As I see it | I was there when the sky fell
The No.2 train slowed to a halt. Inside the subway car, the overhead florescent lights went out for a moment and flickered back to life. The middle-aged Caucasian man standing next to me heaved an impatient sigh, bemoaning the frequent interruptions of an antiquated transport system.
The No.2 train slowed to a halt. Inside the subway car, the overhead florescent lights went out for a moment and flickered back to life. The middle-aged Caucasian man standing next to me heaved an impatient sigh, bemoaning the frequent interruptions of an antiquated transport system. Suddenly the train doors parted and the crackling PA system issued a dispassionate instruction: An emergency has been reported in Lower Manhattan, all passengers must exit now.
I climbed two flights of stairs and came out of the 14th Street station. It was one of those beautiful September mornings in New York. Cloudless blue skies and a few falling leaves. I looked to the south and there it was, the reason why my train had stopped: plumes of heavy smoke were billowing out of the World Trade Center.
I walked into a nearby Citibank branch to find out what had happened. “Some fool flew their plane right into the building, sweetheart,” the heavyset African American woman paraphrased what she had heard from the radio. In my head I had this image of a spoiled brat flying daddy's biplane and accidentally slamming it into a building.
Now what am I supposed to do with my plane ticket? I grumbled to myself as I tried to call Mei Lin to cancel our lunch. My friend and I were supposed to meet up on Wall Street after I finished my errand at the American Airlines ticketing office at the WTC. But my cell phone had no signal. It wasn’t my day.
By the time I walked out of the bank onto the streets, one of the Twin Towers was gone and the other one was burning furiously. Convinced that it was just the angle that put one tower behind the other, I walked from one side of Seventh Avenue to the other to get a different vantage point. That’s when I noticed that every car as far as the eye could see had stopped, and the drivers were all standing in the middle of the streets listening to the car radio.
Approximately an hour ago, two commercial airliners crashed into the World Trade Center. The South Tower has collapsed, casualties unknown at this point. The somber newscaster at WCBS announced.