Nows and Forevers

The words still ring in my head, added to the crushing shock of the day itself, 22 years ago:

“Sept. 11, 2001. You will remember this day as long as you live.”

That’s what Dan Rather said in the opening of the CBS Evening News as the daylight began to ebb on a changed Manhattan skyline.

He was right. I’ve never forgotten Sept. 11. I’ve never been able to. I find it hard to believe that anyone who lived in the New York metro area, as I did on that day, can. That’s millions upon millions of people who didn’t experience the day on TV, as the rest of the country and the world, did. It was terrifyingly real and in front of them.

Having grown up around the New York area, and visiting Manhattan often as a kid and young adult, long before I began to work there, the destruction of the World Trade Center shook me to my core. There was the attack as terrorism, which was shocking enough. There was all the people we lost, and I’ve yet to meet anyone in New York who didn’t have a one- or two-degree of separation to one or more of the people who were lost. If you think New York City is a big, impersonal city, I’m here to tell you that it’s not.

That’s another reason why it hurt so much. New York City, as large as it is, has connective tissue that binds everyone who lives there, works there, was born and raised there.

It threw me too because I had never known New York City without the World Trade Center. It rose up out of the skyline in the same years I did. Coming into Manhattan with my parents, the Twin Towers were an imposing and reassuring presence, one that I always used, even as an adult, as a true north to orient myself on the streets of Manhattan. I’m not the only one who thought that.

I covered the attacks and their aftermath for my New York newspaper, and as I moved on, I also wrote about it on the anniversaries for years afterward. One of the stories I wrote, on the five-year anniversary of the attacks, delved into how TV covered the initial hours of the attack as it unfolded. You can read it several places, not just in The Hollywood Reporter I wrote it for, but also on the Today show website.

The story of that piece will have to wait for another day. But I spent a long time securing interviews and collecting and viewing the tapes of the morning shows and cable news for the hour before 8:48 a.m., when American Flight 11 crashed into the North Tower. Months. I knew after the fourth anniversary that I would write something like this for the fifth, in my role as New York-based TV reporter for The Hollywood Reporter.

I wrote a lot about the attacks and their aftermath, first contributing to the coverage for the newspaper I worked for in New York and then my next several journalism jobs. I moved to Pittsburgh and covered the 10th anniversary of the crash of United 93, which came down not too far from where I live.

I haven’t written about it much since, but mostly because I haven’t had the occasion in my job. But it remains top of my mind and the biggest story I’ve ever covered, one that hit home for me in many ways. Sept. 11 is a day that I will remember as long as I breathe.