The Lark: Vol 3, Issue 12, November 2023

From the Memoir Class:

Remembering 9/11

By Joseph C. Petteruti, Jr.

8:46 am    9/11/01

It is a sunny day in Providence. The sky is ultra blue and cloudless. I walk down College Hill that morning—my usual route. I work at Fleet National Bank in the iconic Superman building. I enter a coffee shop in the lobby.  I am late, as usual. I order my usual. I hear chatter about a small plane that hit the World Trade Center in NYC. It’s 8:46 am. Hmmm. “That is odd,” I think. The sky is clear. The visibility must be at least ten miles. Does NYC have a fog this morning? Not thinking too much more about it, I wait for the bronze elevator doors to open to take me to the 15^th floor.

As soon as I enter the double glass doors, I spot a group of folks crowding around a 16” portable TV. The grainy outlines of the screen show smoke coming out of the World Trade Center. I stop and look. “That is a big hole in the side of the building,” I say. “That does not look like the work of a small plane.”

I go to my office. I press the start button on my computer and open about six different windows. I have some critical deadlines to meet. I work in the Managed Assets Division. Our job is to get the money back after a borrower defaults on its loans. Millions of dollars are at stake. I think about my friend, Vince, who is an attorney in New York City. The office building where he works is across the street from the World Trade Center. We became friends as he handles the legal side of our collection efforts. I think about calling him to see if he is O.K.

My boss and my colleague are supposed to be at a 9:00 a.m. meeting with a client in New York. Mickey told me the day before that she and Bill would be out of the office today. My colleague Mickey and I have adjoining offices.  I look into her office and I see her sitting there. I go over and ask her why she is not in New York. She tells me that the client at the WTC had called yesterday. He cancelled the meeting. “Lucky me,” she says. She looked weirdly out of sorts. I ask her if she is aware that a small plane had breached the side of the North Tower (1 WTC).  “I know,” she says. “That is the tower where we were supposed to meet the client this morning.”

I immediately call Vince in NYC. No answer. The call goes to voice mail. I reach out to two or three other folks at Vince’s firm. Same. Just voice mail. This is not good, I think. I know where Vince’s offices are. They are sitting on the 20^th floor of a building that sits right below Tower One. The bronze-colored building is all glass and steel.  I was in that building two months ago for a meeting.  The view from the firm’s conference room looked directly upon the site of the North Tower.

I go back to the television and watch. A second plane had flown into the South Tower (2WTC). I am transfixed. I cannot work. The bombing of the World Trade Center is now clearly the work of terrorists. After both towers fall, I go home, no longer able to focus. As I climb the hill, I think to myself. “What if the terrorists come to Providence? Would they be flying planes into the Superman building?” The world has changed in a matter of hours.

Three days later

I am once again sitting at my desk. The initial shock of the terrorist attacks has passed. I still feel numb from the attacks on the WTC, the Pentagon, and the crash of United’s Flight 93 in Shanksville, PA. The phone rings.

It is Vince. I say “Hey buddy, how are you doing?” He says “not well.” He explains that he and his lawyers at the firm evacuated their staff after the second plane went into the South Tower. He says that he was the last person to leave his building. As luck would have it, the North Tower had just collapsed. Vince ran down Broadway and ducked behind the “Charging Bull” sculpture-the symbol of Wall Street prosperity. He could barely see what was in front of him as the dust cloud covered everyone. A boulder the size of VW Bug flew by him.  He finally escaped into a coffee shop.  It took him two days to get back to his home in New Jersey.

 A Job on Wall Street, 1970

I started my first job after college at a Wall Street bank in June of 1970. I was a credit analyst in the management training program. Several times each week I would walk two blocks over to the World Trade Center construction site. The 110 story North Tower had just topped out. It was about 50% complete. The steel skeleton of the South Tower was only about 50 stories high. I loved watching the workers balancing on the beams. They were fearless. During the early months of my first year of my job, I sat at my desk every day and heard “Boom, Boom, Boom” The workers were still pile driving piers into the rock to support the massive weight of the South Tower.

Cocktails on Top of the World, 1981

During the early 1980’s, I worked at Old Stone Bank in Providence. I received an invitation to cocktails and dinner at Windows on the World. The restaurant was on the 106^th and 107^th floor of the North Tower (1 WTC).

One of Wall Street’s premier investment banking firms, Salomon Brothers, had invited me to their evening party. The firm was courting clients who were interested in mortgage securitization. I looked out the windows of the 30-foot-high glass wall that looked north. You could see the twinkling lights of Manhattan, New Jersey, and Long Island. The view was phenomenal. I felt giddy. It was not the gin and tonic. That was the last time that I visited the WTC.

Six weeks after the attacks

Six weeks after the 9/11 attacks. My friend and I were visiting her daughter.  She attended New York University. The twenty-year old needed to see her mom. I wanted to see both her and what was left of the once grand capital of commerce. It was so eerie to view the still smoldering wreckage of the towers. I could see flames still rising out of the ashes below the now 50-foot-high twisted steel beams. I thought about the brave men and women who went to work every day and wondered how they could survive that smell, the incredibly acrid smell of smoke still rising from the pile of rubble.

Years later we now know the price that they paid and continue to pay from smoke inhalation. On 9/11/01 about 2,600 souls lost their lives due to the terrorist attack on the WTC. More than that number have since died due to the inhalation of the poisons that spilled out of that site. May they all rest in peace.

October 19, 2023