Finally, someone told me that a plane had crashed into the building. My immediate assessment was that the pilot must have had a heart attack and lost control of the plane. There was no other information. The second plane slammed into the 80th floor of the South Tower at 9:03am, practically severing the building in two, but I have no recollection of it. Precious minutes passed while the Port Authority police were trying to find the safest stairwell for us to exit. Next to me sat a man, bleeding from a head wound, who wanted to talk to his wife. I offered him my hand wipes for the wound and tried to find a working phone so he could speak with his wife, but the situation was deteriorating. The fire above would soon make its way down and time was running out before our floor would be enveloped in flames.
The Port Authority officer who brought us to 64 stood up on a desk and announced that he had been talking to someone on his Walkie-Talkie. “Everyone stay put,” he yelled. “We are waiting for instructions about when to descend into the stairwell. As soon as I get those instructions, we will leave.” He was emphatic about waiting for someone to tell us when we could leave and which stairwell was safe. Waiting for instructions was too risky and our CEO instinctively knew it was a bad idea. He acted immediately, corralling all 17 of us. “We’re not waiting – let’s go!” I assumed everyone was leaving because I never heard the Port Authority officer. I was in the other room with the injured fellow sitting next to me “Time to leave” I told him, helping him up. He seemed dazed, but able to walk. We left and some stayed.
As we move toward the exit, I filled up two paper cups with water and wet several paper towels to protect us from the smoke. I was uplifted by the act of leaving and moving down the stairwell. As long as we kept moving, I began to believe we would get out alive. As we started down the stairwell in apprehension, fear replaced naiveté. A dark, ominous rumble vibrated intermittently like a freight train from somewhere in the building. It was the shudder of the steel infrastructure in its final death throes as it melted away and weakened from the fire’s intensity. It would soon abandon its shell and us. The smell was of fuel, strange and intense. We had descended into a sombre, surreal atmosphere where a silent but palpable unspoken bond of compassion across age, gender and race had become apparent. No panic, no screaming, just tacit fear and the will to help each other. Perhaps it emerged from the brain’s primitive directive to clear out and marshal every possible means for survival through cooperation.
This image above portrays just a very small percentage of poor souls that lost there lives on 11th September 2001..
Perhaps it was rooted in some deeper spiritual knowledge or need for connection in the face of death, as a final human gesture of love. The person next to me was no longer the man from the 64th floor. I never saw him again that day and cannot recall where he was in the stairwell. I was now next to a woman wearing very high heels, carrying a large backpack on her back and weighed down by two heavy shopping bags full of books. A bizarre and somewhat humorous vision in such a tenuous situation. Like me, her purse was slung around her neck and shoulders, freeing our hands to carry other things. I asked her why she was carrying such heavy bags and she told me that her books were important to her. It was hard for me to picture someone in our situation going through bookcases in search of favorite books, then carefully placing them in shopping bags after a plane has nearly blown up the building and was immediately enveloped in fire, but she too probably didn’t know that at the time. I fled with just my purse, heart pounding, with labored breath. It did not even occur to me to take a favorite photo sitting on my desk of my daughter. I didn’t know I would never again see that picture of her again.
58th Floor, North Tower - 1974
As we advanced ahead of our CEO’s group by one flight, I approached a very large man in obvious distress sitting on the stairs with an open briefcase on his lap, red-faced and sweating profusely, trying to make a call on his cell phone. I stopped and asked if he was ok. He told me he was not, so I offered him my cup of water, which he accepted and it, threw it on his face, in an attempt to cool down. I then offered to get help, as I was not big or strong enough to assist a man of that size, who appeared disabled at this point. He didn’t want me to help or get help and told me that I should “keep going, don’t stop”. As I looked back at him while descending, others who stopped and asked if they could do anything for him were also refused. We continued down, walking around him, leaving him behind, but I later learned he was given CPR to no avail. I have often thought about him.
By now, up on the higher floors, a cremation of living souls proceeded as the fire overtook and engulfed the entire upper half of the North Tower. They were at their desks at work, in meetings, at the conference we decided not to attend, or at the Windows on the World restaurant when struck. Doomed on the floors above the fire and with no safe exits, they experienced their final hour and forty-five minutes of life valiantly trying to survive the unspeakable horror about to eclipse them forever, disappearing them into tiny bits of ash and bone that would sit in the Fresh Kills garbage dump on Staten Island for almost 10 years, at times intermingled with household waste, and from which their bereaved families would never get closure.
The wreckage of the World Trade Center attack in New York. | Jim Bourg/ Reuters - Only 20 people were pulled from the pile alive, These people survived because the building collapsed around them and buried them in an air pocket, They were very lucky to have survived.. Any one above floor 13 and higher died instantly from severe blunt force trauma.. The final survivor, Port Authority secretary Genelle Guzman-McMillan, was rescued 27 hours after the collapse of the North Tower.
Genelle Guzman-McMillan
They would be gone in every sense. Their desperate attempts to reach their loved ones are memorialised in the ether of 2001, in their email and phone messages and in the pictures and films of their silent hands poignantly waving out of broken windows as they valiantly waited for the firefighters whose radios didn’t work and other rescuers who died trying to get to them, to the shock of those helplessly watching from the street below, on TV and the loved ones who held on to them on the phone until the end. Those who hadn’t already been massacred by the suicide terrorists were in the final stages of their own holocaust and for some, their own suicides. Like Masada, but rather than death by immolation, some would choose death by jumping 105 stories into the arms of their god, including Allah.
Genelle Guzman McMillan in the hospital after 9/11 - CREDIT: PAUL CHIASSON/AP
This picture is believed to be of an office worker called Edna Cintron, She is standing in the impact hole 97th Floor North Tower.. The distressed woman is waving for help and trying to catch the attention of anyone on the ground below.
Edna Cintron - Please Click on image for a video of Edna Cintron waving for help - Warning distressing footage of people jumping to there deaths..
And for the survivors, the sight of the gruesome carnage on the plate glass windows, in the plaza, the lobby and elsewhere endures in our memories and dreams all these years later, to remind us that we are still here to bear witness and to seek justice. As we continued our descent, a colleague behind me tapped me on the shoulder to tell me that her cell phone was working and offered it to me. It was about 6.20am for her when I called my still sleeping daughter in Los Angeles. She immediately knew something was not right. As calmly as possible, I asked her not to turn on the television, which she immediately did. I don’t think she had yet processed the gravity of the situation until I told her that the building was on fire and tried to assure her that I was all right, but she knew me too well. She asked if I was afraid, would I get out, was I OK? I answered yes to all questions. She tried to comfort me, assuring me that I would survive.
The memory of Bruce Reynolds, a Port Authority police officer who died on 9/11, lives on in a New York City community garden. (Photo 1: Courtesy of Aaron Scott Photo 2: Credit - Adrian Benepe) On September 11, Officer Reynolds was sent to the Twin Towers from his post at the George Washington Bridge. Though he had respiratory problems, he went into the South Tower to help with the rescue effort.
I wanted her to know how much I loved her and that I would make it out. If I died, she would be left without any parents, grandparents and no siblings and she had been through so much since her first cancer diagnosis. We only had a minute together. Others needed to call, so we said goodbye and “I love you”, again and again before handing back the phone, not knowing if this would be our last conversation. As we approached the 44th floor landing, a tall, slim African American man, possibly from the Port Authority, was positioned at the doorway. Just as we arrived on the landing close to him, he stopped us to allow the people from 44 to merge into the human flow of traffic in the stairwell so that they could descend as well. Heart still pounding, I asked him if we were out of danger. Did he think we would be all right? With his kindly face, he smiled and told me that he knew I would be all right because he was going to pray for me, and God was watching over me.
He then asked me if I knew any hymns, but I couldn’t think of any. Just as we started to descend again, he began to sing a hymn in a beautiful alto voice and as we descended, he continued to sing the hymn for all of us. I looked back at him and saw him smiling at me. In spite of all the fear and horror of that day, it was a profoundly touching moment during a continuum of doom. We could still hear his voice two flights down. At about the 30th floor, we saw the firefighters ascending for the first time. They were dressed in full gear, weighed down by the protective hats, oxygen tanks, axes, hoses and other heavy equipment they must have known could never extinguish the fires that raged above. Flushed and grim-faced in their knowledge of how dire the situation was and how it could unfold, they courageously fulfilled their faithful promise to transcend their fear and subordinate their will to live, steadfast until the very end. Like soldiers facing combat, they passed us, heading directly upward for the floors from which we fled and into the smell of death. Their presence filled us with hope. We thanked them. As long as they were there, we would be safe. They would protect us and make sure we got out alive – all of us. Three hundred and forty-three of them did not. And their deaths did not end on that day.
The brave policewoman was the only female police officer to die in the attack Credit: Getty
NYPD Police Officer Moira Smith was the first officer to report the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 when she saw the first plane strike the first tower of the World Trade Center. Smith, a 13-year veteran, ran into the towers and immediately began assisting in the evacuation.
Displaying outward calm, Officer Smith was last seen heading back into the South Tower to help evacuate more people, and in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of that tower a brief radio transmission from a female officer calling for help was recorded and later identified as Smith.
Officer Smith’s remains were recovered in March 2002, and her shield and ’13’ collar brass are preserved in the 9/11 Museum in New York City. She was the only NYPD female police officer to perish at Ground Zero. She was survived by her 2-year-old daughter and her husband.
Her coolness under pressure was remembered by a survivor, Martin Glynn:
“The mass of people exiting the building felt the calm assurance that they were being directed by someone in authority who was in control of the situation. Her actions even seemed ordinary, even commonplace. She insulated the evacuees from the awareness of the dangerous situation they were in, with the result that everything preceded smoothly.”
An extensive biography was written on Moira and it includes interviews with her husband and daughter. You can read that here.
Immediately after the attacks, they returned to finish the job, unmasked and exposed, lied to and unaware they were again risking their lives to find survivors, the dead or any piece or symbol of life left in the pile of smoldering malignant debris that would also claim their souls in one way or another. We made several stops on the way down that morning. Brave men and women from the Port Authority and people at work had stationed themselves at the landings of floors to help people exit into the stairwell. They were managing the flow off the floors, stopping the downward movement from time to time, enabling every floor to enter into the long, quiet, final exodus out of Tower One, yielding to the countdown that would end with their own deaths.
As we descended, many prayed, some aloud, some silently, making their own solemn pact with their god. One has to wonder what was relinquished in exchange for life – what promises were made if their lives could be spared? As the differences that separated us dissolved, would the profound connection experienced that morning endure? If we were separate in life, then that morning we would be together and equal in death. My hopes were lifted the closer we came to the lobby, which is when the stairwell started filling with water. Sprinklers were on full force and in some spots, water was already pooled and shin-deep. The stairs were wet and slippery. We arrived to a shocking scene in the lobby. Unrecognisable, completely gone and awash in the water from above, the airplane fuel fireball had all but erased it. Debris and water were everywhere. The marble floors were gone. In the distance, I could make out what had been the marble reception desks where visitors had to present themselves for their passes during business hours. Bare light bulbs hung in the air. It was dark, brown and dismal. How many had been killed or injured here? We were quickly led toward what used to be revolving doors that separated our lobby from the concourse.
NYPD Police Officer Moira Smith's Badge..Shield and 13 collar brass..
That floor was also covered in water and it was here that I fell and injured my foot. The man standing at that doorway reached out to me and told me to give him my hand. “Let me help you,” he said. He then did the same for all those behind me. He was a civilian there risking his life to make sure we got through the concourse. My foot throbbed with pain and immediately began to swell. Looking ahead, I saw my colleagues about to get on the escalator that would lead to the Plaza level in No. 5 World Trade Center and out to the street and safety, but I couldn’t walk very well or keep up with them anymore. A colleague came back to help me across the concourse, onto the escalator, which to my amazement, worked. This was truly a lucky break because I couldn’t walk up the stairs on my injured foot. The escalator was carrying me within minutes of escape. I could see the sunlight pouring through the huge windows overlooking the Plaza. That magnificent fall day was still in our sights and we were moving toward it. My spirits were so lifted by this wonderful light and my fear replaced by genuine optimism. We would be outside shortly, walking up Church Street in that glorious sunlight, away from the danger and horror. Behind me on the escalator a long human chain extended downward across the concourse and back up the stairwell.
Fire and rescue workers search through the rubble of the World Trade Center in New York on 13 September 2001. On 11 September 2001, two aircrafts were flown into the centre’s twin towers, causing both to collapse. BETH A. KEISER/EPA
One by one, my colleagues stepped onto the floor in number 5 World Trade Center, inside, between the Borders Book Store and Citibank’s plate glass windows and the wall of window overlooking the Plaza itself. How many times I had stood outside or passed in front of that very window. As I was transported to the top of the escalator, I put my uninjured foot down first. Just as I placed my other foot onto the floor, I heard a man yelling, “Run, and don’t look to your left”. Actually, I later found out that he was a firefighter and his left was my right, the side with the view, through enormous, multi-storied, plate glass windows, of those who were jumping from the highest floors. One survivor from the 81st floor reported seeing the head of a young woman and windows splattered with blood. This nightmarish scene of carnage is what the firefighter was trying to protect us from seeing when he told us not to look out on to that Plaza.
Firefighters rest near a piece of the World Trade Center in 2001.
AARON LEE FINEMAN/NEW YORK TIMES
What followed immediately was an enormous rumble, nuclear and otherworldly that overtook us. The ground rippled around us, as if a volcanic eruption had exploded from beneath the earth. In a split second, the light I was optimistically following out of the building was disappearing. In its place, as I stood frozen in that one moment permanently carved into my consciousness, a brown colossus just feet away, advanced toward us and upon us, a wall, stories high, moving with such momentum across the Plaza like a runaway bullet train full of the now infamous toxic stew that was number 2 World Trade Center. It was collapsing, carrying tons of concrete, asbestos, glass, its dead, those on the Plaza and we were next. The plate glass window that separated us from it was swallowed up in the path of the moving wall – gone in a second.
The South Tower Collapses..
With staggering brute force, it slammed down on us like a tsunami at close range, blowing off the ring on a left hand finger, an earring from a pierced ear and the jacket held tightly in my hands. The last thing I remember is looking down at my feet, with my navy shoes still on them, as I rose up in the air like a piece of debris before I girded myself for a full-frontal collision with the Borders Bookstore or Citibank plate glass window. It was 9:59am. I remember the impact, but I don’t remember the fall. What happened next has taken me years to recall, validate, process and there is probably more still unknown to me. I was airborne like a rag doll and fell close to the impact, lost consciousness and was covered by debris and dirt. We had been separated from colleagues in the stairwell as we stopped to allow people from one of the floors to enter. Half of our group was still on 17 when the South Tower came down, but I didn’t know it at the time. The human chain behind me on the escalator was gone. They could no longer get up the escalator because it was blocked, filled with the remains of the South Tower and whatever was brought in with it. They were below in the concourse or still in the stairwell, blown back by the extraordinary force of the collapse.
Cameraman caught in aftermath of Twin Towers collapse on 9/11
When I regained consciousness, I was aware, but in total blackness, the kind of complete black that one might imagine being buried alive, and I was. Time dissolved and a strange overwhelming numbness shrouded my body and mind from within in the immediate moments after the collapse. Sound and noise merged with the darkness into total silence. I no longer inhabited myself. I was there, but my senses were switched off. Blind and deaf. Perhaps dead. I couldn’t move and couldn’t breathe. I was face down and my mouth, nose and lungs were full of the pulverised building that had just collapsed. I could not breathe and was choking before I actually knew it. I lay there, trying to feel where I was because without any spatial orientation, it was impossible to know if I was standing up or lying down. I put my hand into my mouth and desperately tried to scrape the pulverized debris from my tongue and mouth with my nails.
(Stan Honda shot the now-famous photo that became known as “Dust Lady” — but, as he pointed out, that lady had a name: Marcy Borders.)
“After the first tower collapsed, there was so much smoke and dust in the air it was like night. I was near an office building and a police officer was pulling people into the lobby to get out of the cloud of dust. I was in the lobby about a minute and a woman came in completely covered in dust. She paused by some elevators for a second and I took one frame. There wasn’t any time for any interaction, although in the photo she is looking straight into the camera. I didn’t think I would see the woman after that. But in 2002, Marcy’s family contacted the [photo agency] to identify the woman in the photo. A reporter and I met Marcy at her Bayonne, NJ, apartment to hear her story and photograph her. It is amazing, [when you] see the photo, that Marcy survived the attack and collapse of the towers. The photo humanizes the story.” A resident of Bayonne, New Jersey, the 28-year-old Borders was working on the 81st floor inside of the North Tower at the time of the attack. Borders said that she never recovered from the trauma of the attack. Depression led to a break-up with her partner, the loss of custody of her children, and an addiction to alcohol and drugs. Borders said that a key event in her recovery and return to sobriety was learning of the death of Osama bin Laden. Borders had preserved the outfit she wore in the iconic photo. Borders was diagnosed with stomach cancer in August 2014. Borders's cancer had resulted in a $190,000 debt—even though she had not yet received surgery and she still needed additional chemotherapy. Borders said she could not even afford to get her prescriptions filled. She alleged that her cancer was triggered by the toxic dust she was exposed to when the World Trade Center collapsed, having once stated, "I definitely believe it because I haven't had any illnesses. I don't have high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes." Sadly Marcy Borders died from cancer on August 24, 2015.
As I lay there in the blackness, I placed my hands on what I thought was the ground in an effort to feel my location and orientate myself. I was not on the ground however. It took a few moments for me to realize that I was on top of someone, a body, someone who was motionless, who did not speak or cough or indicate in any way that he or she was alive. The body was completely still. I heard no breathing and felt no struggle from it. My hands felt their way around a corpse. I don’t know if it was a whole body or a torso or where it came from, but I believe it was a man. I know that he had been injured and was bleeding, because my clothes across the middle part of my body and my purse absorbed his blood. I would later find the dark red blood encrusted like wet cement on and inside my purse and my wallet. As I tried to free myself, I was too numb to feel the terror or revulsion one might experience knowing that I was on top of a dead stranger and gently pushed up, but my legs had no strength and felt detached from the rest of me. They were like rubber. I tried to get up, but a weakening and warm wave surged through them and my upper body every time I attempted to move. My lungs were struggling to take in oxygen and the pain in my chest began to intensify as it spread from should to shoulder and down through the middle of my chest. I was alone in the blackness with a dead person, couldn’t breathe, my lungs burned intensely, my windpipe and nose were blocked, I couldn’t move, see or hear and now I had serious chest pain that felt like a heart attack. I had to get up, but each effort produced waves of weakness that kept me from standing.
The South Tower explodes into a huge ball of rolling flame killing nearly everyone in the lobby of that building as they waited for elevators down to safety.. Unknown to many Stairwell A is now the only remaining exit from the tower that is still passable albeit some smoke and flame..
Blackness gave way to dark gray. I was not blind after all and could turn my head to see a large white light. As it got closer, a tall man carrying a large searchlight and wearing an oxygen mask came toward me. He took off his mask and put it on my face, telling me to breathe so that the oxygen would flow, but I couldn’t take a deep breath. He held me up. My debris-filled lungs could not expand and it felt as though I was choking. I kept trying, and at last, got some precious oxygen, but with short, small breaths. I tried again to get up, but this time I had help. My rescuer with the light and the oxygen tank on his back later told me he was a New York City detective. I was finally able to rally the strength to slowly get up, using the rescuer’s hands and the dead stranger’s body for stability, but my legs barely held out. I often remember what it felt like to touch this dead stranger, how he didn’t move and how he unknowingly cushioned my fall. A scene from Dante’s Inferno emerged in the wake of the collapse. Life converged with death. We were enclosed in a dark cave of carnage, suffocation and destruction, as though we had passed through the gates of hell on our way to promised salvation. I was upright, numb and catatonic, eyes caked with glass and dirt, legs like rubber and my chest pain intensifying along with the burning in my lungs. Breathing was a frightening struggle and consciousness played out in slow motion. I no longer knew that I had a child who still needed me or colleagues who were with me somewhere in this space. I no longer felt any pain from my foot or the other injuries to my arms and legs. I was present, but just barely, a tentative witness in a nightmare spinning out of control. Nothing seemed real and everything, surreal. I didn’t know it but time was running out until the next collapse of the North Tower.
Clark Jones
“Photographing this vigil held at Washington Square Park, I remember a feeling of both overwhelming sadness and national unity. Like any life-altering event, it took a few days for the enormity of what happened to sink into the mind and psyche of New Yorkers. This was a moment that people had an outlet to grieve with friends and, most importantly, with the community at large. Photographing at night, lit by the glow of candles and dark surroundings, emphasized these three women’s deep grieving — a clear symbol of the national grieving that was taking place. Twenty years later, I still enjoy an occasional walk through Washington Square, although heading down to Ground Zero is very difficult for me.”
In these initial moments on my feet, only present to the extent that I was standing, I experienced the first separation from my inner knowledge that I was alive or present, a shift or detachment, and then surrender to what I believed was my death. I no longer knew that I was alive, even though I was standing. I knew I had crossed over with those present in this space. We were all dead. Looking around me, surrounded by a terrible scene, I felt no fear in this timeless muted state, alternating between being alive and being dead. This alternate state is referred to medically as “disassociation”, sometimes occurring during or after a very traumatic event. It marked the death of my former self. Two firefighters trapped with us repeatedly tried to break through the glass, but with no success. In a final attempt, I am told they removed their oxygen tanks from their backs and threw them against a glass door until it broke. I have no recollection of what that looked like, how big the opening was, how long it took, or even exiting the dark cave of death. Memory allows me only a glimpse of the moments after; perhaps because once outside and surrounded by men in FBI jackets, I experienced another episode of disassociation and again for a brief time, believed I was dead. Minutes would pass before the collapse of the North Tower, but in the meantime, the suicides from the North Tower continued. A woman in front of us screamed in horror that this was “Armageddon, f**king Armageddon!”. At this point, there were no more ambulances or vehicles to help anyone. I have no recollection of the site after the South Tower collapsed, or what I saw or didn’t see. My rescuer quickly brought me to a building opposite us, on Vesey Street, where he sat me on the lobby stairs, continuing to administer oxygen to me. I thanked him and asked his name which I could barely hear. It was Roy or Ray Tanner or Tanney, perhaps Tierney and to this day, I have not been able to find him.
Thomas Franklin
“I was working for the Bergen Record in New Jersey. All the river crossings were closed, so I went to Exchange Place in Jersey City and talked my way onto a tugboat that took me across the Hudson River. I saw firemen working with a flag that had been taken off of a nearby yacht. They transferred it to a flagpole that they found in the rubble. I did not think the photo would stand out the way it does. But, looking at it now, it depicts three firemen doing something that they thought would provide a sense of solidarity, unity and strength in the midst of this terrible tragedy.”
Injured and frightened people had taken refuge in the lobby of this building, unaware of the approaching cataclysm just feet away about to engulf us within the next minutes. On the floor in the middle of the lobby, a distraught man on his knees cried out in Spanish. He wailed and sobbed, lifted his arms upward, as if to beseech god, and with his anguished voice filled with profound grief, uttered a soulful lamentation transcending language. He was completely understood. I couldn’t tell if he was injured or had witnessed too much from the outside. For those who stood on the street looking up, the trauma from helplessly watching an overwhelming scene of horrific carnage and suicide was compounded by the devastating collapse from which they had narrowly escaped themselves. With better vision and growing numbness, I walked out of the Vesey Street building looking battered and wretched. My hair was caked in dirt and glass, its brown color completely hidden by the grayness of the building’s debris. My clothing was covered in it. Near my waist were bloodstains belonging to the man who lay under me. I couldn’t see the large hematomas that covered my arms, from my collision with Borders plate glass window nor the blood on my knees and legs. My foot had swelled and was now painful, but I was oblivious to all the signs and symptoms of injury and shock and to the collapse itself. My body was still flooded with fear and cortisol and I was on automatic pilot. At 10.29am, I was almost at the corner of Vesey and Church when the North Tower collapsed.
I don’t remember the moment of the second collapse or the noise, only looking behind me to see a huge gray cloud, a massive wall of toxic dirt, upon us yet again. Out of nowhere, a young man grabbed my arm, told me to take off my shoes and to run. He thought my shoes were preventing me from running, but it was my injury. Even though we were already down the street from the collapse, the dust cloud was gaining on us, a blinding gale force wind. The young man tried to help me, holding on to me and at the same time, covering his face. He stayed with me while I hobbled as fast as I could and struggled to breathe, trying to keep pace with him. After a few minutes he apologised and told me that he had to run. I stood there alone, watching him sprint for his young life up Church Street, a heavy brief case thrashing against his leg as I slowly limped away in the dust cloud, still alive but detached from my shattered body, already a deadened soul.
Sharon Premoli is a plaintiff-activist in the lawsuit In re Terrorist Attacks. As an injured survivor of the World Trade Center North Tower’s 80th floor, she has lobbied for 9/11 legislation and has blogged on the Huffington Post. Her memoir, Complicit, The United States v The People of the United States chronicles her life following the attacks and her experience in the 19-year legal fight for justice.
Beth Keiser
“Port Authority Police Officer Dominick Pezzulo was killed in the World Trade Center attacks and I was assigned to cover his funeral on Oct. 19, 2001, as a staff photographer for the Associated Press. This was actually one of the first funerals to be held. So few remains had been recovered a month after the Trade Center attacks that funerals were still very emotional and raw. I was positioned outside the church where hundreds of law enforcement officers from all over the country came to pay their respects and grieve together as a community. In the sea of navy uniforms lining the Pelham Bay street, one little girl stood out in her pink shirt. Tiffany Massagli, 8 years old, stood up on a stoop, solemnly holding up her homemade sign — ‘You will always be my Hero’ — as the officers lined her street. I have always loved this photo, as it shows how connected everyone was to each other in their shared grief by the attack on 9/11. She didn’t know the officer killed, or any of the hundreds standing outside her building, but yet she wanted to be there and let them know she shared their pain.”
Michel Setboun/Corbis/Getty Images -
Michel Setboun
“At noon on Sept. 11, the south of Manhattan became a kind of war zone. I couldn’t get access anywhere; I had no press card. The city was like a wounded animal. I started to walk around the places I knew with an impressive background of Manhattan. Of course I went to Brooklyn and on the shore of New Jersey. Everywhere, people were gathering in a kind of mass — they wanted to be together, they were going back to the roots of human beings. That was also a way to survive. I had never felt that humanity in New York before. It was surreal. Two years before, I was in Afghanistan under the control of the Taliban. After 20 years I feel very [sad], all these people killed for nothing.”
The twin towers’ elevator layouts meant getting to ground level was more complicated on some floors than on others. US NIST
The World Trade Center had one of the world's great elevator systems — 198 of the biggest, fastest elevators ever built. Some people plunged to their deaths after elevator cables were destroyed by the hijacked jets that crashed into the buildings. Others burned to death as flames shot down shafts. And some who were trapped inside stalled elevators died
when the buildings collapsed. In all about 200 people died inside the elevators as they rushed to escape the burning towers.. Some people trapped inside elevators managed to escape by forcing there way out of tightly jammed doors, Not everyone who used an elevator perished as some safely opened allowing the occupants time to get out of the dangerous buildings..
Poor communications among rescue workers meant elevators were ignored even after trapped passengers used intercoms to report their locations, sometimes only a few feet from firefighters. Most passengers could not save themselves: Safety devices
designed to prevent people from falling down shafts locked people inside elevators the moment the elevators malfunctioned. And when the second jet hit the south tower at 9:03 a.m., 16½ minutes after the attack on the north tower, the World Trade Center's elevator mechanics decided to leave the buildings. They expected to return later to help firefighters but unfortunately never did. In one way, the elevators played a heroic role that morning. They helped thousands evacuate the south tower before the second jet hit. But the elevator shafts also became
the circulation system of the disaster, carrying death and destruction throughout the towers. Elevator shafts worked like chimneys, funneling unbearable smoke to floors above the crashes. The shafts also channeled burning jet fuel throughout both towers. Fire moved not only up and down but also side to side, from shaft to shaft, unleashing explosions in elevator lobbies and in restrooms next to the shafts.
To comply with building codes, the World Trade Center since 1996 had been adding locks that made it impossible for passengers to force open the doors of stalled elevators. These locks, called "door restrictors," had been added to about half of the 198 elevators in the twin towers. Nobody is known to have escaped from an elevator locked by a door restrictor. The World Trade Center followed a long-established
approach to elevator rescues: Leave people inside stalled elevators until professionals can perform rescues. The elevators had three mechanisms, including the restrictors, designed to prevent people from accidentally falling down elevator shafts. An untold number were still trapped when the buildings collapsed.
A Surviving Piece of the World Trade Center's Elevator Motor. When Flight 175 impacted the South Tower on 9/11, the elevator engine room shielded one of three stairwells, making it the only way to escape down from above the impact zone.
In a fire emergency, an elevator is programmed to return to its lowest floor and hold its doors open. On Sept. 11, many elevators far below the crash zones failed to do this, although they continued to have electrical power. The reason for this failure is unclear. Some elevators returned to their lowest floors but didn't open. That made it hard for firefighters to know whether elevators had returned to lobby floors or were stalled somewhere higher. The doors of nearly 50 elevator in the north lobby alone were closed. Firefighters failed to inspect elevators with closed doors, even those closest to the
command post in the north tower lobby. Eight passengers escaped from these elevators on their own; one man did so just five minutes before the building collapsed.
Eighty elevator mechanics were on duty in the towers that morning, many just a few steps from people who needed rescue. However, the mechanics, fearing for their safety, evacuated on their own initiative when the south tower was struck at 9:03 a.m. A supervisor from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owned the
World Trade Center, radioed the mechanics about 45 minutes later to say firefighters needed their help. The south tower collapsed as two supervisors were on their way back.
After the collapse - World Trade Center - Otis Elevator Company - 339HT Gearless Machine...
Elevators are the safest form of mechanized travel when measured by trips taken:
Only about a dozen passengers die in 200 billion trips made annually in 600,000
elevators in the USA. Most deaths are caused by falling down shafts.
Despite common fears, only once before had a passenger elevator had all its cables
severed and fallen to the ground, according to Elevator World. That happened in 1945
when an elevator fell 78 stories after a military plane hit the Empire State Building.
The woman inside lived.
Before Sept. 11, the World Trade Center had never had an elevator fatality, even
though each express elevator might travel 60,000 miles a year. Although 30 years old, the system remained a worldwide tourist attraction for people in the elevator industry. Trade publications wrote about the elevators with a romanticism never bestowed on the taller Sears Tower in Chicago or other skyscrapers. The World Trade Center elevator system had a revolutionary design that made it
possible to build 110-story towers. The elevators were big and fast and used far less floor space than earlier designs. The elevator system was the first to require people to take two elevators to reach most upper floors.
Vintage view of the elevator of the WTC in NYC in 1995.
Passengers took non-stop express elevators from the ground floor to elevator lobbies on the 44th and 78th floors. There, they walked across a hall to smaller local elevators that went to higher floors. It could take five minutes to get from the ground floor lobby to the 105th floor.
Each tower had only two passenger elevators that went non-stop from bottom to top to the Windows on the World restaurant in the north tower and the observation deck in the south tower. The big benefit was economic. Until the World Trade Center, the height of skyscrapers had been limited by the space needed for elevators that went from the lobby to every floor. By requiring transfers, the World Trade Center cut in half the
number of elevator shafts needed, so more floor space could be leased.
Elevator doors were nearly impossible to open unless a car was within 18 inches of a floor landing. Often, the elevator had to be within 3 inches of a landing before all door locking mechanisms would release. The twin towers had 15 miles of elevator shafts. But only 1.1 miles were within 18 inches of a landing. The odds of being near a landing were not good.
The control panel of one of the express elevators
New York, World Trade Center, 1999 - To floor 107
To get out of an elevator, a passenger had to pass through two doors and be near a
landing. The inside door was attached to the elevator car itself. The outside door was part of the building, keeping people in hallways from stepping into an elevator shaft. A motor on the elevator car roof opened both doors simultaneously when the elevator reached a landing. People stuck inside elevators had to contend with locks on both sets of doors.
The elevators at the World Trade Center trapped people three ways:
• Door restrictors dropped a steel rod, like a deadbolt, into the mechanism that
opened the elevator's doors. The lock was activated when a properly working
elevator left a landing. If the elevator stopped suddenly or lost power, the
restrictor made it impossible to open the inside door more than 4 inches. The
lock could be released — and the doors opened fully — only from the elevator
car's roof.
• On all elevators, both those with and those without door restrictors, pressure
from the motors kept doors closed until elevator cars were near a landing.
Several strong men could overpower these motors. A loss of electrical power
also could free the doors.
• All of the outside or hallway doors had locks called "interlocks" that prevented
opening the doors. This made it difficult for bystanders to help people stuck in
elevators. But it was possible for people in an elevator to release this lock, if
they had been able to open the inside car door first. The release mechanism for
the interlocks was on the shaft side of the door.
Door restrictors proved the most deadly of the three locking devices. In elevators
without door restrictors, a few people managed to overcome the other two locks. In
two cases, people escaped from elevators whose doors were shut by doorway motors.
In another case, passengers overcame the interlock on the hallway doors indirectly by
using wire cutters to cut a cable that held the doors shut.
Konstantin Petrov / Fotki
The debate over door restrictors
The door restrictors the Port Authority had added to half of the elevators in the World Trade Center cost about $400 each. Called the HatchLatch, the restrictor could be released only from the roof of the elevator car. That usually required an elevator mechanic to descend the shaft from above.
"HatchLatch says 'No Exit!' " declares its manufacturer, Adams Elevator of Niles, Ill., in its catalog.
Unlike the HatchLatch, other brands of door restrictors can be opened from the hall outside a stalled elevator and do not require access to the car roof. The Port Authority considered buying these easy-access restrictors, but none fit the World Trade Center elevators when the renovation work began, says Thomas Stack, a former elevator
consultant at the twin towers.
Konstantin Petrov / Fotki - An express elevator would take you directly to floor 107 in the north tower where the high class restaurant Windows on the World resides..
The World Trade Center's elevator staff had disagreed over whether restrictors should be installed at all. Some said the locks were not appropriate for a building vulnerable to terrorism. They remembered the 1993 truck bombing that trapped some people inside Trade Center elevators for 10 hours.
"I fought restrictors for two years," says Alan Forziati Sr., who was the safety engineer responsible for elevators until he retired in December 2000. "If we had had these restrictors in 1993, God knows what would have happened. It may be dangerous to get out of an elevator, but when you're trapped inside during a disaster, you need that option."
Dave Bobbitt, an elevator supervisor at the World Trade Center for the Port Authority, says it was a difficult decision. Several years ago, a friend of Bobbitt's had plunged to his death in another high-rise while trying to escape from an elevator. "He opted not to wait for a mechanic, and it cost him his life," Bobbitt says. "On the other hand, there are good arguments against door restrictors."
Konstantin Petrov / Fotki - Windows on the World..
On Sept. 11, door restrictors may have cost a colleague his life. Anthony Savas, 72, a construction inspector for the Port Authority, was trapped in an elevator at the 78th floor elevator lobby of the north tower when the nose of the first jet struck the building 18 floors above. He pounded his fists on the doors.
Nearby, Keith Meerholz, 35, an insurance executive at Marsh & McLennan had been knocked down and burned by fire shooting the crack in an elevator door. He heard Savas banging from inside the elevator.
The 6-foot-2, 260-pound Meerholz and another man tried to force open the elevator doors with their hands. The doors opened just 2 inches. Inside, Meerholz saw Savas, white-haired, calm, unhurt, wearing a uniform and holding a walkie-talkie. Savas said he had radioed for help. A few minutes later, three Port Authority colleagues came upon Savas. Two of the men men sat back-to-back, put their feet in the 2-inch crack and pushed. The door would not budge. Savas told his colleagues to move on, and that firefighters would rescue him later. Savas did not survive.
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Anthony Savas - Tony Savas was a building inspector for the Port Authority and for fifteen years saw endless changes and renovations within the WTC. He was inside one of the Two towers the day of the attack on September, 11. His body was found next to that of several firefighters under a collapsed stairwell in the rubble of the Towers.
Most deaths occurred in the express elevators in both towers that went from the
lobbies to the 78th floors and in the elevators near the top floors of the buildings. Sixty-four of the twin towers' 198 elevators had cables that ran through the floors
devastated by the hijacked planes, and the cables were likely destroyed.
Forty-eight of these 64 elevators had no known survivors. Even in the elevators where
people escaped — mostly because the doors happened to be open at the moment of
impact — they left behind a large number of people who were burned to death or
were killed when the buildings collapsed.
The loss of life was almost complete inside the south tower's 10 giant express
elevators, which were shuttling evacuees from the 78th floor to the ground floor after
the north tower was hit. Only four people survived.
The four survivors — two each from adjacent elevators — were in elevators that
plunged and were stopped by the emergency brakes 6 to 10 feet above the lobby floor.
About 40 people died in those two elevators. Doomed passengers called loved ones
from two other south tower express elevators stuck near the 12th floor in one case and
the 19th floor in another. The express elevators in the north tower had eight survivors in two elevators. In the other eight express elevators, nobody is known to have lived. People who escaped from elevators high in the buildings saw people left behind burn
to death and some elevators plunge to the ground. Gerry Wertz, a human resources executive at Marsh & McLennan, was in a north tower elevator when it stopped on the 91st floor. The only other passenger, artist Vanessa Lawrence, got out.
Artist Vanessa Lawrence
"She was stepping off the elevator when the plane hit," Wertz recalls. "There was an explosion on top of the elevator as if someone had thrown a hand grenade. I jumped out, fell to the floor and looked behind me. I saw the elevator disintegrate in a ball of flames and fall down (the shaft). There was a big hole in the ceiling above the elevator. I saw the cables fold up as if they'd become detached. It took no more than two seconds." That empty elevator probably plummeted 14 floors into a pit on the 77th floor. Wertz and Lawrence evacuated safely down the stairs, as did 18 other people from the
91st floor. Cantor Fitzgerald tax lawyer Harry Waizer, 50, was alone in a burning elevator that performed as it was programmed to do in an emergency: It returned to its lowest floor — the 78th — and opened its doors. Waizer survived with burns over 40% of his body. He walked the rest of the way
down.
Photo credit - Audrey Russell Photography
As the sun began to come up over Manhattan, its rays spreading out like a golden fan across the hustle and bustle of the city, Vanessa Lawrence felt like the luckiest person alive. It was a beautiful sunrise – sunrise on the morning of September 11, 2001. From her painting studio in an abandoned office on the 91st floor of the World Trade Center, the 26-year-old Manchester-born art student had the best view in the city. Just 19 floors from the top of the tallest buildings in Manhattan, the Twin Towers, she was so high she felt like she was watching the growing crowds of office workers below from a cloud.
Little did she know her dream job was about to turn into something beyond anybody’s worst nightmare.
“I remember the morning of 9/11 very clearly,” recalls Vanessa, now aged 45. “I couldn’t wait to get up. I was painting sunrise over the New York skyline and had done so well the day before I couldn’t wait to get back to work. “I was in my studio in the Twin Towers for 6am. The light was so amazing – it really was a beautiful Manhattan day – that I just didn’t want to stop painting. “I tore myself away about 8.30am and nipped down to the lobby to get a juice. As I came back up I remember the elevator doors opening on the 91st floor. I literally put one foot out of the door and – bam – the whole building shook and I was blown across the corridor.” Vanessa had no idea but that bang was Flight 11 crashing into the North Tower of the World Trade Center, just two floors above her head. It was a moment that ignited a course of events that would change history forever. At least 2,976 people, including 67 Britons, died in the towers that day, making Vanessa’s survival from the 91st floor – above which level there were no survivors in the 110-storey tower – even more remarkable.
Song Bird I - pen and watercolour on canvas
Bird Song II - Pen and Watercolour on Canvas.
Acrylic and watercolour on canvas
Vanessa’s decision to tell her story now is symbolic of how far her life has moved on since that catastrophic day. Born in Manchester, she grew up in Cheshire and now works as a professional artist near Glasgow. “Things remind me every day,” she reveals. “I can still get emotional, even 20 years later. “A strong wind still really scares me, I think something is going to collapse on me. The smell of burning, that takes me back.”
Although Vanessa says her memories play out “silent and in slow motion” in her head, her escape reads like a Hollywood movie. Trapped at the top of the North Tower (the first to be hit) she had to climb down over 1,729 fire escape steps before the building collapsed. “All I could think was I was a long way up and I had to get down,” she says. “I just went into auto-pilot. I remember a few times the procession of people would pause and that was scary because you’d feel trapped. “I remember seeing firemen coming up and they were so brave. We were trapped in this stairwell, you couldn’t tell what was happening in the outside world at all.” But reaching the ground floor did not mean reaching safety, as she recalls in graphic detail. Stepping outside as the South Tower collapsed, she was almost crushed to death in the cloud of falling rubble. “Something made me look up and I saw this cloud coming down,” she recalls. “I just remember choking and trying as hard as I could to breathe. At one point I experienced quite a strange feeling of not being able to do it any more and thinking that was when I was going to die – until something kicked in. Survival instinct I guess.”
It was only later that morning, from the safety of a friend’s apartment, that Vanessa saw the full horror of what she had been through on TV. Neither she nor the New York police could believe she had survived to tell the tale. “I looked down afterwards and there was a tiny little scratch bleeding on my foot – that was all I had, one little scratch. Nobody could believe that somebody got out from that height.” Traumatised by her escape, Vanessa left New York. Unable to return to her Staten Island home for two weeks after the attacks – as rescuers were using the ferry from Manhattan to transport rubble from Ground Zero for forensic examination – she found the smallest things could bring back panic attacks. “It was horrible listening to the answerphone message my mum left – she couldn’t get hold of me and I didn’t manage to get through to her for hours. “For weeks later even the slightest noise would leave me in an absolute mess. I remember collapsing in the street just because I heard a plane overhead. Ever since then I’ve been petrified of flying.”
Of the thousands who escaped that day, only a handful were British – and there are very few support networks. As well as flashbacks, one of the worst after effects has been ‘survivor’s guilt’. Vanessa is all too aware of the thousands that did not make it out of the Twin Towers alive that day. Including, tragically, another artist friend who was trapped on the floor above her. “That was horrible, knowing he was trapped up there – you do go through this guilt of thinking why wasn’t it me? If I hadn’t nipped to get a drink, I would have been in my studio and seen the plane coming straight at me.” Despite her fear of flying, Vanessa has since flown all over the world as an artist. Her vibrant landscapes, portraits and animal scenes displaying a fresh, life-affirming quality. Yet there is one painting she still cannot get quite right – the cityscape she was painting on the morning of 9/11. Although her original canvas was destroyed in the towers, she has since finished a recreation. “I’ve made a new version of the painting but in my eyes it’s never going to be as good as the original. I will probably have to redo it again and again.
Konstantin Petrov / Fotki - 78th Floor Sky Lobby - North Tower
On Sept. 11, people fought their own way out of elevators or they died. USA TODAY could not locate any professional rescues of people stuck in elevators. The Fire Department of New York and the Port Authority also could not cite successful rescues. Rescue attempts were underway when the buildings collapsed. Firefighters from Ladder 4 and Engine 54 — which shared a firehouse at 48th Street and Eighth Avenue — used the Jaws of Life tool to rescue people trapped in an elevator in the south tower lobby. The firefighters died when the tower collapsed at 9:59 a.m. Their bodies were found near an elevator and their Jaws of Life. The elevator rescue effort was run from a fire safety desk in each lobby. Consoles digitally showed the location of every elevator. The fire safety desks also had an intercom system to speak to people inside the elevators. The fire department had set up command posts next to the fire safety desks. In each tower, a Port Authority supervisor tried to make contact with each elevator. Bobbitt, the Port Authority supervisor contacting elevators in the north tower, says he spoke to people in about 10 stalled elevators. He contacted about 75 of the 99 elevators in the north tower before the other tower collapsed and he evacuated. Bobbitt could not contact about 20 elevators located above the 78th floor. The console showed no reading for those elevators, suggesting they were most likely destroyed.
When Bobbitt located people trapped in an elevator, a colleague, Don Parente, wrote down the elevator number and its location. "We found out the information and gave it to the firemen," Bobbitt says. "A couple different firemen grabbed a couple different lists, but I don't know what happened after that." For reasons that are unclear, even the easiest rescues — releasing people trapped in elevators in the ground floor lobby — were not attempted. For example, Chris Young, a 33-year-old temporary worker, escaped on his own a few feet from the fire department's command post in the north tower just five minutes before the building collapsed. He had twice reported his location via intercom. And passengers who escaped from an adjacent elevator told firefighters they had spoken to the trapped man. He was able to open the doors only when the power failed and the motor holding the doors shut stopped working. Elevator mechanics left On Sept. 11, ACE Elevator of Palisades Park, N.J., had 80 elevator mechanics inside the World Trade Center. Following the Port Authority's emergency plan, after the first jet hit the north tower, elevator mechanics from both towers reported to the fire safety desk in the south tower lobby for instructions from police or firefighters. About 60 mechanics had arrived in the south tower lobby and others were in radio contact when the second jet struck that building.
Konstantin Petrov / Fotki
Konstantin Petrov / Fotki
"We were standing there trying to count heads when the second plane hit (the south tower)," said Peter Niederau, ACE Elevator's supervisor of the modernization project. "Parts of the lobby and glass were coming down around us, so we all got out of the lobby as fast as we could." They left in different directions. Some went through the underground shopping mall. Others went out onto Liberty Street. Had they stayed, they would have been about 30 yards from the two express elevators where firefighters tried unsuccessfully to save people. Another mechanic was in the north tower's 78th floor elevator lobby — where Savas and other people were trapped — when the first jet hit. The mechanic was knocked across the lobby, then evacuated safely, the ACE Elevator supervisors say. "(We) went out to the street to assess the damage and come back in as needed," says James O'Neill, ACE Elevator's supervisor of maintenance. The plan was to return to the building later in the day to help with rescues. The strategy had worked after the 1993 terrorist bombing, when many of the same mechanics — working for Otis Elevator, which had the contract then — were hailed as heroes. On Sept. 11, the mechanics left on their own, without instructions from police or fire officials. ACE Elevator supervisors say this was consistent with the emergency plan. All the mechanics survived. "We had a procedure. We had a procedure to follow, and they (the mechanics) followed it," Niederau says. But the Port Authority says the emergency plan called for mechanics to stay and help with rescues. "The manuals consider many emergency scenarios and describe the role of the mechanics in detail in responding to them," Port Authority spokesman Allen Morrison says. "There was no situation in which the mechanics were advised or instructed to leave on their own. They were, depending on the situation, to be dispatched to various emergency posts or to respond to various passenger entrapments and to assist police, fire and other rescue personnel." About 9:45 a.m., from the south tower lobby, Port Authority elevator manager Joseph Amatuccio radioed the ACE Elevator supervisors on their private radio channel. O'Neill recalls him asking: "Can you mobilize to come inside and see what's going on? Because I'm here with the fire department, and they're asking me questions I don't know." O'Neill radioed John Menville, an ACE Elevator supervisor trained in rescues, and both tried to get back in the building. The supervisors had special ID badges with red stripes that allowed them behind police lines. The badges had been issued after the 1993 bombing. As Menville approached, the south tower collapsed. Amatuccio and his colleagues were killed. Bobbitt and other firefighters began evacuating the soon-to-collapse north tower. The elevator rescue effort was over. Data analysis by Paul Overberg. Contributing: Staci George and Nafeesa Syeed
In June 2001 an immigrant from Estonia named Konstantin Petrov landed a job as an electrician at Windows on the World, the restaurant atop the north tower of the World Trade Center.
He worked the nightshift and held a day job as the superintendent of an apartment building in Manhattan. During that summer, Petrov took hundreds of photographs inside the north tower during his shifts, mostly of empty offices, elevator fixtures, stairwells, and the deserted dining room of Windows on the World, with table settings in place for the next day’s service. Windows on the World occupied the 106th and 107th floors of Tower 1. Many of Petrov’s photos capture daybreak blazing into the ghostly dining rooms and sweeping views of the dormant city below.
Petrov’s shift ended at 8 a.m. “Usually, he stuck around to have coffee with the morning staff, but on September 11, 2001, he decided to go straight home. He went down to the parking lot in the basement to get his car, and, as he was driving out, the first plane hit the building. He saw debris but nothing else and thought little of it until he got home and turned on the news. He called his friends at the restaurant. It was the last time he spoke with them,” reports The New Yorker.
The ominous photos he left behind of the vacant, lifeless towers today are as beautiful as they are unsettling. Petrov would also have his life cut tragically short. He was a motorcycle enthusiast. Less than a year after the Sept. 11 attacks, he flipped his bike over on the West Side Highway in Manhattan and was pronounced dead on the scene.
Erik Nelson, a documentary filmmaker, was trying to finish cutting a film called “9/10: The Final Hours,” for the National Geographic Channel. He’d dug up all kinds of footage shot the day before the September 11th terrorist attacks, but very little of what the buildings had looked like inside. Amid a desperation for interiors, there was talk of abandoning the project. Then one of Nelson’s film researchers came across a trove of Petrov’s pictures, on an Estonian photo-sharing site called Fotki.
Nelson felt as though he had stumbled on the tomb of King Tut. For whatever reason, this Petrov had turned an archivist’s eye on the banalities of an office building and a sky-top restaurant, which, though destroyed in one of history’s most photographed events, had hardly been photographed at all. The pictures were beautiful, too. Devoid of people, and suffused with premonitory gloom, they made art out of a site that most New Yorkers, at the time, had come to think of as an eyesore. Petrov seemed to be a kind of savant of the commonplace, as though he’d known that all of it would soon disappear down a smoking pit. Inadvertently or not, he left behind a ghostly record, apparently the only one, of this strange twentieth-century aerie, as though he’d been sent here for this purpose alone.