The Masses Will Run

I vividly remember walking away from the World Trade Center disaster.

Yes, I was there.

I was two blocks away and had just started my activities related to my job, at around 8:00 A.M.  I was a union carpenter who commuted from NJ every morning to work in either uptown or downtown, depending on the scheduled client.

That day, the company I worked for , Steelcase Architechural, had two accounts in Manhatten. My partner and I drove in together, parked my car at the Port Authority, and took a cab to our first chosen contract, with the cabbie using Broadway as our main route.

About 7:30 we passed Chase Bank (on Broadway).  We had a small contract job to complete there, and opted to end our pre-planned early "get away" with that job.  Chase Bank, by the way, is a stones throw from Tower 2, World Trade.  During the ride, my early morning gaze through the cab window focused (as it always did) on those two gothic square pyramids as we passed.

 

So we drove away from the Twin Towers and bypassed Chase Bank, which could easily have been our first choice of construction sites to visit.  As it turns out, the Chase Bank branch was affected by the destruction, and has since moved out.

2 Broadway, MTA (mass transit authority) downtown, 5 blocks from the World Trade Center, was our dropoff.  My day was moving along as typically as all of my other days, as I shuffled from the cab seat to the curb, retrieved my tools from the cab's trunk, and proceeded to lug my tools through the MTA's elaborate lobby.

As constuction personel, we were only allowed to use the freight elevators to transport our tools to the designated worksite floor.  And it was not until I stepped off the elevator on 28th floor of the MTA building, did I feel the elevator shake.  At that time, I thought it was just the elevator.  Now I realize it was the entire building.