On the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on New York, many people are reflecting on where they were when it happened.
Owen Sound native Larry O’Connor said that before heading to work on that Tuesday morning, he decided to take some time to enjoy the clear, sunny weather by taking a walk with his wife before heading to his office in Manhattan.
O’Connor grew up in Owen Sound before eventually moving to New York in 1989. At the time of the terror attacks where two airplanes hit the Twin Towers, he was on his way to his office, which was just across the Westside Highway from the World Trade Center.
“It was such a beautiful day, that I said ‘You know what? I just might be a little bit late for work today.’ My wife and I went for a walk, and I said that I’m not going to take the train that I normally take, which is the R Train by name, and it goes right under the World Trade Center. So, oddly enough, I took a different train, which took me some three blocks north of the World Trade Center, which is plenty fine enough to get me to work on time to be able to do my job.”
He was heading to his office at the World Financial Center, where he was one of two editors for a weekly edition for what was then the Asian Wall Street Journal, and Tuesday was their deadline day for the weekly edition.
What O’Connor didn’t know at the time was that slight delay in getting to the office, and taking a different train to work, would change his life forever.
“When I arrived at the subway station, I notice that there was a line of people that were at a payphone… because in 2001, there were payphones everywhere, and [they were] at the entrance and exit of the station and I thought that was strange, because I’d never seen that before. And it was at that moment, I heard what sounded like a sonic boom. I said to myself ‘I didn’t know there was an airshow in New York’, because I couldn’t begin to think about what could be as loud as all that.”
What he was hearing was the second tower being hit by an airline jet.
As he headed up the stairs to the street level, a lady was on her way down into the station, and she was telling people that a plane had struck one of the Towers.
At the time, he’d thought that she meant a small personal craft, like a Cessna, may have gone off-course and that was that. He made his exit to the street, and saw other people standing and looking up toward the Twin Towers, at which point he followed suit.
He saw the dust and smoke cloud.
It was at that point that he had learned that no work would be done that day, and that people had to evacuate the area.
O’Connor remembered that the plan at the time was to head north. He said it felt counter-intuitive, as he lived in Brooklyn, which is to the south.
“As I’m walking along, I came upon a jet engine that was smoking on the road,” he recalled. “And I said to myself, ‘that is no Cessna.’”
“We didn’t know what was coming next, you know, it was like ‘do we go across the Brooklyn Bridge?’ and someone said ‘Well how do we know the Brooklyn Bridge isn’t a target?’ We didn’t.”
He said that he was lucky to evacuate from the area, while many others were not.
“I think the people who experience and lived through 9/11 have changed and everything’s changed, and that’s different. Like when I walk to my [local] grocery store, and there’s terrifically loud bang, like there is in New York a lot… and now I’ll be walking with my wife, holding her hand, and I will literally start like “Oh my god!” and I internalize, probably my 9/11 experience in ways that she’s sensitive to, and it’s more about how it is that when you say a question like “Where were you on 9/11?’ we have really good friends who have lost people here, so it’s a question that has sort of a very personal dimension.”
O’Connor said that he knows how lucky he is to have survived, adding that he knows that his neighbourhood played a big role as his safety net.
“It’s a very diverse, progressive place, so consequently, in terms of the change I saw in my everyday, I’d have to say that by and large, I was convinced that this had gotten to be a better place to live than it was before, because people I think came together. 9/11 was a place where people in New York, anyway — there might have been a lot of anger about ‘Oh, we have to get back at the people who perpetrate this horrible terrorist act’, but by and large, I loved my life before, and I love my life differently after.”
On the day of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, at total of 2,977 people died across four plane crashes: 2,753 people died in the attacks on the World Trade Center, 189 people died when a third plane struck the Pentagon, and 44 people died when a fourth plane crashed in Pennsylvania.