The weekend before the planes crashed into the twin towers, I had driven my car to New York City to see a friends photography exhibit at a gallery in Chelsea. The original plan was to stay a few days longer and spend some time taking pictures around the city....something I had been doing since college days.
Uninspired for some reason, and called back for work, I drove home the morning of September 10th. The next morning all hell broke loose, and till this day I wonder about the big "what if"? What if I had stayed, what if I had been there to document it, and experience the unfathomable events that unfolded on a clear sunny morning in September?
There are so many stories from that day that have become a part of the collective conscience of our country. Some narratives are horrific and sensational, others speak to the randomness of an ordinary day, interrupted by an extraordinary event. Below is one such story,written by photographer/educator Vincent Cianni, who was on his way to work at Parsons The New School for Design the morning of September 11th.
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| © tom stoye |
On September 11, 2001, I remember going into the subway at Bedford Ave on a beautiful fall day, sun shining, heading to Manhattan to teach my Senior Seminar at Parsons School of Design at 9am. It was 8:30. When I came above ground at 8:50, people were standing around in shock, looking south with a direct view of the first tower billowing smoke, wondering what happened. I ran up to my classroom, ushered my students back down to the street, thinking that a small twin engine plane accidentally hit the WTC. As we stood there in disbelief, the second plane hit a little after 9am and our lives were changed forever. Confusion, fear, disorientation, shock and a need to be close by each other.
I had four exchange students from London in my class. I had facilitated them coming over to study. They had just gotten an apartment 2 blocks from the towers the week before. 3 of the 4 students were came to class that morning, the fourth remained at home not feeling well. The three stood shaking, not knowing what may have happened to her and not able to contact their parents via cell phone. As a matter of fact no one could make calls. It was as though we were cut off from the world in a surreal movie. By that time, people who had been at the WTC when the first plane hit were running past us at Union Square, three miles north of the Financial District, covered with white ash like ghosts running out of middle earth. They didn't look at anyone, they didn't stop, and their faces were frozen in a silent scream, much like Edvard Munch's The Scream. Some of the students ran into the subway with intentions of getting as close as possible, cameras in tow. Others ran south on foot. From 5th Avenue and also from University Place the towers always stood in view, seemingly like a school crossing guard. We stood watching the first tower silently crumble in slow motion. Nothing we had experienced before helped in understanding what was going on.
It took 8 hours to get across the Williamsburg Bridge back to Brooklyn because we didn’t want to leave Manhattan. A sense of community and commitment, yet powerlessness set in. The rest of the day and for days afterwards the images of people falling from the towers played relentlessly on television, were printed in newspapers and magazines and were seared into our memories. I couldn't help but think how brave they were to choose dying in that way rather than being consumed by fire or buried in rubble. Not to say that those decisions were any less heroic. Many stories of heroism surfaced and continue to do so.
I now had three homeless, scared and somewhat manic students from London that were now my complete responsibility for the next three weeks. They camped out at my loft and we tried for days to contact their friend. She ended up being ok.
Life was turned upside down for months but certainly for the next three weeks as hundreds of people took turns standing vigil and communing with each other at Grand Street Park on the East River. It offered no answers, no purpose for what had happened, but a slight feeling of safety being with each other as we were watching the smoke rise from the ruins. Everything had shut down. People supported each other. I volunteered at the rescue center on the West Side Highway.
I was teaching a class today and we were talking about the essay Sense of Place, in a book called 10 Geographic Ideas that Changed the World. It discusses how we relate to our environment and identify with its ecology, how we find our place in the world and in the community. I also brought up Milan Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, where he describes how a nation’s identity is embodied in its buildings and institutions, books and culture, and photographs. The two most distinguishing symbols of American identity - capitalism and military might - were attacked that day. The people who flew the planes were well aware of this. Our memories were wiped clean. But our resilience endured. New buildings replaced the towers. And even though they are gone, they will never be forgotten.
Some of us were not so lucky. This became painfully clear when I was walking up Park Avenue near 22nd Street a few weeks later still in a daze, still disoriented. I unknowingly walked into an area cordoned off by police. I heard people yelling across the street, but wasn't aware they were yelling at me. As I reached the middle of the block, a woman's body landed on the pavement with a thud six feet in front of me. Police ran up, grabbed me and ushered me away. She had jumped because she was despondent losing someone in the towers. I realized it was not only people in the towers who died that day. A piece of us died. A piece of me died again.
Vincent Cianni
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