City in the Sky by James Glanz

Author:James Glanz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

9

9/11: The Collapse

Field: Battalion 1 to Manhattan.

Dispatch: Battalion 1.

F: We just had a plane crash into upper floors of the World Trade Center. Transmit a second alarm and start relocating companies into the area.

D: Ten-four, Battalion 1.

F: Battalion 1 is also sending the whole assignment on this box to that area, K.

—Message in FDNY dispatcher’s log, beginning at 8:46 A.M. and forty-three seconds on September 11, 2001

Guy Tozzoli guided his black Mercedes sedan past a jumble of swaybacked old warehouses and manicured condominium developments on the back streets of Hoboken, New Jersey, winding his way toward the Holland Tunnel. He drove under a rusty train bridge held up by riveted steel braces and past an old brick post office building with tiled parapets and a big watertower on top. Over the years Tozzoli had figured out how to cut to the front of the ten-block line of traffic at the tunnel, shaving a few minutes off the journey through New Jersey, beneath the Hudson River, and into Lower Manhattan from his home in North Bergen. Tozzoli, at seventy-nine, was still a restless fireplug of a man who firmly believed that there was a workaround for every problem, and his daily commute was no exception. This shortcut took him down Jersey Avenue, between two Port Authority buildings dedicated to uninspiring roadway materials like concrete and asphalt, and straight toward the Holland Tunnel plaza near the tollbooths.

On this particular September morning, Tozzoli, looking sharp in a blue business suit and red tie, was running a bit behind schedule. He had left at his usual 7 A.M., driven south down the New Jersey Turnpike, but as he was about to exit onto Route 3, a bus accident brought traffic to a standstill for forty-five minutes. Naturally Tozzoli had made good use of the time. His radio was off, the windows of his car were up, the air-conditioning was running, and he was all but oblivious to the cloudless seventy-degree morning outside. But his briefcase was open on the beige leather of the passenger seat as he punched numbers into a dial pad and spoke toward a microphone on his rearview mirror to business colleagues in Hong Kong, Paris, and New York. Once the traffic had cleared and he zigzagged his way to Jersey Avenue, Tozzoli realized that if he hustled, he could still be on time for a nine o’clock meeting at his seventy-seventh-floor office in the north tower, with its lovely views north toward the Empire State Building and the other Midtown skyscrapers.

Every morning, more than forty thousand people went to work in the trade center. These days, only one of them—Guy Tozzoli—could truly say that he had created it. Austin Tobin was gone. Mal Levy was gone, having died suddenly in 1980 after pleading guilty to padding his expense accounts. Ray Monti, the trade center’s construction chief, had died just a few months before this crystalline morning. Once, before his fellow builders had passed on, Tozzoli had wanted to make an even bigger mark on the region where his agency’s power was centered.

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