September 11, 2001

On that day and in the week that followed, New Yorkers found their strength in family. Immediate, extended, and accidental families.


By Herbert Hadad

Let me start by telling you about what might be the last blissfully carefree day I’ll ever have.

We sat in the right centerfield bleachers—my sons, Edward Salim and Charles Aram; their friend Mark from Providence; and I—on Sunday, September 9, 2001. The Yankees played with aplomb; the Red Sox struggled. It was Mark’s first visit to the great stadium, and he looked worried. “I don’t expect the Sox to win,” he said. “I just hope they don’t lose by too much.”

We ate buns I’d brought from Chinatown, drank Cokes and bottled water. The late-summer sun baked us red and brown. Three burly young Sox fans who had driven down from Maine sat behind us. They became friendly in a reticent New England kind of way and asked for our ticket stubs as souvenirs. Charles and Mark left after eight innings. “I want to stay,” Edward said. “I like it at the end when Frank Sinatra sings ‘New York, New York.’”

The final score was 8-2. I thanked Edward for the ticket, and we kissed good-bye on the subway, which took me to Grand Central and the train home. Gazing lazily at the Hudson River as we traveled north, I relished thoughts of how much our boys loved their city, living and working in it. My wife, Evelyn, drove me home from the station. Pleasure lit her face as I described the afternoon and the happiness of our sons. We read the papers, dined, watched the television news, and slept well.


Emerging from the Brooklyn Bridge–City Hall station just before 9 a.m. on Tuesday, September 11, from the same No. 4 that had taken us to Yankee Stadium, I joined a large pocket of people, many of whom I knew, staring up at the twin towers of the World Trade Center, five blocks south of my office. Profuse billows of gray smoke, filled with sheets of paper floating like large confetti, blew east toward Brooklyn from one of the towers.

“A small plane must have hit the building,” someone said. “Maybe the pilot got lost or had a heart attack.” It was a manageable thought. It was what we wanted to believe. I waited in line to buy my usual coffee from the Russian husband and wife in the yellow wagon and turned back to look up.

An enormous orange-red fireball suddenly erupted from the second tower. It took a moment to comprehend that it was real. The blast’s horrible tongue seemed to lick the sky in slow motion, and it began to spit smoke and thousands of pieces of paper. A booming roar split the air. I didn’t want to believe what else I thought I saw.

“No!” I hollered. “Terrorists!” The brick plaza shook. “Oh, my God!” people screamed. “I don’t believe it!” Someone said it looked like a scene from a Hollywood movie. People began to run. Some stood petrified. The hundreds of pigeons that usually occupy the plaza were already gone.

Three years ago, terrorists had bombed two American embassies in East Africa in quick succession. But this was an attack in downtown Manhattan. I feared there could be more.

Harry, my coworker, came rushing up. His face was bright red, his eyes wet, his arms trembling. Harry is a career law-enforcement man, a member of an anti-terrorism team, known for his cool and incisive manner. He had been standing even closer to the World Trade Center. He confirmed what I could not bring myself to utter. “They were jumping. People were falling from seventy stories up,” he cried.


I waved my credentials and raced inside my building. I work as a press officer for the U.S. Attorney’s Office, an arm of the Department of Justice.
My office had prosecuted the men responsible for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, which took six lives and injured more than a thousand people. And it had prosecuted two dozen defendants for other terrorist crimes linked to the Middle East, most recently the 1998 attacks on the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, which left 224 dead. We had also indicted their purported leader, Osama bin Laden.

“I’ll hang in,” I told the boss. “Go home,” she said. I knew it sounded brash, but I tried again: “I’ll hang in.” She seemed neither pleased nor annoyed. “Go home,” she said.

I called Evelyn to say I was unharmed and asked her to reach our sons in Manhattan and our daughter, Sara Jameel, in Syracuse. Security officers were evacuating our nine-story building. I joined one of them. “Get out. Everyone is ordered out!” I shouted, then got out myself.

On the building’s front steps, fellow employees stared up at the staggering, nightmarish sight. Behind the blazing 110-story towers, the sky was an iridescent blue.

And the air was charged with fearful expectation. I was standing in the middle of a cluster of government buildings, including the courthouse where the terrorists were tried, the jail where they were kept, and the headquarters of the FBI, which had captured them.

My thoughts now were not to serve, but to survive for my family and myself. (We soon learned from storefront TV sets and blaring radios
in parked trucks that a plane had struck the Pentagon, near Washington, and another had plunged into the Pennsylvania countryside.)


One of the people next to me on the steps was Janice, also part of our anti-terrorism unit. She commutes to work from out of state and doesn’t know the city. “I have to get to the Port Authority,” she said. “I have to get a bus home.” From my moments inside the building, I already knew all the tunnels and bridges were sealed, and told her so. “Come with me,” I said. “I’m going to start walking. I don’t think going into the subway is safe. We’ll do the best we can.”

In that instant, we became sister and brother, refugees in our own homeland. Heartbroken, we joined the thousands of grim people streaming north, many covered with ash. Some were numb and silent; some wanted to tell anyone where they had been and what they had seen. Several wanted to pray. Many hugged. Others sat down in the gutter and held their head in their hands.

Sirens wailed everywhere. It didn’t look like America. It looked like a newsreel on war-torn Europe or Asia. But no baritone voice-over let you know that you were safe in a movie house, that this was happening to somebody else. “Janice, let’s just get out of this and get safe,” I told her. “We can do our crying tonight.”


On Sixth Avenue in Greenwich Village, hundreds of people began to shriek, “Oh, no!” I spun around to see several cars and trucks suddenly stop. Someone’s been hit, I thought. But everyone was staring up.

The second tower began to float down, floor by floor. It folded like a gigantic deck of cards, like it was not a building at all, but the finale of a grotesque magic act. It disappeared from the skyline, replaced by billowing clouds of smoke. Maneuvering through the warren of little streets in SoHo and the Village, we had not realized the first tower was already gone, was already dust.

We joined an orderly line at a pay phone and made calls. Janice learned she could stay with a cousin on the West Side. She was hungry, and we found a restaurant in the Garment Center whose name on this day swelled with significance. At the New Jerusalem, Janice ate kosher pizza while I sipped coffee.

Manhattan was an island filled with millions of agitated and grief-stricken people. Astonishingly, one of them closest to me walked through the restaurant door. James is another coworker, who, when we discovered how alike our values and senses of humor were, had become as close as a brother.

We hugged. He introduced two women he’d run into. They were fleeing the United Nations and wanted his company and strength. My son Edward left his job at a securities firm and joined us. He wanted to protect me, and I welcomed the protection. He offered his apartment to any in our group trapped in town. Evelyn waited at Grand Central, from which she and I planned to try to escape the city. In the midst of this monstrous catastrophe, people were giving and receiving comfort, even momentary joy, surrounded by their families—immediate, extended, and accidental.


The night and days that followed brought many calls—my brother, Alvin, in California; Evelyn’s brother, John, in upstate New York; writing students; an editor; the local cab dispatcher; someone I’d dated briefly almost thirty years ago. Everyone asked the exact same question: “Are you okay?”

By then, we knew that Arab suicide terrorists had carried out the attacks with hijacked planes, that a worldwide manhunt was on for their leaders and accomplices. Like everyone, I fell into mourning for the people lost.

I searched my thoughts for why this had happened. I experienced anger, rage, sorrow, feelings of helplessness. Nightmares came easily; ordinary sleep did not. I imagined the falling bodies, the defenseless victims on the planes, the bewilderment and shock of their families. I was uplifted by revelations of the courage shown by the passengers on the plane that fell in Pennsylvania.

I also felt something I had never felt before. I am an Arab and a Jew, and have tolerated a lifetime of curiosity, affection, and even ridicule for being so. But as an Arab-American, I had never before felt shame. Now, I felt the terrorists had disgraced me and every Arab—Muslim, Christian, and Jewish— everywhere on earth. I was still an Arab, but the terrorists had robbed me of my pride in saying so.

Evelyn fretted that our children might become victims of anti-Arab bias. “Hadad” is a quintessential Arab name, though it is more typically spelled “Haddad.” The so-called mastermind of the earlier bombing of the World Trade Center, Ramzi Yousef, had used eleven aliases. One of them was “Naji Haddad.” We ran into a woman we’ve known for years. She snubbed us.


Evelyn and I drove to a Red Cross center and then a local hospital to donate blood. The center had a waiting period of more than five hours; the hospital said it would call us. The World Trade Center site was being overrun with volunteers. Everyone wanted to try to understand the calamity, to ease their pain, by participating in some way. The crime rate fell to zero.

We went to Evelyn’s church. The church is a mile away from my Prayer Tree, in the hills of the Rockefeller family estate. After the suspected embassy bombers had been arraigned in New York, I’d gone to the tree to pray that the government had seized the people truly responsible. It seemed a long and innocent time ago. Now, people were looking over their shoulder, feeling jittery, wondering what might happen next.

I was desperate for a normalcy I knew deep down might not be attainable. I shopped for fresh groceries, changed bed linens, bought new garbage pails, scrubbed sinks. It was a ritual cleansing of the home, as if that might wash away the indelible memories.

Our son Charles, an associate producer, called: “I’m on the street. CNN has been evacuated. Is it on TV?” Evelyn and I wondered how long it might be before he would love his city freely again. He soon let us know.
A few nights later, at 2 a.m., Charles carried an amplifier to his open fourth-story window on Manhattan’s East Side, plugged in his guitar, and played an inspired rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Not a cop in New York would have filed a complaint.

The same night, his brother, Edward, happening into the gloom of a tavern near Madison Square Garden, began to sing the same anthem, filling the room, at least for the moment, with pleasure and hope. “You knew all the words?” I asked the next day. “I hummed some,” he said.


I’d met Robert Windrem, an investigative producer at NBC News, at a terrorist trial. We’d grown to like each other. He called to say his teenage son had asked him why the twin towers were destroyed. “Few people in this country know more about terrorism than me,” he told his son. “But that still doesn’t help me understand it.”

Almost 350 firefighters perished following the attack. Danny Kane of Woodside, Queens, is a retired, decorated New York City firefighter who now works with his son Daniel as an ironworker. Danny is another of my brothers in spirit. “This is a condolence call,” I said over the phone.

“We’ve been down there for three days,” he said of the World Trade Center site. “Essentially, we’re taking big pieces of metal and making them small enough to haul away on trucks. It’s a place I never want to see again.”

I asked him why, after days of failure, they continued to search the rubble for survivors.

“The firefighters had no intention of fighting the fire. They went in to rescue people and save lives,” Danny said. “Everyone knows in their heart no one’s left alive, but no one wants to admit it.”

A letter arrived from Steven Selman, a friend since high school, a Northeastern graduate, and a retired Army colonel: “I thought it might help if I sent you this note of support in light of the horrible events of the last days. It must not be easy to be a Hadad living and working so close to what used to be the WTC. Hang in there.”


I returned to my office. It is a place where people are mostly kind and friendly and very smart. Its conviction rate is over 95 percent. Upon seeing each other, some colleagues wept. Many kissed or embraced. One said he was through mourning—he was angry, and he wanted to get the bastards. That became the universal word on the street to describe the hijackers and their accomplices.

I ran into Harry, who had witnessed the falling bodies, who once told me his retirement dream was running a hotdog stand at the beach. “I’m sorry you had to see what you did,” I said in private. “I’ve thought a lot about you.”

“I’m okay,” he replied.

It had been seven days since the attacks. Smoke continued to rise from where the skyscrapers once stood. The air was foul. My press office colleague Marvin and I secured breathing masks and headed downtown. Cops, state troopers, and National Guardsmen maintained posts on every corner. The streets were crowded. People took snapshots.

We got as far as the corner of Nassau and Liberty Streets, two blocks from the center of the disaster. The view was mesmerizing. The rising smoke suggested purgatory. It stung your eyes, scratched your throat. Huge sheaths of twisted metal remained vertical, as if hurled with great force into the ground from above. They were the remains of the lower floors.


“I’ve seen enough,” I told my partner. “I know a way back where the smoke won’t be as bad.”

We zigzagged back through old and cramped streets, and came upon something we hadn’t expected. It was a narrow building with a small canopy and a sign that read “Wall St. Synagogue.” Such a modest edifice for such an imposing name. Two cops, one a lieutenant, were coming out. We began to reach for our credentials when the lieutenant said, “No, just go in. We were praying, too.”

“They looked more Irish than Jewish,” Marvin said. I knew he was right.
Inside the small sanctuary, I put my mask on top of my head as a yarmulke, and we sat down in a pew near the pulpit in the center of the room. I thanked God for protecting my family. I told Him of my despair over the loss of the thousands of lives in the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, on the four planes. It was the eve of Rosh Hashanah, and I asked for a different kind of New Year, one filled with peace.

Marvin and I emerged back onto the street. Squeezed next door to the temple was a firehouse wide enough for only one truck. A firefighter stood in the doorway. I wanted desperately to talk to him but couldn’t find the words. I couldn’t say, “Are you okay?” Five firefighters from Engine 6 had sped to the twin towers. He was the only one who’d come back.


A few hours later, my day’s work was done, and Evelyn and I relished a diversion from the week’s events—the comfort of a brief reunion with close Boston friends. Lise and Myles Striar were in New York to see their daughter Maria perform in an off-Broadway play. They joined us at a sidewalk café on Park Avenue.

It was a beautiful early evening. Passersby seemed calm, or as calm as New Yorkers ever look dashing to their next appointment. There was a blessed absence of cell phones, and Myles marveled that there was almost no horn honking. The drinks were excellent. We toasted each other and our good fortune to be together, and remembered those lost in the attacks. The sun was setting. A bracing hint of chill was folded into the air.

We got comfortable, the conversation became more animated, and we decided to stay together for one more. Myles caught me paying unusual attention to the sidewalk traffic. “What are you doing?” he asked.

“I’m trying to determine who are more stunning, the women walking south or the women walking north,” I said. He joined in with me.

Relaxing at a café with three people I love, watching the girls go by, felt good. It felt frivolous. It felt defiant. I was a New Yorker, and I wanted my city back. I was an American, and I wanted my country back.

I needed to believe that the future would once again hold for all of us a blissfully carefree day.

Herbert Hadad, Northeastern graduate, award-winning writer, and teacher, writes this magazine’s “Alumni Passages” column.