Remembering 9/11: Close Calls on Wall Street
I remember September 11, 2001 vividly -- I can relive it in slow motion, starting with a morning run on the treadmill in my house in Providence, RI. CNBC reported that an airplane had hit one of the World Trade Center towers. I jumped off the treadmill and made a bunch of frantic phone calls. You see, my connection to New York was deeper than being born and raised there -- I had actually worked at 4 World Trade Center, one of the smaller buildings adjacent to the Twin Towers and home for many years of the Commodity Exchange of New York, where I got my start on Wall Street.
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I quickly went through a mental Rolodex -- "who works nearby? What firms are actually in the WTC?" I was able to make a few early calls to make sure that my closest relatives and friends were OK, but then we lost contact. There were bits of data that got through in the beginning -- Mark in London had learned that three other friends were not in the building, but traveling on the West coast; an old trading buddy living in Florida said that our former clerk had been in the subway, one stop away from the site; and my friend's husband who worked at one of the smaller WTC buildings had not gone into work at all -- his first day off in more than a year.
The randomness of the event hit home later in the day, when my father called, weeping...there were children of his friends from the American Stock Exchange (where he worked for 30 years), who likely perished. "You know, that could have been you and Evan (my brother-in-law, who also worked on the Commodities Exchange)." When we were young traders on the COMEX, Evan and I ate breakfast at Windows on the World, the restaurant atop the Twin Towers, at least once a week -- they had a great deal on breakfast and parking.
As the days and weeks wore on and more information emerged, it turned out that I knew about a dozen people who died in the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. I felt lonely in New England, a weird New Yorker who couldn't quite snap out of my funk the way the others around me could. The events of that day and its aftermath reminded me how connected I was to the city and to Wall Street, although I hadn't lived or worked there since the early 1990s. On some level, these feelings were the first inkling that something was missing in my life and that something was New York. While others fled the city after 9-11, I did the exact opposite and finally returned to the city I love. On sad anniversaries like this one, or at any other time, there is no other place I would rather be.
