Upon digging through some old emails today, I found this haunting gem from my friend Matt K., on his account of 9/11/01. This was written and sent on 9/12/01 from New York City.


Here is how September 11, 2001 looked to me.........

At 9am, I got a message from my dad that the trade center was on fire after a plane crash, right as I was looking it up on the web the second
plane hit and we all rushed to one of the partners' offices that faces
downtown (we are in midtown in rockefeller center, about 3 miles from
downtown where the WTC was). I thought the web pictures were a hoax at
first, but nobody could even speak when we saw it in person through the
window. We moved to a large conference room where CNN was reporting on
the events, we were shocked to learn that hijacked commercial planes
full of people had been used. People got really scared when the plane
hit the pentagon and we feared there were more in the air (the empire
state building and the UN are not far away), not knowing how many more
planes there could be. We watched in horror at WTC #2 fell out of the
sky and put up a cloud of smoke over all of downtown.

We are having a quarterly review of our firm's portfolio this week, so
some of my colleagues from california are in town, we decided to resume
our meetings at the knickerbocker club up on 62 & 5, near central park,
and had an hour or so to gather ourselves before going up there. I just
moved to a new place on 33 & 8, near madison square garden, which has a
spectacular view facing downtown. I high-tailed it home to grab a
camera and get some still shots of the whole thing, and learned that
Tower 1 collapsed while I was en route. You have probably heard that
Morgan Stanley was a large tenant of tower 2 (the second one hit but the
first to go down), I have heard that we occupy the top 40 floors (no
doubt choked off from the world when the second plane hit), it is our
Dean Witter retail operation center that is located there (don't worry,
I'm sure your discover card will still work). I got some great pics
from the roof of my building and then walked (subways were closed, all
taxis were taken, people were begging motorists for rides, although I
have no idea where they were going, the bridges and tunnels were
temporarily closed and manhattan is an island in case you didn't know).
I walked through times square and got some shots of all the big news
screens, there were so many people in the streets it reminded me of the
millenium two years ago.

I ended up working the whole rest of the day, having trouble keeping my
mind off of the fighter jets circling overhead and the fact that the JFK
and the Eisenhower aircraft carriers were steaming north from Viginia to
protect New York. I imagined that this must be how people do business
in Tel Aviv or Beirut, that you just pick up and move to a safer area
when you feel threatened. We were deprived of news throughout the day,
other than to get the updates on what was happening in DC and what they
had discovered about the planes. I was cheered up a little when I
heard that the foiled Pittsburgh crash happened because the passengers
probably revolted against the hijackers (that plane had taken of from
Newark, those New Jersey folks can get really feisty). We heard another
explosion at about 4:15 when tower # 7 (the old Drexel Burnham Lambert
Building most recently occupied by Salmon Brothers) when down, many
people feared it was the empire state, but we knew it wasn't when we
looked out the window and saw it standind there intact. We left out
meetings at 5:30 and walked down the middle of fifth avenue, no cars
were around at all, you could see the smoke all the way down fifth
avenue where downtown used to be. Many of the subways were still
closed, but luckily the A and C trains were running all the way to 4th
street (most were stopping at 42nd Street Times Square). It is sad to
know that the end of the line for the A and C used to be the basement of
the WTC. Many people don't realize how big of a structure that thing
was, there was five buildings and an underground concourse that was like
an average sized shopping mall. The world financial center is across
the highway (Merrill Lynch, Lehman brothers, American Express, and some
of Oppenheimer and Deloitte are located there, sadly most of the other
halves of those two were in the WTC) and I think most people got out of
there. I hear the folks at Goldman Sachs are OK as well, which probably
means that Sullivan and Cromwell is fine, as well as most of wall
street (you may see pictures from time to time of a small brown church,
that is where wall street begins and if that is still standing then
everthing else is probably going to make it)

I, being the runner I am, decided to run down the hudson (there is a
nice path that used to run towards an imposing skyline consisting of two
mammoth structures and a bunch of building that were dwarfed by them).
Instead all you can see running down is the smoke from the fires that
are still burning (apparently #7 started a huge fire when it went down,
and I hear this morning that the WFC is on fire as well), there were
rescue vehicles all down the highway, and just a huge group of people
gathered at Canal Street where the ultimate, no-shit blockade was (the
rest were more of a suggestion to not proceed until that point). I got
some more pictures of the downtown and turned back around because I
wanted to get home to see what else was happening (the news teams have
done a great job of keeping us informed).

Today, on my way to work, there was nobody. There was maybe one car per
block and the subways were empty. Every building has massive security,
nobody in our out without ID.

Hope this helps to fill everyone in.

__________________________
M.K.




It seems like such a long time ago...