Ground Level and North Tower, World Trade Center
September 11, 2001
Up before dawn, Ron Clifford dressed in his new blue suit and knotted his bold yellow tie. He gathered his thoughts and scanned his notes for the meeting he hoped would secure his financial future. As Ron prepared to leave his New Jersey home, his cellphone rang: the meeting had been moved, from a hotel in Times Square to the Marriott World Trade Center, tucked between the Twin Towers in Lower Manhattan.
Ron considered the change a good omen, signifying a homecoming of sorts. Before shifting his career to computer analytics, he had spent eight years as an architect for the New York Housing Authority, in the city’s Financial District, with a corner window view of the World Trade Center.
Ron liked the bustling neighborhood, though he never cared for the towers, which he thought looked like blocky structural supports of a suspension bridge. Occasionally he ate lunch in Windows on the World, the restaurant and catering complex on the 106th and 107th floors of the North Tower, for a spectacular view of the city unblemished by the towers themselves. Now and then his dislike edged into ridicule. While visiting a friend in the South Tower, Ron ran a strip of masking tape down a window, as a point of reference to show the North Tower swaying in high winds. Ron laughed out loud when he read an interview in which the towers’ architect claimed he designed them mindful of the “human scale.”1
By coincidence, Ron had discussed the World Trade Center while out sailing the previous weekend. When Ron and a friend ran into engine trouble, they called the friend’s handy cousin, a recently retired engineer for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Soon they fell into conversation about the 1993 bombing. While he worked on the engine, the engineer confided that the attack was personal: the pregnant woman killed that day was his secretary, Monica Rodriguez Smith.2
Ron’s complicated feelings weren’t unique.
Three decades after the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center reshaped Manhattan’s skyline, they remained enigmas. On one hand, New Yorkers admired the swagger it took to erect the planet’s two tallest buildings only a short distance apart, even if they held the title only briefly. And no one could deny the moxie of designing them to look like colossal exclamation points on Gotham’s greatness. But size matters only so much. Signature skyscrapers need panache. Souvenir models should look like dream castles, not Kit Kat candy bars. It’s hard to love a 110-story monolith, even one with an identical twin.
Doubts, or worse, were the towers’ birthright. Criticism accompanied every step of the decadelong process of planning the sixteen-acre World Trade Center complex, located near the southern tip of the thirteen-mile-long island that is Manhattan. The loudest protests arose in the early 1960s from small business owners who faced displacement by construction, and real estate titans who worried that the huge towers would tilt the city’s power balance away from Midtown to the Financial District. They felt especially piqued that the developer was a public entity, the Port of New York Authority (soon to be renamed the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey). Private developers didn’t mind the agency as an overseer of infrastructure such as bridges and airports, but not as a landlord competing for high-end tenants to fill an unprecedented ten million square feet of vertical office space.
An opposition leader, developer Lawrence Wien, tried scare tactics to ignite a public outcry. He repeatedly invoked the crash of a fogbound B-25 bomber into the 79th floor of the Empire State Building, an accident in 1945 that cost fourteen lives. Wien’s point was sharp and personal: he co-owned the Empire State Building, an Art Deco cathedral to capitalism complete with a spire pointing to heaven, and the longtime holder of the “world’s tallest skyscraper” crown. As part of his campaign, in 1968 Wien and his allies bought a large display ad3 in the New York Times with an artist’s rendering of a passenger jet bearing down on the north face of the proposed North Tower.
The Port Authority expressed outrage, insisting that a structural analysis had determined that each tower could withstand a direct hit by a Boeing 707, the largest passenger jet of the day, traveling at 600 miles per hour. One of the agency’s outside consultants insisted that such a plane crash would trigger “only local damage4 which could not cause collapse or substantial damage to the building and would not endanger the lives and safety of occupants not in the immediate area of impact.” The claim sounded comforting, but in fact no such detailed analysis5 had been conducted, and no one calculated the risk if a plane’s fuel exploded on impact, a predictable result that had, in any case, already occurred in the B-25 crash.
Along with air traffic concerns came withering design complaints. The towers’ boxy severity led critics to deride them as oversized filing cabinets.6 Some said they resembled leftover shipping crates that had once contained more elegant skyscrapers. Even moderate assessments had some sharp edges. In 1966, the powerful New York Times architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable reviewed the blueprints and wrote a lukewarm semiendorsement headlined who’s afraid of the big, bad buildings? Her conclusion: “On balance,7 the World Trade Center is not the city-destroyer that it has been popularly represented to be, its pluses outweigh its minuses in the complex evaluation that must be made, and its potential is greater than its threat.” She ended the review with a line that read like a cross between a backhanded blessing and a voodoo curse: “The trade center towers could be the start of a new skyscraper age or the biggest tombstones in the world.”
Port Authority officials swatted away their opponents and broke ground. In the background, meanwhile, engineers hired to carry out the architects’ plans pioneered inventive construction and safety techniques that made the towers models, for good and ill, of countless tall buildings that would follow.
At the outset, the engineers came up with a novel strategy to battle gravity, the bane of all human-made structures from sandcastles on up. Previously, super-tall buildings relied on internal “bones” of heavy steel, upon which hung the structural equivalent of muscle and skin made of stone. In this case, though, the towers’ engineers designed each one essentially like a box within a box. The external walls, the outer boxes, were made entirely from thin bands of structural steel.8 Like the exoskeleton of a crab, those outer walls minimized the need for heavy, bulky internal steel support columns.
The external columns gave the towers a look reminiscent of pinstripe power suits, but it was more than a stylistic choice. Fewer interior steel columns meant more rentable space on each acre-sized office floor. Some internal columns were still necessary, so the engineers clustered them in the inner boxes, known as the central core, among the elevators, stairwells, and utility shafts. The result was an extraordinary thirty thousand square feet9 of rentable, customizable space on nearly every office floor, uninterrupted by columns or walls, with incredible views to boot. Also, the narrow windows between the closely spaced exterior columns tended to reduce dizzying vertigo among people afraid of heights,10 which oddly enough included the architect, Minoru Yamasaki.
More clever innovations were needed to move thousands of people up and down the towers each day without turning the buildings into giant elevator shafts. The Otis Elevator Company solved the problem by pioneering a design that allowed workers and visitors with business on lower floors to ride local elevators up from the lobby, stopping on multiple floors, as they would in any tall building. But people destined for midlevel and upper floors took express elevators to a “sky lobby” on either the 44th or 78th floor, depending on their final destination. From the sky lobby, they boarded local elevators to their desired floor. This arrangement sharply reduced the size of the towers’ central core, which meant even more rentable office space. Among other construction advances, the towers’ engineers crafted revolutionary solutions to minimize swaying and vibration caused by powerful winds from the Hudson River.
All told, the design and structural innovations lowered the buildings’ weight, sped the pace of construction, dropped the cost of materials, and increased the anticipated return on what became a $1 billion investment, more than triple the initial cost estimates. Yet those and other advances came with an unwanted, largely overlooked price: they collectively made the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center more susceptible to fire, especially when compared with older buildings whose exteriors were clad in fire-resistant masonry, whose floors were divided into compartments like the hull of a ship, and whose skeletons contained thicker and more abundant steel.
Exacerbating the potential fire risk was a quirk of timing in revisions to the New York City Building Code. As a public agency, the Port Authority wasn’t required to comply11 with the code, but its top officials promised to meet or exceed the city’s standards at the trade center. During initial planning, that meant applying strict rules adopted in 1938. But in the mid-1960s, as the towers took shape, a revised, less stringent code moved toward enactment. Even before it took effect, Port Authority bosses told the engineers to follow the new standards’ more lenient, cost-saving rules.
The old code would have mandated six emergency exit stairwells in each tower. The Port Authority interpreted the new rules as requiring only three stairwells per tower. However, even under the new code, each tower should have included at least a fourth stairwell,12 to accommodate visitors to public spaces on the highest floors. Also, fire safety experts generally urge that stairwells in tall buildings be spaced as far apart as possible. But in each of the Twin Towers, the three stairwells were bunched relatively close to one another in the central core. That left them collectively more vulnerable to fire or other damage affecting the core and made them harder to reach for tenants and visitors working in desirable offices near the windows.
In addition, the old construction code required tall buildings to have a “fire tower,” one stairwell encased in masonry, with an entranceway that trapped and vented smoke away from the stairs. The new rules didn’t require fire towers, so the World Trade Center didn’t have them. Instead, each tower’s three central stairwells were encased in lightweight gypsum wallboard, making them far more susceptible to damage.
Also worrisome were the techniques used to stop or at least slow a fire from weakening the spindly steel frames that supported the towers’ floors. Because the floor system was so original, neither the new nor the old New York City codes included regulations that addressed the engineers’ plans to use sprayed-on fire retardants.13 Special tests could have determined those answers, but no one conducted them. In the end, Port Authority officials essentially guessed14 at what type of fire-resistant material to use and how much to apply to prevent the steel floor supports from buckling in a blaze. Initially, they insisted that the fireproofing was adequate, and that each floor was built to be airtight. If a fire did break out, they said, it would be locally contained and cause limited damage. Later, however, they installed a sprinkler system, too.
Construction of the towers took five years, slowed by strikes among elevator builders and tugboat operators, which delayed the delivery of steel. Occupancy began even before completion, although at first the twin giants primarily served the Port Authority and other public agencies. Over time they gained grudging acceptance and by 2001 attracted more than four hundred companies15 as tenants, from financial giants like Morgan Stanley, with more than eight hundred thousand square feet of office space in the South Tower, to one-person firms that enjoyed the prestige of the address but were crammed into nooks and crannies barely larger than a janitor’s closet.
As the towers rose into the clouds, their size demanded that attention be paid. Positioned on a diagonal from each other, the buildings stood 131 feet apart, about the distance of a third baseman’s throw to first. Each exterior wall spanned 208 feet. The North Tower rose 1,368 feet, an imperceptible six feet taller than its twin, and its flat roof sprouted a 360-foot television and radio antenna. On clear days, visitors to an indoor observation deck on the 107th floor of the South Tower could see parts of New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Delaware. Windows on the World, in the North Tower, came with similar views plus fine wine and pricey food that earned mixed reviews. Some critics complained that the menu never lived up to the height.
The Twin Towers officially opened with a ribbon-cutting ceremony in April 1973, only to be dethroned as the world’s tallest by the Sears Tower in Chicago a month later. The towers loomed over a plaza that would be named in honor of Austin J. Tobin, the Port Authority’s longtime executive director. Eventually, the complex also would include four smaller, conventional office buildings, plus the Marriott hotel that was Ron Clifford’s meeting destination the morning of September 11.
Below the plaza was an underground shopping mall called the Concourse that connected the buildings in the complex. Deeper still were parking levels and a train station that served New Jersey commuters and provided connections to New York City subway lines. Surrounding the six underground stories were walls of concrete three feet thick and eighty feet deep, affectionately called “the bathtub.” The nickname was a misnomer: the walls didn’t contain water, they held back the Hudson River.
In August 1974, sixteen months after they opened, the towers had their true coming-out party. Tightrope artist Philippe Petit captivated the world with a dazzling, forty-three-minute, thoroughly illegal high-wire walk on a cable strung between the roofs. By making the twins his costars, casting them as strong, silent types in his death-defying show, Petit gave them the personality their design lacked. Soon indifference among hardboiled New Yorkers evolved into nodding familiarity and even grudging affection. Two years after Petit’s walk, a Hollywood remake of King Kong showed the great ape ignoring his old haunt, the Empire State Building. This time he leapt from the North Tower to the South Tower before his demise. Over time, the twins appeared in scores of other movies, instantly setting the scene in Manhattan. They graced countless photos and postcards, often paired with the Statue of Liberty as their leading lady.
After the towers withstood the 1993 bombing, Port Authority officials boasted about their durability, even as the agency upgraded and replaced fireproofing,16 added an air pressure system to limit smoke rising through the core, installed backup power for emergency lights, and improved stairwell lighting.
By the summer of 2001, occupancy remained high and the buildings’ future seemed assured. The Twin Towers of the World Trade Center had endured early trials and a terrorist attack to become icons approaching a comfortable middle age. Still uninspiring, perhaps, but undeniable symbols of American ingenuity and financial might, as synonymous with New York as the Eiffel Tower was to Paris or the pyramids to Egypt.
Dressed and ready, shortly before 7 a.m. Ron kissed his wife, Brigid, goodbye, hopeful that when he returned they’d celebrate their daughter Monica’s birthday and his new business venture. The changed meeting location gave him extra time, so Ron indulged his love of the water, riding a commuter train to Hoboken, New Jersey, then taking a fifteen-minute ferry trip across the Hudson. The thunderstorm of the night before had passed, so Ron stood on the deck under a cloudless late-summer sky, a leather bag containing his sales pitch hanging from his shoulder. He basked in the cool breeze and watched the rising sun illuminate the towers.
“How lucky am I?” Ron thought. “Who gets to do this?”
The ferry docked, and Ron strolled past the exclusive North Cove Yacht Harbor. He admired the gleaming vessels of the super-rich, who paid berthing fees that topped $2 million a year.17 Crew members in T-shirts swabbed teak decks as though they feared a captain’s lash. As Ron walked along a promenade by the yachts, a well-dressed man enjoying breakfast alfresco raised a glass to him and called out: “Nice suit.”
Shortly after Ron began his morning journey, a silver PATH commuter train from New Jersey squealed to a stop inside the cavernous rail station five stories beneath the World Trade Center. Out poured work-bound men and women, young and not so young, a diverse and divergent group from every rung on the corporate ladder.
Jostled by the crowd, Port Authority senior administrative assistant Elaine Duch stepped onto the platform in her white canvas sneakers. She held a purse in one hand and a tote bag in the other. Her dark blond hair fell on the shoulders of her smart blue jacket. Elaine’s cherished gold skirt with a blue paisley print, the one she’d laid out the previous night after swimming with her twin sister, Janet, swished with every hurried step.
Emerging from the subterranean gloom, Elaine ordered her morning coffee,18 with a whisper of milk, at a pushcart whose owner knew that she would circle back, frowning, if she opened it at her desk and found it wasn’t just right. Sunlight streamed through the cathedral-like windows inside the North Tower lobby as Elaine boarded an express elevator that rocketed skyward and deposited her at the 78th floor sky lobby. There she caught a local elevator up to her destination: the 88th floor.
Elaine reached her desk in the Port Authority’s real estate department a few minutes before eight. Ringing telephones and the hustle of colleagues rushing to meet deadlines heralded her arrival. Elaine said quick hellos, dropped her bags, and turned on her computer. Swamped by work, Elaine had no time to change out of her sneakers; her strappy black leather sandals stayed buried inside her tote bag with a new gadget: her first cellphone.
Elaine sipped her coffee, the perfect shade of mahogany, and dived into her day.
A mile and a half to the east, FDNY Captain Jay Jonas wolfed down a bowl of Wheaties19 and gulped black coffee in the kitchen of the Ladder 6 firehouse in Chinatown. He’d been awake nearly all night, busy with runs, and now Jay could only hope for a quiet day ahead.
Around eight thirty, a half hour before the changeover to the day shift, Jay joked around with the two younger firefighters from a different Manhattan ladder company, Scott Kopytko and Doug Oelschlager, who’d worked the overnight shift with Jay and his men. The pair said goodbye, leaving Jay to finish his breakfast.
Alone with his thoughts, Jay prepared for another shift as a captain, eight years into the role, still number eighteen on the promotion list.
Working on short sleep after his movie premiere, aspiring actor and temp worker Chris Young arrived by subway20 at the World Trade Center shortly after eight. He’d already swung by the Midtown office of Marsh & McLennan to grab the box of materials he had to deliver.
Chris blinked at the precise instant a guard took his photo for a visitor ID badge. Clipped to his shirt, it allowed him access to the North Tower’s 99th floor, one of eight floors where the giant insurance and financial services company rented space. Chris had previously worked a different temp job in the South Tower, so as he pushed through a lobby turnstile toward the elevators he anticipated the stunning views awaiting him.
The 99th floor was already a hive of activity at the start of the workday. Chris quickly found his temporary boss, managing director Angela Kyte. He handed her the box, but his job wasn’t done. Angela told him that a separate shipment of presentation materials hadn’t arrived, so he should track it down.
With a few phone calls, Chris discovered that a planned delivery the previous night had gone awry, but the materials were now on their way. He volunteered to wait, knowing that both Angela and his other supervisor, Dominique Pandolfo, intended to spend the entire day in the North Tower. Their absence from the Midtown office meant that he’d have nothing to do all day if he left now and went back uptown.
Angela surprised Chris by saying that she’d deal with the late arrival herself. He could take the subway back to Midtown.
At 8:30 a.m., Cecilia Lillo was hungry.21
The Port Authority administrator had lately grumbled to her paramedic husband, Carlos, that she’d been gaining weight while he kept fit by jogging after work. In the semiuseful way of husbands everywhere, that morning Carlos had executed a plan. During their shared commute, he bought one bagel for them to split, instead of their usual order of a full bagel each. Carlos had chosen her favorite, plain with butter, but it wasn’t enough. Now, hours before lunchtime, Cecilia’s stomach growled.
In her office on the 64th floor of the North Tower, Cecilia decided that she’d head up to the 86th floor to deliver a stack of ID cards to colleagues there, shoot down to the 43rd floor to graze through the public cafeteria, then return to her desk fully fueled.
First, though, Cecilia bumped into Nancy Perez, a vivacious Cuban-born Port Authority supervisor. Cecilia admired Nancy, whose nature was to look after people. Among other outside pursuits, Nancy learned sign language to teach karate to deaf children. In a hallway outside a ladies’ room, the two friends made lunch plans for a Cuban restaurant and strategized about how Cecilia could balance her desire to become pregnant with her ambitions for promotion.
Before heading upstairs, Cecilia circled back to her desk to check an email.
By 8:30 a.m., Moussa “Moose” Diaz had already put in a full day.
He awoke at the usual awful time: 2:40 a.m.22 That was the price he paid to work as an emergency medical technician in New York City while raising his family atop a mountain in upstate Monroe, New York. This would be Moose’s second day back at work after a three-week vacation, part of which he spent visiting Virginia with his wife, Ericka, a waitress, and their sons, eleven-year-old Greg and five-year-old Harrison.
Moose was thirty-six, nearly six feet tall, with a shaved head and soulful brown eyes. He had olive skin, inherited from his Cuban father and his Palestinian/Haitian mother. His mother had chosen his name, the Arabic equivalent of Moses. Calm and thoughtful, happiest with his family, Moose showered and dressed in his dark blue uniform with emt in white letters over his heart and fdny across his broad back. He moved silently through the darkened house to avoid waking Ericka and their boys.
Fortified by a protein shake, Moose slid into his 1993 Toyota Corolla and turned on the news radio station 1010 WINS. Still sleepy, he settled into his hour-and-fifteen-minute country-to-city commute to Crescent Street and Thirty-First Avenue in the New York City borough of Queens, home to Battalion 49, Astoria Station, ten miles across the East River from the Twin Towers.
Moose arrived early for his 5 a.m. to 1 p.m. shift at the EMTs’ cramped underground workplace, nicknamed without affection the Submarine. The good news was that Moose and his colleagues rarely spent much time inside; they served a working-class district of housing projects and factories with one of the heaviest emergency call volumes in the city. Some days it seemed as though everyone in Astoria dialed 9-1-1.
With more than an hour until sunrise, Moose went through a mandatory routine of making sure his ambulance, 45 Adam, had enough gas, plenty of bandages, and a working defibrillator. His trauma bag was stuffed with stethoscopes, gauze, and airway kits. At 5 a.m. sharp, Moose and his partner of two years, Paul Adams, logged on to the radio network so dispatchers would know they were ready, willing, and available.
Paul was thirty-five, a powerfully built five foot nine with a crew cut and a wild edge: the yin to Moose’s tranquil yang. After his father’s death two decades earlier, Paul had emigrated to Queens from Glasgow, Scotland, with his mother and two younger sisters. Although he still spoke with a slight burr, Paul had become a full-throated New Yorker with a ready supply of profanities. Single, a city EMT for ten years, when he wasn’t working or playing pool, Paul could be found in the air, piloting small planes.
Moose and Paul piled into their ambulance for the day’s first call, a pregnant woman suffering from blood loss and a possible miscarriage. As a precaution, they called for backup from another Astoria crew, 49 Victor, an ambulance staffed by two paramedics: Roberto Abril and Cecilia Lillo’s husband, Carlos Lillo.
Moose felt especially glad to see Carlos, whom Moose considered a mentor. Carlos had been two years ahead of Moose at Long Island City High School, where Moose was a wrestler and Carlos captained the gymnastics team. When Moose first arrived on the job, other EMTs and paramedics kept a cool distance. Then one day in the station locker room, a high-pitched voice announced to all within earshot: “Oh my God. I can’t believe it—Moose is here!” Moose immediately became part of the squad.
Having delivered the pregnant woman to Elmhurst Hospital by 8:30 a.m., Moose and Paul stood near the hospital’s emergency room, waiting to get their paperwork signed. Carlos lingered nearby.
As he neared the Marriott, Ron Clifford felt the streets around him pulse with controlled chaos. On any given workday morning, a million or more23 people rushed about Lower Manhattan to command, serve, live in, or visit the main engine of the world’s financial system. Stock traders and executives, secretaries and technology whizzes, public servants and messengers, food servers and custodians, retail clerks and tourists jostled for position, all under the watchful eye of police officers, “New York’s Finest,” who patrolled in cars, on foot, and on horseback, and firefighters, “New York’s Bravest,” ready for whatever emergency the day might bring.
If money had an aroma, Lower Manhattan would have been as fragrant as a bakery. Instead it smelled of fast-moving people and slow-moving vehicles, asphalt and steel, coffee and steam, cologne and sweat, with salty high notes wafting from New York Harbor. Air brakes hissed in complaint as city buses disgorged passengers. Horns blared as taxis avoided men in polished brogues and sneaker-wearing women who, like Elaine Duch of the Port Authority, carried heels in their work bags. Another among the sneaker set was Jennieann Maffeo.
At forty years old, Jennieann stood five feet one,24 with luxuriant brown hair held in place by a metal clip. She wore blue pants, a pretty blouse, and a zippered sweater. New Balance running shoes cushioned her steps; her briefcase contained her work shoes alongside her wallet, a book, and a knitting project.
As Ron Clifford approached the Marriott, Jennieann waited nearby for the second leg of her commute in the shadow of the North Tower, at a bus stop on West Street. She intended to grab a New York Waterway shuttle bus to a Hudson River ferry pier. A brief cruise would leave her on a dock in Weehawken, New Jersey, close to her job as a computer systems analyst at the financial firm UBS PaineWebber.
Jennieann’s younger sister and best friend, Andrea, often teased her that the long commute would be the death of her. But Jennieann tolerated the ninety-minute trek every morning and every night so she could live with Andrea. Together, they cared for their mother, Frances, a cancer survivor, and their father, Sam, a stroke victim, in a three-family house in a working-class section of Brooklyn.
Single, a gifted soprano in her church choir, Jennieann threw herself into childcentric volunteer work. She raised money to fight juvenile diabetes, supported Make-a-Wish, and spent lunch hours reading to impoverished children. Earlier that morning she had interrogated Andrea, the literacy director for the New York City public schools, about the most economical way to buy art supplies for a needy New Jersey elementary school. Before leaving for work, the sisters made plans to shop that night at a discount store.
As Jennieann waited for the shuttle bus, she stood alongside a quiet colleague, Wai-ching Chung,25 a thirty-six-year-old UBS PaineWebber vice president. Wai-ching’s colleagues knew him as a man so devoted to protecting the firm’s databases that he rarely took a day off. A Hong Kong native, painfully shy, Wai-ching would get flustered if anyone at work so much as said hello. He lived with his parents and younger brother in Brooklyn. He spent his little free time with his sister and her family, including his niece Maurita Tam, a recent graduate of Amherst College.
When Maurita was a child, Wai-ching had amused her by blowing sheets of tissue paper into the air so she could watch them float gently to the ground. Now twenty-two, Maurita enjoyed the sight of rainbows26 that spanned the Manhattan skyline. At that very moment, Maurita was headed skyward, to her job as an executive assistant for the Aon Corporation on the 99th floor of the South Tower, a thousand feet above the shuttle stop where Wai-ching and Jennieann stood waiting.
Ron Clifford climbed the stone stairs to the Marriott, a twenty-two-story hotel dwarfed by the adjoining towers. A favorite of business travelers, the 843-room Marriott boasted meeting rooms fittingly named Dow, Stock, Bond, and Trader.27
Ron stepped into the beige marble lobby. With some time to kill before his 9 a.m. meeting, he ducked into a restroom for a peek in the mirror. He couldn’t explain why, but Ron took appreciative note of the bathroom’s antiseptic cleanliness. His hair in place, his bold yellow tie straight, Ron returned to the lobby. Still too early to call his meeting partner’s room, he pushed through revolving doors that connected the Marriott to the North Tower.
Despite his ambivalence about the towers, Ron enjoyed the soaring grandeur of their light-filled seven-story lobbies. He gazed through the windows onto the five-acre plaza. It occurred to him that the steel trident columns at the towers’ base resembled an upward branching design in stained glass windows created by Frank Lloyd Wright. The master architect called his pattern the Tree of Life.
Invigorated, Ron returned to the Marriott lobby. Diners clinked silverware and spoke in muffled tones over breakfast in the hotel’s Tall Ships Bar and Grill. Guests checking out bustled toward the front desk. Ron reminded himself of everything at stake and inhaled deeply.
By 8:41 a.m., on the North Tower’s 88th floor, Elaine Duch had caught up with her pile of work. She took a break to send a ritual morning email. She wrote her twin sister, Janet, that she’d arrived safely and reminded her of their yoga class that night. Elaine included an exasperated complaint about the first leg of her morning commute: “bus soooooooo28 crowded. . . . no a/c—i was roasting on bus, then i finally cooled.”
Minutes later, a receptionist called Elaine with momentous news: a messenger had arrived with ten brown cardboard boxes whose contents foretold the future of the World Trade Center. Inside the boxes were overdue lease documents that would enable the Port Authority to give two private real estate companies control of the complex for the next ninety-nine years. This was the paperwork that had delayed Elaine’s planned move to a new job in the agency’s audit department, based in an office across the river in Jersey City. The messenger’s arrival signaled not only the trade center’s historic turnover to private control, but also the final days of Elaine’s quarter century of work inside the North Tower. She’d miss her Port Authority friends, but not the building, whose magnificent views of Manhattan never compensated Elaine for its dizzying height.
Elaine grabbed a set of keys and walked briskly through a glass door that led to a vestibule down the hall from a bank of elevators. The messenger’s flatbed cart couldn’t fit through the glass door, so Elaine pointed him toward double-wide doors down the hall that served as the main entrance to the Port Authority real estate department.
In the Marriott lobby, Ron Clifford made final preparations for his big meeting. In his Chinatown firehouse, Captain Jay Jonas spooned his Wheaties. At Elmhurst Hospital, paramedic Carlos Lillo, EMT Moose Diaz, and their partners awaited their next call. On the 64th floor of the North Tower, Cecilia Lillo plotted her second breakfast. The World Trade Center hummed with the usual activity of a normal Tuesday morning in September. Roughly 8,900 people29 were at work or visiting the North Tower.
After being dismissed by his supervisor, Angela Kyte, on the 99th floor, temp worker and actor Chris Young retraced his steps to a local elevator. He rode it down to the 78th floor sky lobby, then switched to one of ten giant express elevators to the ground floor.
Alone in an elevator car built to carry up to fifty-five people, Chris felt tired from his movie premiere the night before, but upbeat about an easy workday ahead. He recognized a rare opportunity to test a childhood theory that claimed a person who jumps inside a high-speed elevator feels as weightless as an astronaut in space.
Chris jumped once. Nothing. A second jump, higher. Still nothing.
Chris jumped a third time, higher still. The time was 8:46 a.m.
At that moment, terrorist pilot Mohamed Atta gripped the controls inside the cockpit of American Airlines Flight 11. Thirty-two minutes had elapsed since the takeover began. After flying the Boeing 767 the full length of Manhattan island, Atta pointed the hijacked jet toward his target: the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
Flight attendant Amy Sweeney huddled in a rear jump seat. Using an Airfone, she described the hijacking to Boston-based flight service manager Michael Woodward.
“Something is wrong,” Amy told Michael. “We’re in a rapid descent. . . . We are all over the place.”
Michael asked her to look out the window and describe what she saw.
“Oh my God!” Amy said. “We are way too low!”