There’s a spot in downtown Newark, N.J., on a hill overlooking the Passaic River, where you’ve got a direct line of sight into lower Manhattan.
Over the Passaic, beyond Jersey City and past the Hudson River.
Twenty-five years ago tomorrow, I stood on that spot, a hill, and watched the Twin Towers burn.
That spot was less than a block away from WBGO, the NPR member station where I was working as a reporter in 2001.
Earlier that morning, I had just come back from my morning run in the small suburban Jersey town where I lived. I was in my kitchen, grabbing a bite to eat. I had the radio on in the background, but my ears perked up when I heard the local news anchor breaking into regular programming, talking about a fire burning in one of the towers.
He shared that there were reports that a small plane had crashed into it. I grabbed the remote and turned on the small TV in the kitchen. I put on one of the local stations that had their news chopper on the scene, providing live footage of the smoke billowing out of the skyscraper.
Moments later, I watched, dumbstruck, as a jet sliced into the upper floors of the second tower, the plane disappearing as a massive fireball erupted.
I grabbed my reporter go bag and rushed out the door.
My first instinct? To head to lower Manhattan. As I was walk-running to the train station, I called my boss, the news director. “I’m heading into New York,” I said. The Port Authority Trans-Hudson train ran directly to the World Trade Center. I’d be there in no time.
“No,” he said. “Come to the station. We’re going to need you here.”
And that’s how, later in the morning on Sept. 11, 2001, I found myself gazing at the thick black smoke and dust obscuring the World Trade Center.
I wasn’t alone.
There were others around me staring in disbelief at what was happening before their eyes. I interviewed a few of them. I don’t remember what they shared at this point, but then I came to a man I'll never forget. He looked to be, maybe, in his 30s. He was pale. He looked ashen. Before I raised my mic to ask him for his reactions, he shared with me that he was trying to call his wife.
His wife who worked in Manhattan.
His wife whose commute took her through the World Trade Center PATH Station.
His wife who had dropped their daughter off at a day care center in the base of one of the towers at the World Trade Center.
The circuits were overwhelmed. He couldn’t get through to her.
I put down my recorder and mic. I pulled out my cellphone. I asked him for her phone number. I joined him in trying.
We kept trying and trying and trying, but our calls would not go through.
I lost track of time. Maybe it was 10 minutes? Maybe longer.
I had to get back to work — I was needed on the air back at the station. I picked up my mic and recorder. I told the man I hoped everyone was safe and sound, that I was sure that his family must have gotten to safety and that they were OK.
It was hard to tell in that moment, from that spot on the hill, through all the smoke and dust, but the South Tower had already collapsed. The North Tower would soon follow.
I never found out if his wife and daughter escaped, they got out, whether they were safe.
I will probably never know.
The rest of that day and the days that followed were a blur. I spent the first half of each day out in the field reporting and each afternoon in the studio, as the local news host. When the North Tower fell, so did the transmitters for many of New York City’s TV and FM radio stations, including WNYC, the NPR news and information station for the tri-state region. My Ideastream colleague, Amy Eddings, worked as a reporter and news host there at the time. She was reporting at Ground Zero when a cop told her it wasn't safe to be there. Every year, when the anniversary comes around, we find ourselves sharing stories about that day. On the 20th anniversary, we recorded the conversation.
When the towers fell, all those stations were all knocked off the air.
AT WBGO across the river, we were in the midst of a fundraising drive at the time of the 9/11 attacks. At that moment, we halted the drive and shifted gears. WBGO was a NPR station with a jazz and news format. We switched to NPR’s feed of national news programming and deployed our small but mighty team of full-time and freelance reporters across New York and New Jersey. We worked to help fill the news and information void that was created when radio transmissions in Manhattan went down.
I powered through the following days and weeks. I knew we had a job to do and that people all across the metro area were counting on us. That first week, I travelled around North Jersey, finding people where they gathered to grieve, to vent, to share their shock over the attacks and the loss.
The Eagle Rock Reservation situated on the First Watchung Mountain in Essex County provides a clear line of site to lower Manhattan. People gathered in an eerie quiet, staring off at the massive cloud of dust that hung in the air days later where the World Trade Center towers once stood.
In addition to our daily news coverage, WBGO produced a half-hour news special that aired every Friday evening. We covered the news of the week, everything from the most important stories of the moment to the moments of joy.
Needless to say, there was no joy that week. We had digested a lot of tough news, and still had many more questions than answers.
The show usually was recorded and ready for air by early Friday afternoon. To me, it made sense to break format and host the show live so we could quickly pivot should new developments warrant it. I was proud of the work our team did.
I saved a recording of the show. I went back and listened to it this week. It was probably the first time in 24 years.
In addition to hosting the program, I contributed several interviews to the show, one with a structural engineer who’d written a book about the construction of the World Trade Center, another with our news director and our morning host, who both were on-air at the time the attacks took place. I used some “tape” I had gathered during the stop at Eagle Rock to close out the show.
That recording was a conversation I had with Robert, from Livingston, N.J., a suburban community a little further to the west in Essex County. The day after the attacks, the large mountain-top park was closed to vehicle traffic, but like many others, Robert had walked into the observation area to get a firsthand look at the devastation.
He told me he was lucky. His dad was in lower Manhattan at the time of the attacks, but after a few anxious hours, Robert heard that his dad was safe. All of his friends and family were accounted for and safe. But what was he going to tell his young daughter about what had happened?
“I tried to explain to my daughter last night, who’s seven, she’s in the second grade,” Robert shared with me. “Whenever we go to the city, she goes ‘there’s the Twin Towers’… It’s just two buildings. But trying to explain that to a seven-year-old and have them understand and not frighten them is difficult. I’m not sure. I’m saving all the newspapers, and everything, so that some day, explain to them, what happened, when they can better understand. “
As I wrapped up my conversation with Robert, he offered that, as an adult, it was something he was having trouble dealing with.
That half-hour program, coming at the end of a very tough week, gave me the chance to share what our team had learned, the stories we had collected and all the uncertainty that remained.
I am a journalist, and I did my job.
But 25 years later, I’m still reflecting on what happened that day and still figuring out how to deal with it.
"The Cut" is featured in Ideastream Public Media's weekly newsletter, The Frequency Week in Review. To get The Frequency Week in Review, The Daily Frequency or any of our newsletters, sign up on Ideastream's newsletter subscription page.
