Thread by @RollinsBridge

"Following the attacks on the World Trade Centre, TV reports of New Yorkers being evacuated noticed among them 'an elderly black man carrying a saxophone case'. It was Sonny Rollins, who had witnessed the whole thing from his Manhattan pied-a-terre a few blocks away" @guardian

According to @JazzTimes, "Sonny Rollins had been home in his Manhattan apartment, six blocks north of the World Trade Center, when the attacks occurred on 9/11. From the street, he watched the second tower go down. The National Guard evacuated him from his apartment on 9/12."...

A decade later, he told @OffBeatMagazine "9/11 was quite an experience for me. I learned so much. I remember when we were being evacuated, they wanted me to get on the evacuation bus. There were some old ladies that lived in that building...

...”and they were sitting there very calmly and here I was all upset. I thought, ‘I should be ashamed of myself.’ Then I noticed how everybody was so kind to each other around the time of 9/11. I knew it couldn’t last, and it was remarkable to see it....

“It was nice to speculate about what would happen if the world could be like that. Of course the world is not like that. The world is not supposed to be like that. But it was interesting seeing that....

“The other thing that I learned was that my possessions didn’t matter. I’d been living in that apartment for almost 30 years and I had a lot of books, clothes, musical instruments, and 90 percent of it was destroyed. I was really worried about it all,...

“...my wonderful books and my stage clothes. I lost all of that and I was really mad about it and then I came to realize ‘Wait a minute. Those are just material things. That’s not what life is about.’ That was a big revelation for me." —Sonny Rollins, @OffBeatMagazine

While Sonny Rollins survived 9/11, it had a profound effect on him. Writing in 2016, @natechinen said Rollins "draws a dotted line between that traumatic day and his present state of health. ‘When that second plane hit, it was like snowfall coming down,’ he said....

...‘And that snow, of course, was just toxic stuff. Anyway, I gulped some of it down. We were waiting until the next day to be evacuated, so I picked up my horn to play, man. I took a deep breath and felt that stuff down to my stomach. I said, ‘Oh, wow, no practicing today.’...

‘So yeah, it’s been conjectured that that’s part of what happened to me.’...

.@natechinen continues "Setting aside the implications of a story in which Rollins is harmed by the act of practicing-in search of inspiration, a word whose etymology literally derives from “to breathe in”-there’s something terribly definitive about this moment....

“Rollins was born and raised in New York City, and he kept a foothold there until the events of 9/11, after which he and Lucille retreated to their home upstate. He never got another apartment in the city.” —@natechinen

Like many New Yorkers who survived 9/11, that day was a dividing line for a certain way of life. For Sonny Rollins, 9/11 meant the end of his days living in the city he had called home for over 7 decades. It also likely contributed to his horn going silent over a decade later....

Of course Sonny Rollins’ story of 9/11 is just one of many from that day.

2,977 people were killed by the attacks, including 125 at the Pentagon, and over 6,000 are estimated to have been injured. Never forget.