Part 1 is here.
My office was on the fifth floor of a building on Hudson Street. Windows lined all of the walls, but there was nothing to see through all the smoke. It was a small office, probably around 20-25 people. We walked back and forth in a daze. Nobody was sure what to do.
The phones in the office still worked, somehow. So I called my family to let them know I was ok. Later, I learned that my sister was supposed to have a work appointment at the WTC that afternoon, but it had been cancelled a few days earlier.
Somebody had a radio and we had it tuned to WNYC, who continued to broadcast from right next to the towers. It was from that radio that we heard the first tower collapse. Immediately, the collective trance snapped.
Our small office only had a single human resources person – a woman named Sarah Kurek. She was the first hero I met that day. Sarah oversaw the evacuation of the office. We ran down five flights of steps; I stupidly jumped several steps at the bottom of each flight and paid for it with leg pain for the next week. On the street, it was utter confusion. Sarah had a list of everyone in the office, and she checked each of our names off before we left. She did not leave until she confirmed everybody was accounted for.
Once Sarah cleared me to leave, I started walking North, joining an increasing stream of people fleeing from downtown. It was about two and a half miles from my office to my apartment.
When I reached Chelsea Market at 15th St. and 9th Ave., I ran into Eliot. Eliot was a programmer who also worked at On2. I was still new there, so I didn’t really know Eliot that well.
Eliot was standing on the street corner, looking as if he didn’t know where to go. He said that he was walking out of the Path train station when the first tower was hit, and that he was knocked to the ground by the impact. Since then, he had just been walking.
I brought Eliot back to my apartment so he could try to call his wife in New Jersey and figure out how he was going to get back across the river. He was able to reach her to say he was OK. Shortly thereafter he left to walk over to the river and see if he could find a ferry.
Around noon, as the adrenaline wore off I realized that I still hadn’t eaten anything that day. The only thing I could find in the kitchen to eat was a half loaf of olive bread. I’d bought it a few days earlier from a bakery in the WTC concourse. I ate it in front of the television, watching the replays over and over again, connecting the dots between the camera images and what I had seen. I still wonder if the first plane hit while I was in the Chambers Street subway station, and that was why the train braked so suddenly.
Later that day, the smell reached Chelsea.
The Loosefishery 