When The Chronicle hit campus bins the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, headlines about recent Oak Room renovations and hotel tax increases greeted Econ students as they left class.
About the same time, more troubling reports began to pop up that a plane had flown into the World Trade Center. The minutes passed, the story unraveled and, sooner than anyone could have imagined, Sept. 11, 2001 became that infamous date without a year--"9/11."
Four-hundred-and-some-odd miles away, I made the three-block trek from the 86th St. subway station to my high school in New York City. I finished up some chemistry homework and scrambled up the four flights of stairs to my 8:40 a.m. theology class. Twelve minutes passed, and then a rumbling rumor began to surge that things might be a little different from now on.
The next morning, The Chronicle's headline encapsulated the thoughts of a campus in mourning and addressed the one thought on everyone's mind: "DAY OF TERROR." I stayed home from school and tried to make sense of something that didn't make any sense at all.
My father said he was playing football near the Elmhurst, Queens gas tanks when he heard that JFK was shot. He was 10 years old, and he was wearing a red Giants jersey. He says he remembers every minute of that day.
When I talk to my friends from high school, they can recount every minute of the hours--and then days--when smoke filled the oddly empty Manhattan skyline. It was, after all, the biggest event of our generation. Still is.
But then I draw this strange blank. And, when I try to put things together from that day, the memories are at best jumbled.
Sure, I remember going back to homeroom and jerry-rigging a TV just in time to see the second tower fall. I remember frantically running though the list of all my uncles, aunts and cousins who worked near Ground Zero. It's an Irish-Catholic family--needless to say, there were a lot of names to scroll through.
I remember how bizarre it was to see people walking their dogs in the middle of Park Avenue since no cars were allowed in the city, and I recall how futile it was to try to call parents, let alone get reception. I certainly remember the F-14s roaring overhead and the muffled hearsay that our dean had pulled one of the freshman out of a history class to tell him some bad news. Luckily, it was just a rumor.
But, honestly, I don't remember much more. I have no idea what I was wearing or what I ate for breakfast that morning. I went home, and I watched CNN with the rest of the country.
For me, the picture starts to come together that night of Sept. 11, when our neighbor knocked on the door, still in his business suit. He was wearing a blue shirt that was un-tucked, and his tie was loosened. "I was working down there. I was in the building, but I got out," he said with a strange kind of excitement-riding this odd rush. He was okay, his family was okay and, for that moment, that's what mattered. I remember that.
And I remember commuting into the city the next morning--coming from Westchester county and heading past Yankee Stadium, as I had every day since I was five. But this time, I remember gawking at a blank, smoldering space in the heart of the Manhattan skyline. Things had moved on, the newspaper headlines had changed and, it turns out, things weren't quite the same anymore. Sept. 11 had become the event of our generation in a matter of hours.
It took me four years to go down to Ground Zero, and when I did, I made the biggest mistake a New Yorker can make--I asked for directions. "Just look for the big empty space," a police officer told me. Empty space has a way of standing out in New York City. This past weekend, I found myself going back through The Chronicle's bound volumes--back to the fall months of 2001. I found The Chronicle's Sept. 12 issue.
In total, about five hours separate the time when a motley crew of editors put The Chronicle to bed every night and the time when the papers hit one of 120 distribution bins on campus. But in those five hours, that morning of Sept. 11, a campus and a nation had changed entirely. Years have an odd way of erasing hours, and of blurring details in a wave of abstractions.
Five years removed from Sept. 11, The Chronicle shares remembrances of the details of that day without a year that has become so much a part of our country, and of this generation.
Ryan McCartney is a Trinity junior and editor of The Chronicle.
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.