September 9, 2026
As we’ve done every year since the World Trade Center was attacked and brought down in 2001, this week New Yorkers will once again honor the memory of those we lost. This year that list has grown longer, like it has every year, as more people pass away from the effects of toxins inhaled on that day. With almost one in five New Yorkers born since the tragedy, and another third who were still very little kids on that day, the demographic that has a direct, first person memory of it is also diminishing. These people can mostly tell you exactly what they were doing when they learned of the attack, and what they experienced during the weeks and months that followed.
A view of the Twin Towers from the Empire State Building, late 70s.
One particular memory we have is of walking across 23rd Street with friends and family for a holiday meal at El Quijote. As we crossed 6th Avenue I can recall glancing down toward the spot where the towers had stood. For around 30 years they’d served as a kind of North Star to the South when, upon exiting the subway downtown, one wanted to quickly orient oneself as to direction. The Towers were downtown. And that evening they were gone, a symbol of the disorientation many of us had been feeling nonstop since what had by then been christened 9/11. The smoke was still in the air downtown as the fire was still smouldering in December. It was just a random moment at a point in time and space a little distant from that incredible September morning, but it was part of a steadily growing sense that things had stopped making sense according to the World we knew before.
This week Mayor Mamdani released nearly 70 boxes containing 170,000 pages of records the City kept secret for two and a half decades. It’ll take time to go through them all (link here), but already one major takeaway is that the authorities lied to the public about the air quality, or rather the air toxicity. They knew it wasn’t safe to breathe as they assured us that it was. Their goal was to reopen Wall Street and keep their World of Finance happy while turning their backs on our World of Sorrow. Less than a week later the Stock Exchange was back in business, even as the operation at what became known as Ground Zero was still in Rescue mode. The fire was only extinguished months later, just before Christmas. Cleanup continued until the following May.
As seen from the Staten Island ferry, late 70s.
Police, Fire and Sanitation workers can retire after 20 years so many, if not most, of those who worked on that dreadful day and the weeks and months that followed at The Pit, have left City Service. Same for 25 and out EMTs and Paramedics. The present day workforce can largely center their own catastrophe: the COVID-19 pandemic. They too have lost friends, co-workers and families to a shared tragedy. But their moment of Truth, when all the relevant, hidden records finally see the light of Day has yet to come.
As seen from the Staten Island ferry, late 70s.
Our community was hit especially hard. For months after the attack there were funeral services at Good Shepherd, the local Catholic Church. Helicopters hovered low over Broadway and cops wearing kilts played sad music on bagpipes. Today there’s a 9/11 Memorial at that church, on Isham Street. The centerpiece is an iron cross formed by girders that once supported one of the Twin Towers. It was obtained somehow for our community by the late Father Devine, a Parish priest who helped our community heal. He’d previously served as a Chaplain on the front lines of the Vietnam War. A couple of nights after 9/11 he led a candlelight procession from the church to the firehouse on Vermilyea Avenue. Hundreds of Inwood residents walked slowly in a stunned and somber silence. The extent of our loss was only beginning to come into focus. “The number of casualties will be more than any of us can bear, ultimately,” Giuliani had said on September 11th, 2001. He was correct.
A cross from the Twin Towers.
A few steps away from the Iron Cross, there’s a serene garden dedicated to some of the local heroes we lost that day. Any day of the year people can walk in and spend a few quiet moments recalling that day. Chances are it’ll be busier than usual this week as we mark the milestone 25th year commemoration of that day. To state that things have changed is a ridiculous understatement. To say that almost everything has changed since the day before 9/11 is probably more accurate. The sense of things falling apart, the feeling of impending doom, the sheer banality of a daily procession of one unbelievable thing after another is still bringing trauma to this City. We were down after the attack, but we recovered somehow and even thrived. Then COVID-19 knocked us back down again. There was talk of digging mass graves in Central Park, and there really WERE mass graves on Hart Island! Today, thankfully, our City is back on its feet, once again a place often described as indispensable and immodestly regarded by many of us New Yorkers as the Center of the Universe. And it is. It always will be, too.
Inwood’s 9/11 Memorial Garden.
*Title photo illustration: a Port Authority Police Officer walks past a 9/11 Memorial shrine at PABT on September 6, 2026.
