911 by The Guardian

Author:The Guardian [Guardian, The]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: 9/11, World Trade Center, September 11, World Trade Centre, World Trade Center Series: Guardian Shorts
ISBN: 9780852652640
Publisher: Guardian Books

The first

anniversary

A brief history of time

How the US remembered 9/11

12 September 2002

8.46am: American Airlines flight 11, from Boston, crashes into the north tower of the World Trade Center

When the silence finally came, it felt like much less than a minute – but then, said Joe Colon, a firefighter from the Upper West Side, it had felt like much less than a year. “It all went too fast for me,” Colon said. “A year? It’s unbelievable.” He took off his baseball cap and held it against his heart, like most of his colleagues gathered in a chainlink pen overlooking Ground Zero, but something about that must have felt awkward. Moments later, he put it back on his head.

“It might have been all right if it was a hurricane or something,” he said suddenly, as respectful murmurs of conversation began to resume around him and bells began to peal across the city. “Everybody has to die. But like that? In that way?”

The streets around what New Yorkers now call the Pit had been bustling since 5.30am, and by the time the sun rose at 6.15 – on a day that would prove as warm and as bright as last year, only hazier – thousands of people packed the narrow sidewalks. Clusters of police officers, apparently unprepared for the numbers, experimented with varying arrangements of crowd barriers, herding people backwards and forwards repeatedly, but nobody seemed to mind: all morning, the sight of a uniform was the cue for applause.

A man with a large wooden crucifix on his shoulders strode purposefully up and down Church Street. At the corner of Cortlandt Street, all eyes were on Mitch Mitchell, a white-bearded machinist from South Carolina, and the companion he had brought to the memorial: a mannequin of Osama bin Laden in a glossy black coffin that he had converted into a trailer attached to his motorbike.

“Took me three days. I carved it out of cedar,” he explained as two visiting British policemen stopped to shake his hand.

And then at 8.44 the service began, as the amplified nasal tones of Michael Bloomberg boomed across the empty expanse from a podium to the west. “Again today we are a nation that mourns,” the mayor said. “Again today we take into our hearts and minds those who perished on this site one year ago.”

Then came the silence, and then, over the ethereal sound of a solo cello, Rudolph Giuliani walked up to the microphone and began to read the names. “Gordon A ... Aamoth,” he said, pausing to consider how to pronounce the unfamiliar name, as he would throughout the reading, picking up speed with the more familiar ones. “Edelmiro Abad. Maria Rose Abad. Andrew Anthony Abate. Vincent Abate ...”

Sixty blocks uptown, Mark Lambert, a midtown office worker, looked on astonished at the empty quiet of Times Square. “It’s never this quiet round here,” he said, as the busy intersection fell briefly into silence. A sombre crowd gathered to watch TV relays of the ceremonies, and the famous ticker tape read simply: “New York Remembers .

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