Wilborn R. Hampton - 9/11/2001. Attack on New York City

A Dedication in Love and an Apology
for
Jerel Hampton
Age 1 year, 4 months, 17 days on September 11, 2001

The world you will inherit in a few short years is now rife with hatred. My generation must accept a certain responsibility for this. We did not pay enough heed to a divide that opened between the needy and the complacent; we did not listen with enough attention to the cries of frustration and despair from the other side. That divide opened into a chasm of enmity that led to the terrible events that occurred on September 11. It will be the task of your generation to begin building a bridge across this gulf of hatred. Hatred is born of fear. Do not be afraid.

W. H.

Then, shortly before 9:00 A.M. , just as most New Yorkers were beginning their working day, the city was suddenly and deliberately attacked by hijackers who seized control of two jetliners bound from Boston to Los Angeles and flew them on kamikaze missions into the twin 110-story towers of the World Trade Center. At 8:46 A.M. , American Airlines Flight 11, a Boeing 767, flew into the North Tower. At 9:06 A.M. , United Airlines Flight 175, another Boeing 767, flew into the South Tower. The planes exploded in fireballs that sent clouds of smoke pouring from the skyscrapers.

In the space of those few minutes, the comfortable world most Americans thought they lived in changed forever. But the horrors of the day were only beginning.

At 9:40 A.M. , a third hijacked plane, American Airlines Flight 77, a Boeing 757 en route from Washington, D.C., to Los Angeles, crashed into the Pentagon, the headquarters of Americas defense department.

Then, only minutes later, the thing many people had feared, but had tried not to think about, happened. The South Tower, the one into which the second plane crashed, began to collapse. It came down like a tower of dominoes when someone removes one domino from the middle.

Concern immediately grew for its twin, the building that had been hit first. Less than half an hour later, the North Tower tumbled to earth in a mountain of molten rubble. Fires from the 10,000 gallons of fuel that each plane carried raged up to 2,000 degrees, softening the steel girders. The two buildings simply imploded. Steel, concrete, and glass rained from 110 stories in the sky onto city streets jammed with thousands of frightened people, turning lower Manhattan into a black inferno.

In the time between the collapse of the two towers, a plane crashed in an open field in Pennsylvania, about eighty miles southeast of Pittsburgh. That plane, United Airlines Flight 93, another Boeing 757, had also been seized by hijackers, and authorities assumed that they had intended to fly it into another prominent target, possibly the White House or the Capitol.

In the space of just over an hour, the United States suffered the worst attack in its history. Of four commandeered planes, three had been turned into flying missiles with hundreds of passengers on board. Two had been flown into two giant skyscrapers where thousands of people were quietly at work, and the third had been flown into the home of the nations defense. And while America grieved at the loss in all four crashes, it was the first attacks on the World Trade Center and the collapse of the Twin Towers that came to symbolize the collective agony of the day. For those of us who lived in New York, the blow was staggering. Within an hour, the ruins were being called Ground Zero.

Nearly 3,000 people were killed at the World Trade Center, and more than 3,200 children lost a parent. But numbers cant tell the story. The story of what happened in New York that day is told in the accounts of several people who lived through it. Each endured a personal nightmare that day. Each carries different memories. One thing they all remember is how quiet the city was.

It was such a glorious day Jim Kenworthy decided to walk to work. Although both Jim and his wife, Ginger Ormiston, had jobs in the complex of buildings that made up the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan, they rarely went to work together. Their two children, Beth and Billie, went to different schools in different parts of the city, and mornings sometimes resembled a fire drill as the four of them scrambled to shower, eat breakfast, dress, and get off to school or work.

As usual, Jim was the first one up that Tuesday. He headed into the kitchen to start the coffee, then went to wake the kids. Billie, who was ten, was the hardest to rouse. But he had to get ready first since he had an early school bus to catch. Billie was just starting the fifth grade at P.S. 6 on the Upper East Side. A school bus stopped at University Place, near Jim and Gingers apartment off Union Square, but Billie had to be there by 7:30 to catch it. He had missed the bus the previous day and Ginger had to take him to school on the subway, which in turn had made her late for work at her new job as a computer expert with Marsh & McLennan.

After getting the children up, Jim went back to the kitchen to start making breakfast for Beth and Billie. He heard the shower running and knew that Ginger was up. Once the kids were fed, Jim started his own shower while Ginger dressed. He was just getting out when he heard Ginger shout something to him and the front door close. He didnt hear what she said, and he called out to her from the bathroom. But she was gone.

Jim had first met Ginger seventeen years earlier at the wedding of a mutual friend in Pittsburgh. No sparks flew immediately, but when they met again at another wedding two years later, Jim asked Ginger for a date. When they started going out, Ginger and Jim did not seem to have a lot in common. Jim, who was born in Baltimore but grew up in Florida, was working for a small law firm. He loved New York. Ginger, who had an electrical engineering degree from Rutgers and was taking night courses at New York University, still lived with her parents in New Jersey while working at Bell Labs. She was not all that fond of the city. Jim liked baseball and had season tickets to the Yankees, but Ginger did not care much for the game; Jim liked the ballet, while Ginger preferred the opera. But there were many things they both enjoyed. They both loved to try the food of different countries, for example, a pleasure that New York, with its many restaurants, offered. Two years later, Jim and Ginger were married.

They moved into Jims little one-bedroom bachelor apartment on 17th Street in Manhattan, but after Beth and Billie were born, it became clear they would have to find a bigger place to live. First, they looked for a house in the suburbs, but in the end it was Ginger who decided she did not want to leave Manhattan. The girl from the Jersey suburbs had become a dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker. Eventually, they found a loft near Union Square in downtown Manhattan. It was more than they could afford, and it needed a lot of work. But it became their dream house.