Individual, private loss and horror, but also universal memories. The xeroxed missing posters up everywhere. The lingering smell. Involuntarily ducking at the roar of fighter jets patrolling the NYC airspace. Desperately wanting to do something, but not knowing what.
Each time you saw the smoke rising through the altered skyline from a new place was a punch in the gut.
I’m not surprised that I remember - that we all remember - these things 20 years later, but it’s still so fresh.
The famous images from that day are of people running from the smoking towers, but north of about 14th street or so, Manhattan was very calm. There was no mass panic outside the immediate area. By afternoon, the city was very quiet.
There was a lot of misinformation being reported that day over the ’net and in media, particularly about explosions all over Washington DC. But it didn’t trigger a panicked rush to escape Manhattan, even though, it retrospect, it could well have.
It’s easy to interpret this as a reflection of “unflappable NYers” or something, but I think it was more that people simply felt safe in their homes, and were, for the most part, dazed by what was happening.
One of the smaller disruptions of 9/11: it was election day in NYC, for the Republican and Democrat mayoral primaries. It was a rare case of an election being postponed (to two weeks later). It’s likely that the lower turnout in the rescheduled election affected the outcome.
As for the lack of panic: everyone’s intuition that day was that the threat was to skyscrapers, and those were evacuated pretty much nationwide. But that was plainly wrong. The Pentagon isn’t a tall building, nor was whatever flight 93 was likely headed to.
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