Ed Note: I’ve added many new images to the gallery. Some from my original time at Ground Zero, others from New Jersey ceremonies and many new images of remembrances in North Carolina.
September 10, 2001 was an extremely normal day filled with its typical and unusual errands. Coffee at Dunkin Donuts, packing a lunch, reading the paper. Before my shift on at the Daily Record, I made a trip to the Salvation Army thrift store in downtown Dover, NJ. I was a competitive runner at the time and looking forward to taking some time off with a few friends to travel to Las Vegas to participate in a mens only “Red Dress Race” 5K fundraiser. I found three modest short red skirts that my friends and I would wear and brought them home to be packed.
The following morning was a perfect Fall day. I had just dropped off a book at the Morristown library just after 9am when a man stopped me on the way out and said, ‘a plane just flew into the World Trade Center.’ I jumped into my car to head to work, we had a planned a days worth of shoots in Madison for the entire photo staff for our ‘Day I the Life Of’ sections, but I thought this might take one or two of us off the schedule.
Driving up Route 287 north towards the Daily Record, 1010WINS was already reporting a second plane hitting the South Tower at 9:03 a.m. Minutes later, a live (false) report that the ‘US Capitol itself had been hit.’ I pulled onto Parsippany Road, and said aloud to myself, ‘This is it, this is really the end of the world.” There’s no way I could have known, but by the end of that perfect Fall day, 65 Morris County natives would be among the nearly three thousand killed.
I decided to drive to Powder Mill Heights, one of the highest points in Parsippany with gorgeous views of Manhattan. It was the first place I thought people might be gathering to watch this disaster unfold. Driving west on Route 10 was the first moment I felt the true enormity of what had just happened. From nearly 30 miles away, I could see smoke rising from downtown Manhattan, from my rear-view mirror.
When I arrived at the condos, I photographed a security guard watching the live coverage on TV while calling to check on her daughter who was in New York City that morning. Walking back outside, people were starting to line the balcony edge looking east as the smoke rose from downtown Manhattan, holding binoculars, cameras, making calls on their cell phones. A woman who came to see what people were looking at immediately put her hand over her mouth and gasped, shocked by her first sight of the scene.
The frivolous shopping spree the day before seemed like ancient history. My vacation would now be spent in and around Ground Zero photographing the aftermath of the attacks. Each morning, I would take the train into Penn Station and walk the 2 1/2 miles down to Ground Zero. Some days we had access, other days we were collected into Press pens where we waited for hours for access to shoot. I remember passing by countless people along my walks to and from the trains. The grief was palpable and unbearable. One day I wished that we could jump ahead five years just to get past the agony we were sharing.
My most memorable and heartbreaking moment was a woman I met on a train into Penn Station who had just arrived from Florida. Her son was a firefighter and she had not heard from him since before 9/11. She noticed my cameras and asked me what I had seen and what I thought the chances were that her son was still alive. I tried to be as encouraging as possible knowing as each days passed, the chances of survival grew less and less. When we pulled into the station, I wrote her son’s name on a business card and tucked back into my wallet. I told her I would pray for them every day. When I returned home, I pinned the card to my bulletin board and checked the papers every day, hoping for just one miracle. Weeks later, I saw her son’s name listed in the New York Times as “remains that had been recovered.”
Years go by too quickly and the belief you will ever understand and reconcile any pain accumulated. As a journalist, closure is not one of the luxury we are afforded. Over the course of three decades of photojournalism, I’ve covered countless positive, inspiring stories and yet it’s the tragedies you can never quite erase from the back of your mind. And in the twenty years since I found myself documenting the aftermath of 9/11, I’ve covered too many tragedies to count. Murders, hurricanes, accidents, and even a pandemic. So many of my brother and sister photojournalists who were down at Ground Zero on 9/11/01, still carry the scars of that terrible day. The words bravery and courage are too often forgotten when used to describe the essential front-line communications done by journalists at Ground Zero.
For years, every time I had drove up the Turnpike seeing that stunning New York City skyline, now missing its Twin Towers, I would keep checking over my right shoulder knowing that the next time I looked they would surely be back where they belonged. They were the perfect background for photographers and tourists and if you got a little lost, they were always there to point you in the right direction. This was the inspiration for Bruce Springsteen’s song, “Empty Sky.”
Since that day, I’ve been documenting memorial ceremonies in and around New York City, New Jersey and now North Carolina, as journalists do, we look to tell the story, to comfort and to move people through our images. We were witnesses to history long before that day, but on 9/11/01, there was never a story in our lifetimes that needed to be told more. My first year in North Carolina, I found a 9/11 ceremony in Apex, to again do what I have done for the two decades since 2001 and tell the story of how we recover, how we heal.
Twenty-two years now have passed by in the blink of an eye.
Wishing all of us a peaceful day. Be kind to each other.
Never forget.
