Windows on the World - then, and now

Ten years - it's not long enough to heal the scars of that day. But it may be long enough to see how spirits so wounded on September 11 have begun to lift again. Martha Teichner reports:

"It's much homier being down, you know, at this level, and really being able to see something as naturally beautiful as Central Park," said Michael Lomonaco.

The difference between the view out these windows and Windows on the World is telling.

"At Windows, the view from the 107th floor was otherworldly, it was beyond description," he said.

Lomonaco was executive chef at Windows on the World, the restaurant that occupied the 106th and 107th floors of the North Tower of the World Trade Center - so high up that when it opened in 1976, a critic wrote,."everything to hate and fear is invisible."

We know now, that wasn't true.

Ten years after 9/11, are we all closer to the ground somehow, still seeking comfort? It took Lomonaco five years to find a reassuring space for his new restaurant, Porterhouse N.Y.

"I wake up every day and I'm really grateful to be here," he said, "And at the same time, I dedicate my restaurant work to my lost colleagues, because it was what they were doing on that day that I do today."

Lomonaco is alive because he decided not to go straight up to his office that morning. When the first plane hit, he was able to get out.

In 2001, he told Teichner, "I saw a fireball. I'm completely sorry that I witnessed any of this. I mean to say that it was just a terrible thing to see. I immediately began to make a mental note of who I thought would be there - Who's there? Who's up there?"

You can watch Martha Teichner's 2001 report by clicking on the video player below.

It was a question that ricocheted around the city in the days after the attack - a question repeated until there were no words left, only names on lists ... faces on walls smiling snapshot smiles.

In 2001 we followed Elizabeth Ortiz, human resources director for Windows on the World, and her assistant as they searched.

Until a few weeks ago, she'd never been back to the places she'd looked, those streets of sorrow.

"I don't know that you can put into words how difficult it was,' Ortiz said today. "I mean, there's hundreds, or, I mean, there's thousands of families that had to deal with it differently. But I think for us, there was a sense of responsibility of working with the families ... you had to be strong for the families. But, you know, I couldn't be alone at night, because it was just too ... scary, too sad."

Just struggling to comprehend that "missing" meant dead. Out of 450 Windows employees, 72 died.

Two days after the attack, Eulogia Hernandez couldn't speak. Her husband Norberto was a pastry chef at Windows on the World.

Family members talk about Norberto: "He called his sister at 9:00, 9:03, he said there was an explosion in the building in front of them."

Norberto Hernandez was from Puerto Rico. Banquet waiter Muhamed Saladeen Chowdhury was from Bangladesh. Windows employees came from more than 60 nations.

The end of this terrible story would bring the beginning of another, better one: Almost exactly 48 hours after Chowdhury died, his wife Baraheen Ashrafi gave birth to the son he would never see, Farqad - the first of the post-9/11 babies.

Michael Lomonaco couldn't get Farqad out of his mind, as he helped set up the Windows of Hope family relief fund. It raised $22 million to provide emergency assistance to the families of food service workers who died in the attack, and to educate their children through college.

The fund pays Farqad Chowdhury's tuition at a private school in Oklahoma City. Baraheen Ashrafi moved nearby to be close to her sister. In 2004, she became a U.S. citizen.

"It's my country now," she told Teichner. "My kids born here, my husband, you know, his soul and his body's in here. So I started feeling love for staying in here."

While her husband was alive, she wore Western clothes. But after his death, she began wearing a headscarf.

"I'm practicing Muslim - why don't I, you know, cover myself?" she said. "It's very spiritual, you can say. It came in my mind."

There are photographs of muhamed saladeen chowdhury throughout the house..his daughter, fahina is now nearly 16..in a public school program for gifted students..she didn't want to be interviewed and hasn't told her classmates about her father, because she doesn't want to be known, in her words, as a "9/11 kid."

But for her mother, every day is 9/11, still.

"Is it easier for you that people don't know and talk to you about 9/11" Teichner asked.

"You know, still, I have the issue," Baraheen said, crying. "I still, I can't hold my tears, and talking about my husband, I don't want to face it, you know, crying. So I prefer not to know."

"So it's still that hard, ten years later, it's still that hard for you?"

"Yes," she replied.

Eulogia Hernandez said, "I never stopped crying. I always crying, but about two or three years ago, I have to stop."

That was when Hernandez finally admitted to herself that her husband Norberto really was dead.

"I have to stop thinking that my husband was alive, because that was just in my mind, so one day I stop and say, 'No, he's not coming back,'" she said.

He was actually found - piece by piece - in the rubble at Ground Zero. He was buried in Puerto Rico. But all these years later, his wife has not buried her pain.

"Nobody and no one in this world is going to destroy us again," Eulogia said.

"So your family is everything?" Teichner asked.

"Uh huh. My family is my life."

Catherine Hernandez was 20, her sister Tatiana 14, when their father died. On Friday evenings they still get together at their mother's house.

"He always comes up in the conversations," Catherine said. "At one point or another then, after the jokes and the fun and stories are over, you just go back to, 'Well, he's not here.'"

Catherine became a N.Y.C. police officer, because of 9/11: "After I saw that tragedy, those officers that lost their lives and those firefighters, I always thought maybe if I were there, I could have helped. So I'm going to help."

Tatiana is studying to be a commercial pilot - also because of 9/11: "The pilot that crashed in Pennsylvania, I see him as a hero, because he didn't allow them to crash into the White House. So that's what pushed me to do something like that."

Next Sunday, the whole Hernandez family will be at Ground Zero, as they have been before, when Norberto's name is read.

For the survivors of Windows on the World, like Elizabeth Ortiz, there are 9/11 rituals. "The last couple of years, I actually sat across from the site, and I'd just sit there for like an hour by myself," Ortiz said. "I try to go through each face, I try to go through each name in my head. It's like that list is burned in my memory forever. Because that's what it's about."

Michael Lomonaco, who wished he'd never seen what happened here, now never wants to forget.

"I want to retain that memory, and I, you know, to never forget means to try to keep a grasp on the details," he said.

"And you want that, why?" Teichner asked.

"Because frozen in time in a way, is the memory of my friends and colleagues."

And what optimism looked like from the 107th floor.

No restaurant is planned for the top of the new World Trade Center.