One of our immediate concerns has been making sure that our people are all right -- our alumni, our families, and our students. By the time this is over, there won't be a person who isn't touched in some way by this. -- PC President John Griffith

September 11, 2001, will remain a date that will live in infamy for many Americans. "Lucky", a 1995 PC graduate who has been living in Manhattan since 1997, experienced part of the tragedy first-hand. A vice president for Commercial Bank of New York, managing both domestic and Latin American media affairs, and the owner and operator of an arts website, he penned his thoughts on the day's events in the form of an e-mail diary after traveling through the city. He has consented to have it published on the PC website with the hope that his words will facilitate the healing process following this great tragedy. 

September 11, 2001 - 6:45 p.m.

The phone lines are jammed with the calls of eight million other New Yorkers calling family and friends, and I haven't been able to get through except for brief conversations with my mother and father to say I'm alive! I'm cut off in my East Village apartment to an extent that is a little too reclusive even for me, so I would appreciate email. At this point I'm feeling like we've been buried in an unseasonable snowstorm, waiting to be dug out. I'm making the best of it, as you might expect.

The coordinated attack on the World Trade Center occurred at the height of rush hour this morning while I was sitting on an 8:35 Long Island train making a reverse commute to West Babylon on business. I noticed a plume of smoke on the horizon as the train came into Jamaica Station. Ironically, yesterday I coordinated the release of a website at offices in the easternmost building of the financial district, at 120 Wall Street. From their offices it is but a short walk up the street and over the hill to the World Trade Center. My train had stopped and I called my contact on a cell phone to check on the status of the website and inquire if they knew what was happening. They were justifiably unconcerned with our project, and glued to a television set reporting that a single airplane crashed up the street in the World Trade Center. At the time, nobody knew the extent to the impending devastation, and I assumed it was an errant airplane that caused the accident, just as many people must have surmised at the beginning. A few minutes later I watched the tower collapse. I have been unable to communicate with them since, and assume they evacuated the area soon after I spoke with them. In fact, most everyone with somewhere to go is evacuating the island.

I experienced delays on the train lines and dismissed my appointment on Long Island. I used the ole college educated noggin and formulated a plan to get on a train back into the city, under the guise of a blood lab technician. (Hey, I was biology minor in college after all.) Critical personnel were the only ones allowed to enter the city, and by the time I pulled into Penn Station all travel in and out of the city had been stopped. Rather than resolving myself to a shelter in Queens, I had stretched the truth and arrived in Manhattan by lunchtime to make my way home. I second-guessed my decision when I saw how eager the crowds were to leave the island.

Rightly so, for the catastrophic crashes of two hijacked commercial airliners sealed the fate of the Twin Towers in less than 20 minutes, but the day has been overshadowed by the terrifying event. Public lines of transportation were ordered closed, all routes came to a halt, streets emptied and gates were pulled closed over the bodegas and storefronts throughout the city. The destruction of the World Trade Center had been completed and the city was in a state of disbelief, mobilized evacuation, and military lockdown. I'm sure you've seen the pictures on the news.

Gridlock crippled the city to which I returned, but by evening the streets had emptied completely following closures to all but emergency vehicles which go screaming down the avenue as I write. No busses, cabs or subways in operation created a mass exodus on the Brooklyn Bridge, hundreds of thousands fleeing the ashen storm overtaking the southern tip of the island. A man in a suit asked me for directions to the Williamsburg Bridge, thousands more passed me going in the opposite direction to attempt their getting out of the city on frozen commuter trains. I walked down the center of Broadway and was astounded by the austere silence that had set on Manhattan. The sky was full of gray smoke, but a peace had settled on the city. I'm reminded of the scene in 'Devils Advocate' where the young lawyer emerges onto a deserted and wide avenue, the hurdles of the city's congestion mysteriously removed. What gets me most is the absolute serenity I felt looking at it all.

Then there was the apocalyptic cloud hovering to the south, casting the sinister shadows on the island that I couldn't escape until I arrived indoors, and I brushed off the white ash on my shoulders. I walked toward my apartment watching and listening to New Yorkers telling and sometimes crying their stories to complete strangers. The sky filled with plumes of smoke overshadowing the city as if a late summer rain shower had blotted out the sunshine. Nature's blessing on the tragedy is a strong eastern breeze carrying smoke out to sea. Many more young people were in the Village, and I walked downtown to my friend Angel's apartment talking to strangers along the way. Television sets were set on stoops and radios blasted news reports to the attentive ears of passersby. On Angel's rooftop there is a skyline perspective on the city. What I saw can only be expressed in the pictures I took. I will send them when I can get them developed.

Life's disasters are often surreal and unreal during their aftermath, but as I returned to my apartment, I overheard a story that made the extent of the attack very clear. Perhaps the most disturbing story I've come to know. The north tower was the first to fall, but while its stairwells filled up with smoke the top floors began to smelt metal and debris. 100,000 tons of steel and 110 stories high, there was more than glass and metal falling from the top floors to the streets below, where those fortunate enough to have been below the airplane's impact were exiting and moving away from the building. The first casualties came in the form of forced suicides, more than 100 reported on the radio station this hour. According to a visibly frazzled stranger ahead of me on my walk home, horrified onlookers watched the jumpers. I imagine the sight is balefully electric, to the extent that one cannot take his eyes off the hurled body as it moves through the air, a transfixing if not altogether surreal picture. Her account left me with a picture of two jumpers sweeping down to their deaths from the burning building above, arms spread out and holding hands for the duration of the fatal flight.

Yesterday I immerged from the Subway car on the corner of Wall Street and Broadway, where Trinity Church's steeple casts shadows at the entrance of the Stock Exchange. Cattycorner to NYSE is Federal Hall where Washington was sworn in and the fathers of the constitution mingled during early America. The three buildings are conspicuously representative of the country in which we live, set on a hill 1000 yards from the World Trade Center towering over approvingly. You'll excuse my sentimental tone in this note, but I can't imagine how the place will be the same again.

"Lucky"
Class of 1995