Every year when September 11th arrives, time bends. No matter how many years pass, the morning air always carries me back to lower Manhattan, to the corridors of the World Trade Center, and to the days that permanently reshaped the trajectory of our country, our city, and my own life.
For me, the memories are not abstract newsreels or distant history. They are tangible, personal, and deeply rooted in places I once walked every day.
Above the Clouds: The 97th Floor
From 1989 to 1992, I worked on the 97th floor of the North Tower for Fiduciary Trust International. At that height, you lived in a different atmosphere altogether. I remember looking out the wide glass windows and seeing low cloud cover rolling by below my feet. Every so often, helicopters or small aircraft would cruise past beneath my line of sight, an immediate reminder of just how high up we were suspended in the sky.
One of my colleagues had a gravity ball suspended from the ceiling. On windy days, you would watch that ball hang at an angle. Your eyes played tricks on you: it looked as though the string had somehow gone crooked, but the truth was far more sobering. The ball was pointing straight down; it was the building itself that was swaying with the wind.
Looking down at the ant-sized streets below, I used to let my imagination wander. “What would happen if this building ever fell?” It was the kind of idle, impossible thought you quickly dismiss because it belongs strictly in the realm of unthinkable fiction.
When I moved on from Fiduciary in 1992 to work further uptown at Group Health Incorporated on 34th Street, the towers remained in my rearview mirror. Just a year later, in 1993, a bomb tore through the World Trade Center garage. I remember seeing the smoke on the news and thinking how close I had been: I was just working in that building last year.
Yet the ties connecting me to those towers never truly broke.
Crossings and Coincidences
Over the years, the World Trade Center kept reappearing in my life in unexpected ways.
One afternoon, I ran into an old college buddy of mine from the City College of New York track team. We had both graduated, and Jerome was working security at Macy’s to pay the bills, but his eyes lit up when he told me about his real passion: he was going to culinary school. He was determined to become a professional chef. Just a month or two before September 2001, Jerome realized that dream—he landed a job as a chef at Windows on the World, at the very top of the North Tower.
That same summer, in late July or August, my wife and I attended the wedding of good friends. Their reception took place high above the skyline, right there at Windows on the World. It was an evening filled with laughter, celebration, and breathtaking panoramic views of the city we loved.
None of us could fathom what was coming just weeks later.
Tuesday Morning, September 11, 2001
By the fall of 2001, I was working as a systems engineer for Nortel, covering enterprise communications with a major focus on the financial sector.
On the morning of Tuesday, September 11th, I was scheduled to attend a 9:00 a.m. meeting with Deutsche Bank, whose offices were located at 7 World Trade Center. Under normal circumstances, I would have been on-site in lower Manhattan. But life had intervened in a quiet, ordinary way: my mother, who usually babysat my two-year-old daughter, had traveled back home down south. So to care for my daughter, I decided to work from home and attend the meeting remotely.
I was in the middle of feeding my daughter breakfast and joined the conference bridge about a minute late. When my line clicked in, the tone was not business as usual. People were talking frantically about a plane hitting the World Trade Center.
Someone on the call said, “Ed, turn on the news to see what’s happening.”
I hurried to turn on the television. It was roughly 9:03 a.m. Almost the very moment the screen flickered to life, I watched in real-time as a second airliner struck the South Tower. The initial news chatter had suggested an errant, small commuter plane. Seeing that second impact, I said out loud: this was no accident, and that was no small plane.
The Deutsche Bank meeting dissolved instantly as people evacuated 7 World Trade.
I stood in my living room, mouth open in disbelief, watching thick black smoke pour across the blue sky. Down on the floor, my two-year-old daughter was playing peacefully, completely unaware that the world outside our window was unraveling.
Panic quickly took over. My wife worked uptown in Midtown, but her job in the financial sector frequently took her to meetings downtown. My brother worked for a law firm in lower Manhattan. I dialed their numbers repeatedly, but the circuits were jammed; no calls would go through. The feeling of helplessness was suffocating. Across the day, shock compounded into horror and anger as the towers fell, another plane struck the Pentagon, and United 93 crashed into a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
The Call to Duty: When Infrastructure Becomes a Lifeline
In everyday corporate life, it can be easy to lose sight of the bigger picture. When you spend your days configuring telecommunications hardware, engineering voice pathways, and debugging networks, it often feels like routine technical plumbing. You rarely pause to think about how your daily labor connects to society at large.
The days following September 11th erased any doubt.
Because the Twin Towers collapsed onto the West Street switching hub, critical telecom arteries across lower Manhattan were wiped out. As a primary vendor for the City of New York, Nortel was called upon immediately. I was tasked with designing a PBX, a voice system to provide telephone services to the Office of Emergency Management (OEM) command center—stationed at an undisclosed location—where the OEM, NYPD, FDNY, federal agencies, the military, and emergency medical personnel were setting up triage.
The phone system had to be rushed in from Canada so by Thursday morning, I had to report directly to the command center to commission, configure, and bring the platform online alongside other Nortel personnel, city leaders and military personnel. The atmosphere was charged with intensity, exhaustion, and singular focus.
On Friday, another urgent mandate came down. One of my primary accounts was the New York Stock Exchange. The NYSE had lost its primary connectivity through the damaged infrastructure downtown. A directive had come straight from leadership: the New York Stock Exchange must ring the opening bell on Monday morning. It was not merely an economic necessity; it was a non-negotiable symbol to the nation and the world that New York was still standing, that our resolve could not be broken.
I remember being put in the back of a police cruiser, siren blaring, flying down a vacant West Side Highway under escort to help assess the damage and lay out the recovery plan. We went into marathon sessions, mapping out bypass routes and emergency trunk lines to restore dial tones and data feeds.
We didn’t sleep much that weekend. But when the bell rang on Monday morning, the exchange was live.
Working at the emergency hub over the ensuing months earned our team a letter from the mayor and an award from Nortel but the real lesson had already settled deep within me: what we do every day matters.
Most of the time, the systems that keep modern society running are invisible. Nobody notices the dial tone, the network route, or the engineer behind the console until the world stops turning. But when a crisis hits, those wires, switches, and lines become the very lifeline over which rescue operations are coordinated, families are reunited, and a shattered city begins to pick itself up. I realized that my technical skills were not just a way to earn a living; they were my civic contribution when my community needed them most.
The Lost Souls Board
Yet, pride in that recovery work is always tempered by an ache that never goes away.
At the command sites and relief staging areas, there was a designated wall that people quietly called the “Lost Souls” board, covered in missing flyers, photographs, and hand-written phone numbers posted by desperate families.
Walking past that board, I saw the face and name of my college friend. The joy we had shared at our chance meeting at Macy’s and the joy over his new culinary career at Windows on the World had ended in unthinkable tragedy.
And then there were the names from my old firm, Fiduciary Trust. The company occupied the 94th through the 98th floors of the North Tower—right where the first impact hit. Ninety seven former colleagues, people whose faces I had passed in the halls and shared elevators with on the 97th floor, never made it down.
Carrying the Memory Forward
Every September 11th, I carry both of these realities side-by-side.
I carry profound grief for my college friend, for the colleagues at Fiduciary Trust, and for every innocent life cut short that morning. I remember the fragile twists of fate that kept me home with my daughter, and the agonizing hours spent hoping for a phone call that my loved ones were safe.
And I remember the collective spirit of the days that followed. In the face of devastating darkness, thousands of ordinary people—first responders, transit workers, sanitation crews, and engineers working quietly behind the scenes—stood shoulder-to-shoulder to put our city back on its feet.
It taught me that no work is trivial. Whether we configure a cloud platform, cook in a kitchen, patrol a street, or build a data network…, our daily efforts form the invisible fabric of our society. On September 11th, we honor the lives lost by refusing to take that fabric—or one another—for granted.
