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live on 14th and Union Square, and around a quarter of nine heard
a low roar of a plane, much louder than I've ever heard in Manhattan.
I idly thought, "That's the sound people talk about when they
report seeing plane crashes."
A couple of
minutes later a friend told me to turn on the TV and I saw one of
the most searing images of the decade.
About a half block from my apartment is Fifth Avenue, which affords
a clear view of the twin towers of the World Trade Center.
It's odd how
disasters excite people, thrill them somehow — clerks who work
in the grocery store below my apartment building were dashing toward
Fifth Avenue, smiling.
At every corner of Fifth Avenue, people were standing and staring,
about half of them on cell phones, reporting on the sight to friends.
The twin towers
always look a little other worldly, a little surreal as if they
are painted onto the sky, and ofcourse the effect was magnified
in an unbelievable way (and now it's a sight that simply doesn't
exist anymore).
When I left my apartment, just one tower had been hit, rather high
up. By the time I was on the street the second tower was burning
as well, lower down.
Sirens kept
droning by, as emergency vehicle after emergency vehicle headed
down Fifth, the drivers sometimes shouting over their speakers for
the traffic to get out of the way.
The street was clogged, because cars, including a bunch of cabs,
were pulled off along the side of the street, their drivers standing
next to their cars, with the doors open, sometimes withtheir radios
turned up high.
One moron had
pulled his pick-up truck over and sat up near the cab so a friend
could snap an instamatic picture of him with the worst terrorist
attack ever on the American homeland burning in the background.
As the news kept coming over the radio of two deliberate attacks
on both towers, you could just see the reaction on peoples' faces,
gaping mouths, hands over mouths, hand clasped to the sides of their
heads.
And feel the sick feeling you knew was in the pit of everyone's
stomach.
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