25 Years After 9/11: World Trade Center Remembrances

“That’s going to be a good one,” said the photographer “The World Trade Center is in the background!”

There was no way of knowing then that the photo Glen Davis was shooting would be among the very last ever taken of the World Trade Center at night.

I was standing on the aft deck of the Forbes yacht, The Highlander on Sept. 10, 2001 with my wife, Pat Walsh. It was a three-hour media cruise and when the Forbes brothers, who at the time still owned the magazine and the yacht, heard it was my birthday as we headed back to the dock at Chelsea Piers, they had their bagpiper play “Happy Birthday” and let me pick out a big Churchill from a cedar cigar box while my wife sipped a nice cabernet. Davis happily snapped our smiling photo.

When Davis viewed the photo the next day, he was stunned. “It was as surreal as surreal could be,” he said in an interview on Sept. 4 this year.

For awhile we thought that evening would be the last happy time on earth for a good long time. In many ways, it was. You think that 25 years after 9-11, you are emotionally over it. And then you hear a new story, and it brings a tear to your eye and breaks your heart all over again.

We were fortunate that nobody in our innermost circle of family or friends perished. Still, in my mind, it replaced the deaths of President John F. Kennedy and Senator Robert F. Kennedy in a central sad spot in my heart.

As a journalist, I stopped writing the Media Ink column for the NY Post for weeks and worked full time on 9-11 stories. The day after, I finally convined my editors to let me head into the frozen zone around Ground Zero. The Post ran my column in the next day’s paper, “Painful Return to the Gates of Hell.” It would be Sept. 24, nearly two weeks after the attack, before the Post ran a cover that was not connected to 9-11 events.

I remember seeing Michael Daly of the Daily News, exhausted after spending the night there. He’d go on to write a biography of Father Mychal Judge, “The Book of Mychal” about the Fire Department chaplain Fr. Mychal Judge who died in the North Tower. He recalled that when he first heard the news, his knees buckled. I don’t know if he knew yet that a long time friend, legendary firefighter, Patrick Browne had also perished. The Stuy Town fire captain today has a memorial on the East River. His role in a rope roof rescue captured on video at a Times Square fire in 1991 is taught in the Fire Academy to this day.

For photojournalist Peter Foley, it was a day that saw him loose trusted friends even after it turned his career around. He was a late vocation to photography after first plying the streets of New York as a chauffeur for the likes of Jack Nicholson. To jump start his career, he got permission to move into the firehouse of Engine Company 54, Ladder 4, Battalion 9 on the west side at Eight Ave. and West 48 Street and was there for the better part of a year before 9-11. “They were a great group of guys who had a genuine commitment to do a hard job,” recalled Foley.

On the morning of 9-11, 15 firefighters from the house answered the “all hands” bell after the North Tower was hit at 8:46 a.m. None of them survived. It would be the house with the most casualties on a day when 343 firefighters, racing toward the towers while others fled, would perish.

Among those killed from that tragic house was Carl Asaro, Sr. Today four of his six children followed their dad into the FDNY. Three sons, Carl Jr., Matt and Marc, are stationed at firehouses in Manhattan. His daughter Rebecca is stationed in the very house where her father served his last shift.

Carl Asaro Sr., in the parlance of the FDNY was “doing a mutual.” He was supposed to be off, but swapped with a firefighter who needed the day off.

“I know my dad’s with me,” Rebecca said in Scholastic News entitled “Our Dad, Our Hero“ published earlier this month. “It brings me a lot of pride and honor to know that I’m literally walking in my dad’s footsteps.”

Foley showed up at the firehouse recently delivering to Rebecca the treasure trove of photos he had amassed of firefighters in action battling fires as well as relaxing around the firehouse, horsing around, ordering sandwiches, cooking communal meals in the weeks and months he was there before the tragic day. He jokingly recalled, that firefighters are great cooks. “I gained 20 pounds the year I was living here,” he told her.

And he also had a clipping of a story I had written for the Post back then, about the last firefighter to be laid to rest from another tragic house, the elite Squad One in Park Slope Brooklyn where all 12 who answered the call died. I remembered giving a nod to Foley in the graveyard the day of the funeral for Thomas Butler, married 14 years to his wife Martha and the dad of three young kids. In the graveyard, I ran into firefighter Hugh Lynch, a family connection I knew, a cousin to my first cousins on the O’Connell side. He was spared because he was on the opposite end of a “mutual” at Squad One. A friend needed Sunday off, so Lynch agreed to swap and give up his Tuesday shift.

And now in the graveyard, Lynch was a pallbearer for a firefighter brother. “I always hoped I’d never have to go to one of these,” he told me that day. “and now I’ve been to 12.” Lynch stayed on the job and retired as a Captain.

The sacrifice of first responders is well chronicled. In addition to the 343 firefighters, there were 23 NYPD officers, 37 officers of the Port Authority Police Department. Another 11 or 12 federal officers also died. One of those killed was former top FBI guy John O’Neill, who had been the chief expert on Osama bin Laden before being forced out after four decades. He was the subject of terrific book by Murry Weiss “The Man Who Warned America: The Life and Death of John O’Neill, the FBI’s Embattled Counterterror Warrior.”

Civilian casualties were enormous. Cantor Fitzgerald lost 653 employees that day, the most civilian casualties suffered by any company. Nearly 1,000 children lost a parent and 38 women became widows that fateful day. A new book was recently released entitled, The Families: 9/11 Anthology of Love, Loss and Lessons of Resilience,” a collection of 176 personal essays, poems and letters.

Insurance giant Marsh & McLennan lost 295 employees and another 63 consultants at the WTC that day. “So many lives were lost, but we remember them not because they died, but of what they did right before their lives were cut short,” say a memorial plaque on the Sixth Ave. HQ where the company moved.

Time marches on, but after 25 years it has not healed all wounds and probably never will. “To me it will always feel like yesterday,” said Foley.

Still there is a resiliency that came through even in the early days after the attack and continues to this day. The St. Paul Chapel at Trinity Church became a staging ground and resting place for first responders. Thousands of letters from school kids across the country and the world poured in and some are on display today. “I hope it never happens again. Thank You,” read one letter in child’s block lettering. A huge handmade banner from Oklahoma thanking first responders hangs from the choir loft to this day. “Thank you first responders...Oklahoma loves you.”

The St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church was destroyed when the South Tower collapsed on 9-11, but was reopened in 2022 after a two decade rebuilding effort. Designed by architect Santiago Calatrava, the new shrine now sits on a bluff ovelooking the Trade Center memorial pools and of course was the scene of a 9-11 memorial event this year.

The World Trade Center itself took eight years to rebuild and opened on Nov. 3, 2014 reaching 104 stories and 1,776 ft. tall. Its height marked the year the Declaration of Independence was signed and the United States was born. The Perelman Center for the Performing Art, a cultural center at its base, opened Sept, 19, 2023.

I’ve watched my own family grow. On 9-11, we could see the Twin Towers first burning and then collapsing from the south facing windows of our neighbors’ Stuyvesant Town apartment. The neighbors, Lydia and Louie, were the sitters for the kids growing up but they were almost like built in grandparents, older and wiser. My oldest son Ruairi, was about to turn four years old and my second son Luke, about to turn two, were watching. Ruairi said of all the days that he remembers from his youth, that is the first one he recalls vividly to this day.

The day of 9-11, my wife was already at her job, an R.N. at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Hospital and it was she who first called to alert me that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. Everyone on first hearing it figured a civilian pilot maybe flying a Cessna had a heart attack or veered off course. Once the second plane hit the South Tower 19 minutes later, everyone knew instantly we were under a terrorist attack.

In the first responder world, they were expecting ultimately that there were going to be tens of thousands of casualties. All medical personnel at every hospital in Manhattan was told they were on duty for the next 24 hours straight. Sloan Kettering had no emergency room, but patients from nearby hospitals were rolling in--anyone that was mobile enough to be moved. The idea was to clear bed space in hospitals equipped for triage with emergency operating rooms. But casualties never came. Either you found a way out through the dust and chaos or you died. There was no in between.

Eventually that night, the doctors and nurses were told they could go home. When the final death toll was tallied, 2,753 perished at the WTC out of the 2,996 who perished from the three terrorist attacks.

In the early days, with body recovery being hard, the unaccounted for at the WTC were classified only as “missing.” The heartbreaking photos appeared on supermarkets bulletin boards, in posters in Union Square and at the Lexington Ave. Armory, where the grim task of getting DNA samples from the “missing” was taking place, trying to match personal markers to fragments of body parts. There were photos of kids with questions: “Have you seen my daddy?’ or a young woman’s face under the headline: “missing.” Each one would break your heart, because you know that eventually the missing would be declared deceased. And so many who perished left behind young families. And to this day, some were never found.

It seems everyone in the city eventually knew of someone who had perished in the attack. Sadly the death toll kept mounting from 9-11 related diseases in the years since. Today, they estimate 9,000 people have died from 9-11 related illnesses, three times the number that died in the attacks at the WTC, the Pentagon and a field in Shakeville, PA, where passengers breached the cockpit and forced Flight 93 to crash before it could reach Washington D.C.

Our own family was spared close encounters with death, but it still cast a long shadow that plays out to this day. Our oldest son Ruairi realized his lifelong ambition and became a firefighter nearly five years ago and also became a United States Marine officer. He’s in the reserves now and is getting called to active duty for nearly 12 months next year, only a few months after he marries his very understanding fiancé Lauren. Our next son Luke, an EMT who served in the South Bronx is on the promotion list for the FDNY. On 9/11, he got an email extending a “job offer” to join the FDNY. A third of the people alive in the United States today were born after the 9-11 attacks and that includes my youngest son Eamon, born the year after the towers fell. And his hope is to follow his brothers into the larger brotherhood of the FDNY.

For Pat and myself, we’ll probably worry every day. And of course, we could not be prouder.