HOLY CRAP was the email subject line.

DO YOU SEE THIS was the body of the email.

I sent that email to my friend Bob at 9:04:47 am on September 11, 2001, just one minute after the second plane struck the World Trade Center. He saved our e-mails from that morning and re-shared it with me just this week. 

I was a corporate bond reporter at Bloomberg at the time. On the morning of 9/11/01, I was working at the old Bloomberg office at 499 Park Avenue, seven miles north of the WTC. 

Around 9 am I recall being half-asleep at my desk, trying to get the synapses to fire, when my colleague Kathy stood by a nearby ceiling-mounted TV and noted a plane had hit a tower, and news helicopters were showing it. Wow, I thought, how bizarre — must have been a horrible accident with grievous pilot error or a medical incident in the cockpit? I watched for a couple minutes and then turned back to my screen.

It was then Kathy said “another plane just hit” and walked away.

That changed everything. 

My personal 9/11 story isn’t dramatic or heroic like those of many others. It’s just the story of an average person who happened to be living and working right near ground zero. But everyone has their own personal 9/11 story and they’re all interesting in their own way, so I thought I’d share my story from 25 years ago. 

Believe me, the email I shared above would have been laced with profanity had it not been for the Bloomberg LP email censors. After the second plane hit, the whole mood of the newsroom changed on a dime. There was no panic, but there was a lot of what the heck is happening, what do we do, and we’re all in this together. Some people cried. In retrospect, I think that vibe in the newsroom was a microcosm of the vibe in the city and the country. 

Many firms sent employees home, but as Bloomberg was a news organization, there was no going home – I actually stayed an hour or so later than usual. Some of my news colleagues of course were covering the actual attacks and aftermath, but most of us stayed on our beats. 

For me that meant calling corporate bond underwriters and buy-side investors – normally I’d be asking about new issues and yield spreads, but on 9/11 I was asking what they were doing and was the market functioning. I recall the few people I was able to reach were going home and there was no market activity to write about, so we wrote that there was no market activity.

Throughout the day, in between making and taking personal calls, mostly to assure people I was okay, I had my eyes glued to the scrolling newsfeed at the bottom of the Bloomberg terminal, especially the “hot” headlines that were in red and stayed for a few seconds before scrolling down. That’s where I learned about the plane crashing into the Pentagon and the plane crashing in the field in Pennsylvania – there were also headlines with reports of other situations that proved to not be true. But it was a crazy day obviously with all kinds of information flying around.

I don’t remember for sure but I think Bloomberg brought lunch in for everyone. 

At the time I lived in Hoboken, NJ, right across the Hudson River from the WTC, and through late afternoon of 9/11 it was clear that all tunnels and bridges were closed, so I tentatively arranged to stay with a friend who lived on the east side of Manhattan, a 15-min walk from the office. But just as I was getting ready to leave for his pad around 6:30 pm I saw a headline that the PATH train was resuming service, so I gave that a try. 

I remember walking down 5th Avenue to 34th Street – the iconic thoroughfare was almost empty in terms of pedestrian and regular vehicular traffic, it was mostly emergency vehicles. Fighter jets screamed overhead. Surreal is an overused word in this editor’s opinion, but this walk was most definitely surreal. 

The PATH train was indeed open. Heavily armed national guardspeople were everywhere, on the platform and on the train. The train from Herald Square barreled nonstop to Hoboken bypassing its usual four NYC stops. We passengers just looked at our feet in stone silence for the duration of the ride. 

When we emerged in Hoboken there was a feeling of relief, but at the same time, with ground zero just 1.7 miles away as the crow flies, the giant smoke plume was right there for all to see. People went their separate ways into the evening, knowing that the world had changed.