BY MARY REINHOLZ | On that unforgettable day 15 years ago, I was heading to the News Bar on University Place between E. 12 and 13th Sts., focused on sending out a few résumés but wondering why the hell there was a ring of fire around one of the twin towers at the World Trade Center. The towers were still intact and I could see them clearly at around 8:50 in the morning. So I asked a kid with binoculars who stood outside the bar to explain the situation.
“A plane hit the tower,” he said quietly.
“A plane? You mean a small light aircraft like a Cessna?” I inquired in disbelief.
“No, a jetliner,” he said.
“A jetliner,” I mused. I entered the News Bar, which then was an Internet cafe with a row of TV’s overhead. There was only one other person, a male Brit, working at a computer.
“A kid outside says a jetliner crashed into the World Trade Center,” I told him. “That couldn’t be an accident.”
“Not bloody likely,” he said grimly, not looking up. We worked the keyboards in silence, two slaves of New York.
The television sets were on but there was no immediate information about a jetliner or the fact that the North Tower had been hit first by the hijacked plane. Then, suddenly, I heard a newscaster shouting about a terror attack against the U.S. and saw images flashing on the TV screens of smoke billowing in lobbies and people running out of buildings in the Financial District. I rushed outside to the street.
“A second plane hit the other tower,” the kid with binoculars said.
Trying to be the enterprising freelance journo, I started running down University Place and passed Washington Square Park, soon crossing Canal St. The windows on the South Tower were shimmering in the bright sunlight like the scales of a snake. Close to 10 a.m. I saw the building shake, its middle section bulge and blacken. It pancaked down in seconds. A massive cloud of debris billowed up from many blocks away and shot into the streets.
Young working people walked past me, heading north, some crying. I remember thinking dry-eyed and ice-cold crazy: “What’s the matter with these people? Why don’t they buck up?” The outer chaos obliterated the inner turmoil, at least for a few moments.
Then I looked down. I was wearing sandals with no socks. The cautionary side of me said: Get out of this spot or your feet will get sliced into bloody stumps with flying glass.
Feeling guilty for my cowardice, I walked back toward University Place. A gaunt hipster stripped off his shirt and set up a card table, asking for donations.
“Did you see what they did to our skyline?” he shouted at passersby, his voice indignant and veering toward hysteria. “We look like Milwaukee now!”
That’s when I walked over to the New York Health and Racquet Club on E. 13th St. to see if anyone knew anything about the North Tower.
“The North Tower fell,” said a receptionist.
That night, after standing for hours trying to give blood without success at Bellevue Hospital and answering worried phone calls from friends and relatives in California, I attended a vigil at Union Square. It would become, as a Facebook friend noted late on Sunday, “Grief Central,” a place where people from all over the country converged to bring flowers, care packages and lit candles. Friends and relatives of missing people put up pictures of their loved ones on all available spaces, with notes asking strangers for help in finding them.
Other people wrote slogans and poems on signs, among them “September 1, 1939,” by British poet W. H. Auden, a towering figure in 20th-century literature and onetime East Village resident. That poem, much quoted after 9/11, including on National Public Radio, marks the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany. It contains lines that suggest the dawning of a new and perilous era as “the unmentionable odor of death/offends the September night.”
Another widely quoted line from that poem — “We must love one another or die” — was used in a Lyndon B. Johnson speech and a commercial when L.B.J. was running for president against Republican Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona in 1964. It came with the famous image of a girl picking daisies before a nuclear explosion. Auden, scholars say, had come to loathe the poem. But he was furious that it was used for political purposes without his permission, according to the late British writer Christopher Hitchens.
Even so, the words of the dead poet still resonate with the living in September 2016.
