Where I Was On September 11

[Silver Pines]

Where I Was On September 11

By Dan McLaughlin
9/11/2016


I wrote this piece on September 13, 2001, when everything was still fresh, and I was still writing a baseball blog, “The Baseball Crank,” at The Providence Journal. I re-run it every year on this day.



On Tuesday, they tried to kill me.


I am ordinarily at my desk between 7:30 and 8:30 in the morning, in my office on the 54th floor of one of the World Trade Center’s towers. Tuesday, I was running late – I stopped to vote in the primary election for mayor, an election that has now been postponed indefinitely. Thank God for petty partisan politics.

Around 20 minutes to 9, as I have done every day for the past five years, I got on the number 2/3 train heading to Park Place, an underground stop roughly a block and a half, connected underground, to the Trade Center. The train made its usual stop at Chambers Street, five blocks north of my office, where you can switch to the local 1/9 that runs directly into the Trade Center mall. The subway announcer – in a rare, audible announcement – was telling people to stay on the 2/3 because the tunnel was blocked by a train ahead of us. Then he mentioned that there had been “an explosion at the World Trade Center.”

Read more at:

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/439922/where-i-was-september-11

[Silver Pines]

"The architect who designed the towers – well, we used to complain a lot that the windows were too narrow, but the strength of those buildings, how they stayed standing for an hour and an hour and a half, respectively, after taking a direct hit by a plane full of gasoline – there are probably 10 to 15,000 people walking around New York today because they stayed up so long."


I've never heard that before, but it was worth reading the article just to become informed of it.