a bout 9:00 am - I was walking to school (Cooper Union in the Village in NYC) then I see an ambulance fly by, 20 seconds later, another and then a whole cascade of ambulances and firefighters. I was wondering what happened, but when I got to school I heard : "a plane hit the world trade center". My first thought was that it was some small cesna or something that accidentaly hit it but then They showed the towers on TV with smoke billowing out of one of them.

A few minutes later another plane hit - even though we were maybe 2 miles away from the WTC we couldnt see or hear it b/c NYC is so noisy and built up... but we saw it on TV.

The AV guy from my school was on the roof of the school I later found out, videotaping it all.

Of course classes were cancelled. I remmber waling back home across downtown manhattan and just streams of people walking uptown. Cell phones wouldnt work because they were overloaded by the call volume.

When I got home, my mom said - we're getting out of manhattan so we drove to my grandmother's in the bronx. The trip took about 2.5 hours - because so many people were leaving manhattan out of fear.

Going the other way on the FDR (highway) were a convoy of bulldozers...

Every radio station, tv station, anything for the next week played nothing but reports about this...

We spent about a week with my grandmother, streets were closed to pedestrians below 14th I think for several days. My school reopened in about 2 weeks I think. I never went down to the WTC site until over a year later, even though some students from my school would sneak in there on their mountain bikes and ride around... (not on the site itself, just around the financial district which was covered in ash and still smoldering)...

I went to high school only about 1/4 mile from the WTC (Stuyvesant) and it served as a triage station for victims....

My mom actually worked in the world financial center until 1999 which is a smaller building adjacent to the WTC which was destroyed as well ...

A frined of mine worked (and still works) in the financial center and when I talked to him on the phone he told me how he saw people jump or fall. And how he hid in a deli from the cloud of debris coming down... and then how he took the Battery city ferry out the city as everything else was not working...

...