September 11 Was The Day New York Stopped
**Twenty-five years later, I still carry that day with me.**
There are some days in your life that divide everything into a *before* and an *after*.
For me, September 11, 2001, is that day.
I have thought about writing this story for years. Every time I try, I find myself back there. Sometimes I can remember tiny details with extraordinary clarity. Other parts are blurred together. I don’t remember exactly how long I was inside the dust cloud. I don’t remember precisely what time anything happened. In many ways, I don’t think my brain recorded that day as a normal sequence of events.
It recorded fragments.
And those fragments have stayed with me for twenty-five years.
An ordinary morning
It was early in the morning when I went outside to the bodega to get an iced coffee.
I hadn’t really gotten my life together yet.
At the time, I was sleeping on a mate’s couch. I had met him in a bar, and my life was still very much in transition.
I’d been travelling back and forth across the United States, particularly between New York and San Francisco. I’d previously worked for the Limelight before it closed, and my friend was from San Francisco. He had DJed for a party I hosted, and eventually he introduced me to the San Francisco rave scene.
My life was nights, music, clubs, travel and very little routine.
The night before 9/11, I’d been at Spa nightclub. I’d had perhaps four hours of sleep and was a little hungover.
So when I walked outside that morning, I wasn’t exactly starting the day fresh.
Then I noticed several people standing on top of a car, all looking up.
I remember thinking they were lunatics.
I asked them what they were doing.
They didn’t really answer. They just pointed.
I looked toward the World Trade Center.
There was the tail end of an airplane hanging out of the tower.
Smoke was everywhere.
And yet somehow, it didn’t fully sink in.
I knew something terrible had happened, but I don’t think I understood what I was looking at.
My immediate thought was incredibly mundane:
**I had to get to work.**
I still had obligations
At the time, I was working temporarily as a barista at Timothy’s World Coffee. I’d been there for a few months.
I was also supposed to be moving into a new flat that day with a friend who had previously answered the phones at the Limelight.
And I needed my paycheck.
So I started making my way toward Wall Street.
Looking back now, I sometimes wonder what I was thinking.
Why did I keep walking toward the disaster?
But at that moment, I had no idea the tower was going to collapse.
I had no concept that things were about to become unimaginably worse.
I was exhausted. I was hungover. I was accustomed to working nights and living an irregular life between New York and San Francisco. My sense of time was already messy.
And I still had obligations.
So I kept walking.
Fulton Street
I made it to Fulton Street.
That’s where everything changed.
There were hundreds of people packed into the street, jammed together like sardines.
Nobody could move.
It was a gridlock of pedestrians unlike anything I had ever experienced.
And then the tower came down.
Because it was nearby, I could see it.
Then the smoke hit us.
It felt like being hit by a Mack truck.
There was a solid blow against my face and body, and the mass of people around me seemed to collapse.
Then I couldn’t see anything.
It was pitch black.
Or almost black — I remember it being grey in places, with occasional beams of light cutting through the darkness.
I was inside the dust cloud for what felt like minutes, although I have absolutely no reliable sense of how long it was.
Time had disappeared.
I couldn’t see.
I couldn’t breathe properly.
I didn’t know where I was.
I didn’t know what was happening.
And I didn’t know what to do.
The door
Then I saw something.
A crack of light coming from a building.
I ran toward it.
A doorman was letting people inside.
For a brief moment, there was somewhere to go.
There were perhaps ten of us inside.
He locked the door shortly after.
Outside, people were still trying to get in. I remember things hitting the door. Even now, I don’t know whether people were throwing things or whether what I heard was simply debris from the destruction around us.
Inside, I stood covered in ash.
I was surrounded by a handful of complete strangers.
And somehow, despite being surrounded by people, I felt completely alone.
There was a Puerto Rican couple sitting together in the stairwell.
I remember them because they started kissing.
It struck me as strange at the time.
How could anyone be romantic at a moment like this?
But I remember thinking that if I believed I was about to die, and I had someone I loved beside me, perhaps that would be exactly what I’d want to be doing too.
So I sat below them quietly.
And waited.
We waited for the smoke to clear.
It seemed like hours.
I have no reliable sense of time that day.
Trying to get home
My cellphone wasn’t working.
There was no service.
I wanted to call my mother.
She was disabled and was supposed to see her cardiologist in the city that morning. I wanted to tell her **not to come**.
I thought I could use the phone at work.
And I needed water.
The coffee shop was only several blocks away.
Eventually, when the smoke subsided enough to move, I stepped back outside.
I walked through the ash with my shirt pulled over my face as a makeshift mask.
The ash was everywhere.
In my hair.
In my nose.
In my mouth.
On my clothes.
On my skin.
I eventually made it to Pine Street and Broadway, where Timothy’s World Coffee was.
The shop had a huge wall of windows.
Now they were covered in ash.
Inside, it was destroyed.
Coffee machines were everywhere. Canisters and equipment were scattered across the floor. Things were smashed and broken.
It looked as though somebody had deliberately vandalised the entire shop.
But I knew this wasn’t vandalism.
It was the force of what had just happened.
I went to the phone.
It didn’t work.
I still didn’t know what to do.
I was caught between two apartments.
My new place wasn’t ready.
The subway wasn’t running.
My phone wasn’t working.
And New York had effectively stopped.
Then the second tower came down
I was back outside when the second tower collapsed.
The second collapse felt different.
The smoke was black.
Completely black.
There were no beams of light this time.
Just darkness.
I remember tiny pieces of debris hitting me.
Pebbles.
Little pieces of things.
And then I realised something that still stays with me:
**There was nobody else in the street.**
No crowds.
No traffic.
No normal New York noise.
I couldn’t see anyone in the buildings either.
I was completely shell-shocked.
I had no idea where to go.
Then, some time after the initial blast, I heard someone.
I followed the sound.
There was an Italian sandwich shop.
A woman let me inside.
She gave me a panini, water and washcloths so I could clean my face.
I sat quietly on a bench for a while.
Alone.
Eating a sandwich.
Covered in the remains of a building that had just collapsed.
It was such an ordinary act in such an extraordinary moment.
And I have never forgotten her kindness.
Walking across New York
Eventually I decided I needed to get to my friend’s home in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
The subways weren’t running.
I had no idea how I was going to get there.
So I started walking.
What followed was one of the strangest journeys of my life.
I walked through the Lower East Side.
And I saw something I had never expected to see in New York.
People were giving things away.
Ordinary people were standing in the streets with pitchers of water.
People were handing out peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
People who might normally have pushed you out of the way or tried to take your money were simply helping strangers.
There was generosity everywhere.
I remember looking at the guy who gave me a sandwich thinking he looked like a gang member.
But there they were, giving people food and water for free.
No questions.
No expectation.
Just generosity.
New York had changed in a matter of hours.
The city that I knew had disappeared.
But something else had appeared in its place.
Humanity.
The Williamsburg Bridge
It took me several hours to make my way across the Williamsburg Bridge and eventually reach my friend’s apartment.
By the time I arrived, I was completely demolished.
Physically.
Emotionally.
Mentally.
I had spent the day walking through a city covered in ash, trying to understand what had happened and trying to find somewhere safe to go.
But the effects of that day didn’t end when I arrived in Brooklyn.
In many ways, they were only beginning. My experience with September 11 was far from over.
Returning to Ground Zero
I continued working at Ground Zero for weeks afterward.
For what I remember being approximately six weeks to three months, I returned to Timothy’s World Coffee, working eight-hour shifts, five days a week.
The area was restricted, and I remember having to show identification to officials I understood to be from the CDC before being allowed inside.
They wore white protective suits and masks, reminding me of the government scientists who came to take E.T. away in the Spielberg film.
And there I was, a barista, walking into the middle of it.
Before September 11, my responsibilities were pouring coffee, operating the register and stocking shelves.
Afterward, I was cleaning up the destruction.
The shop was covered in ash, with a layer of powder at least half an inch thick across much of the interior.
The walls were finished in bevelled pine wood, and I spent hours trying to clean the ash from the grooves.
It was impossible.
Every time I wiped the wood, the dust mixed with water and turned into a thick paste. Instead of disappearing, it seemed to settle deeper into the grooves.
Looking back, it felt like an enormous waste of time. We were simply moving the contamination around and getting it all over ourselves.
Every day, I went home with ash in my hair, on my clothes and against my skin.
I wasn’t a construction worker or trained in hazardous-material removal. I was a barista who had suddenly been expected to clean up the aftermath of a terrorist attack.
We weren’t provided with adequate protection.
I remember disposable masks sitting on a table, already covered in the same dust we were supposed to be cleaning.
They were contaminated before we even put them on.
What strikes me now is the contrast between the officials outside, dressed head to toe in protective clothing, and those of us inside, working in ordinary clothes.
They were dressed as though the environment was dangerous. We were expected to work as though it wasn’t.
At the time, I was young, needed my paycheck and had rent to pay.
I just went to work.
Years later, I applied to the World Trade Center Health Program. I wanted my exposure documented and access to appropriate healthcare should I develop a related illness in the future.
I also wanted to understand my potential eligibility for the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund, which has separate registration deadlines and requirements.
I hope I never need to make a compensation claim.
But I sometimes wonder how many ordinary workers returned to Lower Manhattan without understanding the potential risks.
We weren’t firefighters or rescue workers. We were baristas, shop assistants, cleaners and office employees.
People who needed to earn a living.
What came after
For years afterward, sleep became one of the hardest things for me.
Nighttime could be brutal.
I would lie awake staring at the ceiling for hours.
Sometimes I felt enormous anger.
Sometimes rage.
Sometimes I simply couldn’t settle my mind enough to sleep.
There are things about trauma that are difficult to explain to somebody who hasn’t experienced it.
The event ends.
The news cycle moves on.
The buildings are rebuilt.
The streets become busy again.
People return to work.
But your nervous system doesn’t necessarily receive the memo.
A part of you is still there.
I was traumatised for years.
And I still have difficult nights today.
Running saved something in me
There was one thing I did after 9/11 that changed the direction of my life.
I quit smoking.
And I started running.
At first, I ran because I needed to clear my head from the poison.
I started running at the track.
Then I ran around the Hudson River.
I ran through parks.
I kept going.
And eventually, it became a habit.
There was something about running that helped me process what I was carrying.
It helped me breathe.
It helped me sleep.
It helped quiet the anger.
It gave my body somewhere to put all that energy.
For me, running became part of my recovery.
I don’t mean that running magically cured trauma. It didn’t.
But it gave me something I could control.
One foot in front of the other.
Keep breathing.
Keep moving.
Keep going.
I eventually joined a gym and stayed with exercise for the next twenty-five years. I’ve remained active three to six days a week for much of that time. Now I swim 2k 5 days per week.
Looking back, I realise that running wasn’t just exercise.
It became one of the ways I survived all of that trauma and processed all of the toxins.
Twenty-five years later
There are parts of September 11 that I remember with extraordinary clarity.
The people standing on top of a car, pointing toward the World Trade Center.
I remember the iced coffee.
Walking toward Wall Street because I needed my paycheck.
The crowds on Fulton Street.
The force of the first tower collapsing.
The darkness.
The couple kissing in the stairwell.
Standing alone when the second tower came down.
The Italian woman who gave me a sandwich and somewhere safe to sit.
And the extraordinary kindness of strangers helping one another throughout New York.
But I also remember returning to work.
The ash, the ruined coffee shop, the endless cleaning and the feeling that we were expected to carry on as though nothing had happened.
I sometimes wonder how different my life might have been if I’d taken another route to work, stayed in bed a little longer or decided that collecting my paycheck could wait another day.
But there’s little point dwelling on those possibilities.
I survived, and I’ve spent much of the past twenty-five years learning how to live with what happened.
Some things have improved enormously. Others remain difficult.
I still struggle with sleep, and occasionally a memory returns with such force that it feels as though very little time has passed.
I don’t think September 11 is something I’ll ever completely put behind me.
Thousands of people never made it home that day, and countless others have lived with the consequences ever since.
I was fortunate enough to walk away.
But walking away and leaving something behind are two very different things.
Perhaps that’s why I wanted to write this story.
Not to make a grand statement about courage or resilience, but simply to explain what happened to me, what came afterward and why it still matters.
September 11 was the day New York stopped.
For some of us, a part of that day never really ended.
**And I will never forget.** 🗽❤️
Photo: Kelly Guenther for The New York Times
