Wednesday 12 September
I called into my office voicemail and learned my company was closed for the day. I walked out to head uptown to go to where I'm going to school (the School of Visual Arts for a Masters in Fine Art in Photography). As I cross 14th Street and the police checkpoints it struck me how noisy it had suddenly become. Cars were banned only below 14th Street and the city sounded somewhat more normal. School was also closed.

Lisa and I wanted to find some normalcy in the city so we went roller blading on the river. We found hundreds of people lining the West Side Highway waving flags signs and cheering and clapping whenever a construction truck or police car or ambulance came by. I guess people just had to do something, anything they could.

When we passed the Chelsea Piers sports complex we saw fifty or so ambulances from all over New York and New Jersey, lined up waiting. We heard they didn't need anymore volunteers unless you were medical personnel.

Later that day the wind shifted and for the first time you could smell the fires. It smelled a bit like burning plastic. The plume went all the way uptown over the Empire State Building.
We went back down to Tribeca to meet Lisa's friend and people had started posting signs all over looking for their missing family members. One of Lisa's friends told her how he took an early train into the city and there were still cars at the station parking lot in Connecticut of people who never returned home the night before.
At a certain point going south all the street lights were out and the city was quiet and dark. All you could see was the glow of high powered lights closer to what the television stations were calling "ground zero."
Cars were covered with ashes, dust and debris.
We walked south until we came across military guards. Always that weird glow where the towers once stood.
Walking back north across Canal Street and up Sixth Avenue we came across a hundred or so pieces of heavy construction equipment parked three across, waiting to go in.

When I got home and checked my e-mail I found lots of people were searching for photos of the towers before they were destroyed and came across my website. Lots of kind e-mail and guestbook signings and I decided to add some of these photos to the story.

I caught up on the latest by channel surfing the 20 or so channels with 24 hour coverage and I got to watch first hand how any news story could snowball... flipping channels I saw a new image of some smoke coming out of one the World Financial Center towers, with the news crew saying they were alerting the authorities. Flipping channels I saw that one-by-one almost every channel was soon displaying the exact same image. Then word came back that it was the exhaust from emergency generators in the roof and just as quickly every channel moved onto something else.
To Thurs 9/13
Back to Tues 9/11
Back to Cityscapes