Pieces of the buildings steadily peeled away into the late summer sky. Some plummeted to the ground. Others gently floated downward, almost poetically. But the vicious fire raged and continued to consume the skyscrapers. The crowd remained mostly calm and quiet, transfixed by the unholy image of these most majestic buildings slowly incinerating, as well as by, I am sure, their own private thoughts of dismay and confusion. I tried to keep myself from speculating about the human cost. How many people were in the building--on the floors that were hit? How many were able to escape? What was the evacuation like right now? I thought about the people that I was to meet and wondered if they had been evacuated from their building nearby. Some of my associates were travelling from Westchester and I tried to remember if they were planning to drive or come by train and hoped that they were safe and not caught up in the frenzy that was surely the scene closer to ground zero. Our meeting was to have begun just about now: 10 o'clock.
Then the unimaginable happened. As if in slow motion, the upper part of the South tower began to collapse. A deep rumbling could be heard as some twenty or thirty of the uppermost floors compressed with only the slightest tilt to the east. It seemed as if the steel framework, weakened by the blast and the fire, simply gave out. In the first second or two, my mind raced with hope that the top would simply fall away. But with a quickening pace the building literally melted beneath the weight of its upper third. In seconds, smoke and dust plumed upward and the tower disappeared. The rumble of its destruction increased in volume and pitch and a collective gasp arose from the crowd. Cries and wails quickly followed.
In great haste, but still without panic, the crowd followed police on foot and in vehicles as they retreated uptown on the avenue, escaping from a huge wall of smoke and dust some 10 to 15 stories high that gasped forth in the street canyons north of the tower. As I glanced left and right on the cross streets, I saw hundreds of people doing the same on avenues to the west and east. I stopped two blocks north, close to Franklin Street now, and looked back. The North tower stood alone, debris filled the air and smoke and dust reached up from behind the building to the extreme south of West Broadway, where there was surely nothing but rubble and death now. How many, I wondered, of those firefighters and policemen who had sped bravely into ground zero for more than the last hour, had been caught in the collapse? Hundreds, for certain. A wave of nausea overcame me and I gasped for breath that I could not find. Tears welled in my eyes. This was not to be believed. It could not be happening. And yet I knew that it was far too real.
I remained numbly in place as people streamed by me heading uptown. Women and men cried openly or shouted invectives. "Lord help us. Lord help us", said one woman who was weak and wobbly and would have collapsed but for the support of two companions. In contrast, "Now we'll see; Now we'll get them; Now we'll see," one man repeated over and over as he marched in a brisk long-stepped pace, a tight and tense grimace on his face. As if he had stumbled into a sporting event late, a middle-aged Asian man asked me in halting English: "The small tower, it fell down?" "Yes," I answered, not bothering to correct him or to explain the optical illusion that led him to believe the towers were of different height. It no longer seemed relevant.
But mostly the crowd was silent. And they trouped uptown, somber with their personal thoughts as if refugees leaving a war-ravaged village. For all practical purposes, they were.
I continued to redial my cell phone, hoping to get through to my wife, my office, and my colleagues who worked downtown near Battery Park. Nothing. My eyes stayed glued to the remaining tower and I wondered if it too was doomed. I hoped not. But I feared that it was. Fighter jets occasionally passed overhead. A helicopter--I could not tell if it was a news or police aircraft--danced dangerously close to the flaming tower. The smoke was getting thicker and more voluminous. It seemed to be pouring more heavily from the top of the building and I guessed that the roof was now breached. I hoped and prayed I would not see any humans leap or be thrown from the building. And yet, I could not turn away.
Like black, bilious blood pouring from a mortal wound, a huge cloud of dark smoke suddenly belched from the triangular gash in the North building. It was clear that the second tower was going down. The huge gleaming communications tower above the 110th floor had remained visible all morning like a brave, war-torn standard, despite the smoke. Now, it tilted to the left for a moment, and then sank into the smoke as a ship's mast might surrender to the waves at sea. A sickeningly familiar whoosh and rumble, the signal of a skyscraper consuming itself, was repeated. The semi-solid smoke and dust arose in a fountain-like spray, arcing like the leaves of a hideous giant gray houseplant. The smoky cloud reached ever higher as the building's mass seemingly evaporated below. One long steel pillar remained erect momentarily. I rooted for it as a symbol of survival, a sign that all was not lost, that the destruction I had incomprehensibly witnessed in little more than an hour would be less than complete. Then the steel beam wavered, collapsed and was gone. It was 10:30 am.
I looked on. But where the sky once had been punctured with two glorious landmarks of New York's grandeur and glory, there was only air. Dirty, tomblike air. Emptiness filled my view. I bowed my head and turned to walk north, joining the throng in sad silence.
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