It was a beautiful sunny cloudless morning. I was on my way to work walking down the same sidewalk I walked for the past 2 years. I lived on South 11th in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the neighborhood was a mixture of upstart artists (who later became known as hipsters), generations of Puerto Rican families and Hasidic Orthodox Jews (the guys with the black top hats and curly q’s). A strange cultural mixture that co-existed without tension and without real interaction, only in Brooklyn. You would rarely see this group together unless waiting for a bus but this morning was different. A crowd was gathered at the corner gazing and pointing across the Hudson River in the direction of Manhattan. Talking to each other some even hugging. I was curious as to what they were all so enthralled by, it was New York and the unexpected was expected. Before I reached the corner I received a call from a friend in Amsterdam, Holland. “Are you ok?”, they asked. “Yea, what’s up?”, I replied. “A plane crashed into one of the towers!”, they explained. I hit the corner and looked to see one of my twins smoking like a cigarette. They were my twins. I woke up to them from my bedroom window. I gazed at them at night while sitting outside my window alley staircase. They were iconic, they were symbolic, they were my twins. As others sat in shock, the videographer in me jumped at the opportunity. I ran back home and went to the rooftop of my apartment building. I set up my camera and hit record. I was excited at the visual significance of the shot. As I watched the smoke billow from the tower, I saw then heard a boom in the second building. At first it looked as though a small bomb had exploded on the side then the spark turned into another endless billowing cloud of smoke. Suddenly my beautiful NY skyline had turned into a New Jersey factory yard. Two towering chimneys cascading grey gushes of smoke across the wide blue sky. It seemed in the next instant, she fell. Crumbling, falling, descending from her Heavenly prominence to the earth below. As I stepped back from the camera, numb, clearly in shock, I noticed a crowd had gathered on the rooftop and were around me asking me questions, crying, pointing. Among the inaudible chatter, someone close to me clearly said, “my God all those people in that building”. Over the next months I was dispatched to “Ground Zero”, gas mask and camera, to film the ruins. Days of watching the brave rescue workers trudging through the rubble searching for remains. Nights of watching hundreds huddled by candlelight with pictures and written prayers. The endless tears, the fear, the shame, the anger, the hatred, the indomitable attitude that as a country, as a city ,as a people we would not be intimidated. We would all rise from those ashes and unite as one country indivisible to stand for liberty and justice. We mourned, we cried, we hugged, we rallied and we promised to never forget.
Posted on: Thu, 11 Sep 2014 19:18:18 +0000
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