdest sight, really, like Armageddon had struck. And one of the kind of like shocking things to me to have seen was a dead bird. And you knew that this bird was in mid-flight and was killed. And for some reason that was kinda like, "Whoo!" This thing was up in the air and it was killed by this explosion.

FR: We were all covered by dust and everything, We were like ghosts – thousands and thousands of ghosts. And I remember this guy telling me the Tower collapsed. Of course we turned, and I said to her, "They are not there anymore!" It was unbelievable. Like, the Twin Towers are not there! And I remember her, she started to cry, and it was simply out of any comprehension.

JP: Maybe I was on East Broadway, I couldn't tell you. I got up to Henry Street Settlement, which is a little too far east, but at that point I was so disoriented I thought I was still walking north. And two employees from Henry Street Settlement came up to me and they asked me where I was going and I told them, and they said, "Well, you know, that's not very far from here. Why don't we help you carry your bags the rest of the way?" So they were very nice to do that.

RY: Just walking through Soho was the strangest thing, there was the strange sense that, "You guys don't know what's going on." and just getting these kind of strange looks too. I know at one point, I was just so tired walking with Cody, and I sat down for awhile. And people were in & out of the bars and they'd go, "Oh look! A kitty cat!" And I thought, "Yeah, you should try carrying her a couple of miles!" But just this weird thing like there's really two different realities I think happening at that time.

FR: And then we did walk till 71st & Broadway. So you can imagine how long we walked. And something strange happened that when we arrived on 15th Street, on our way to 71st Street, I stopped by for a few minutes over a friend. So I was waiting for her to come down and open the door for us, and this woman came out with some laundry or something. And since she opened the door, we can get in and we can go up to our friend without her [having] to come down and everything. She looked at us and she said, "I’m sorry, but I cannot let you in in this condition." Because we were of course covered in dust. We were horrible, and dirty, [Laugh] and whatever. I mean, I didn’t have the strength to say a thing. I looked at her as she walked away and as she closed the door in front of me.

RY: And finally I made it to Cecelia's place. So we hugged each other, which I really needed at that time. And I was still trembling. I knew I should call my folks, and I just grabbed the phone, and I just couldn't dial. I had to ask her to dial the phone for me, cause I was shaking so much. And then they were watching the news, and I saw that the towers had collapsed. You know, I just…I didn't know. I didn't know the towers collapsed, and it was a big shock to me.

LM: My friend eventually came. After midnight. He lived about a half an hour away, but you were hearing it was taking four hours. We drove back to his place So I went back there, and that was my day on September 11th!

RY: It was a horrific experience, but there's never a time that I said, "God I wish that I didn't have to go through it." It's weird, because it's such a horrible thing to have happened, and taking pride in being a witness to it is kinda strange, but I'm fine with the things I went through. Somehow this has grounded me in some weird sense, just knowing that I can survive that. It's interesting to know, 'cause you always think: Well, how would I react to that? And really this was an instance where - Okay we've gotta leave the apartment, what am I gonna take? But I'm just glad I got my Cody, my cat, out of there.

LM: Priority number one was to get my two cats, Gus and Lila out of the apartment. I was constantly worried about them. They were my main concern. And that night out of nowhere I ran into Danny. Danny lives in apartment 2, and he said, "I’ll pick you up tomorrow and we’ll go down and get your cats. And he picked me up the next morning. And we drove down to Canal Street and parked, and then walked for about an hour and a half. And eventually got in there. And saw Lila within a minute sitting on top of my laundry, just her eyes. And [I] had to rip open my sink and had to throw everything on my kitchen floor to get Gus, that had lodged himself, but got them.
And I remember being in the van, and cheesy moment, but "With a Little Help from My Friends" came on the radio, and I just [Crying]…I just started to realize that this was total reality, and that has been the enormous, immediate, unending support and love for my friends and my family – just there, anything you need.

JP: This was September 12th. And I was in shock at least for a day. And I was walking on Broadway. And I stopped by, I think it's Grace Episcopal Church on Tenth Street, on Broadway - I was outside in front of that, and the doors were open, and all of a sudden this wave of sadness came over me and I started crying and I thought - I don't want to be crying on the street, I'll just go in the church and cry. There were about a dozen people in the church, and it was very quiet in there. And I got in and sat down, and was sobbing. I was very loud. Well, not very loud, but, compared to everybody else! And I realized about a minute later, that everybody else had started crying also.

JC: Like everyone else from our building, Erwin & Eddie were wondering if 109 Washington was still standing.

EM: So several days later I still at this point had no idea if the building had been demolished or not, but I went back to work two days later, and happened to have picked up a copy of the New York Post – and happened to have turned to page two, and sure enough, there’s a photograph of the World Trade Center with my building on the right. It was still standing.

ES: It wasn't for days that I knew my neighbors were okay, I knew that my home still stood, I knew that, you know, had some sense of what was and what wasn't. It makes you think at the same time about what's important in life.

JP: I would have to say that from an objective point of view this has been a difficult year. [Laugh] A little less than a year I was diagnosed with Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma and was hospitalized for a week. My oncologist at the time told me that probably if we had waited even a day to start chemotherapy that the cancer would've gone into my brain, and it would've been too late to do anything about it. I feel pretty good. I have days when I'm a little run down, but I'm still in remission. You know you just wake up everyday and say, "Here we go! One more time!" When I was diagnosed with the cancer I thought, "I don't know if I can handle this." But I got through that and you know, I can survive a hundred and ten story building falling down on top of me now. Throw it at me! I can deal with it! [Laugh]

RY: I've really, learned about friendship and family and [crying] knowing how everyone's life touches another. Of course the first people I knew I had to call was my family. And when the phone call time came around, you know, I said, "Okay let me call this person, this person, this person." But in actuality I really needed to call this person, this person, this person, this person, this person, like almost everyone in my phone book. You know, the outpouring of concern from people. So many people were inquiring about me, and my safety and everything.

JP: There were a lot of heroes for me in the aftermath, not just firemen and policemen, but the guy who's mother called my mother was a hero to me, you know the woman on the bus the next day who patted my shoulder when she saw that I was crying, my doctors, and the couple of counselors that I saw afterwards, and my neighbors. You know, I think everybody was a hero and I'm trying to be a hero too.

RY: My first day in New York was the bombing, the first bombing of the World Trade Center. And people always thought it was so ironic that I ended up living two and a half blocks from there. But what people would say is, "If it blows up again, you’ll have a great view of it." Or "You better watch out if that thing falls, it'll fall right on your building." And of course you laughed back then. But…My God [Crying] who would have known that that actually would've happened?

LM: When I first moved down there and people would ask me, "Oh how do you like living down there?" or, "Where do you live?" I’m like, "I live right by the World Trade Center! Yes it’s a funky area! Yeah, people do live down there. I live down there! My neighbors live down there!" And there was this, proud territorial thing. You know, we were kind of the Pilgrims of that area.

EM: I think the residents of the building have all gotten a better feel for where they’re living and we’re going to make a sort of a pioneer effort living in that particular area. Which it will be, because we will see the transition and I wouldn’t move under any circumstances at this point. You know, I’ve seen the Trade Center being built, now I’ve seen it destroyed, and now I’ll live through a reconstruction of some type. And the eyes of the world will be watching the World Trade Center site. And it will be interesting. It will be beautiful, and who knows? It’s going to be fun again. Fun! So, [I’m] looking forward to it! Absolutely.

----MUSIC FROM ROOF CONCERT ----

JC: One year later, different sounds could be heard emanating from 109 Washington. Our neighbor from apartment 9, Jim--who is our resident classical musician-- brought over three of his friends to perform a Mozart requiem on the roof of our building. What a difference a year makes. on this September 11th, we did not hear any screams… or fire alarms.. or planes crashing… or towers falling. we could only hear… peace.

----FADE OUT MUSIC----

END

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