The Phones Went Silent: Remembering September 11, Twenty-Five Years Later

All: I had suspended sending this message every year, but felt it important to do so for the 25th anniversary this Friday. The terror attacks on our homeland on September 11 2001 killed over 2800 people when the Towers fell, in addition to the 189 killed in the Pentagon and over 40 in Shanksville, PA that day. I had, until recently, forwarded an always updated version of this each year to my current and former colleagues and friends, including those who were with me then so we will never forget that horrible day and the week that followed. I know this is somewhat long and apologize in advance. If you'veread it before I hope you want to read it again. And for those of you new to this - there is nothing I ask of you other than to help us all remember.. 

I was driving my then 11-year old daughter (now 36!) and her friend Dani (now a successful attorney in South Florida who is also a happy mom) to middle school in Woodmere, Long Island on a crisp sunny Tuesday morning when it came over the radio. We thought it was a joke on Z100, the top 40 NYC radio station, shortly after 8:46 AM. "A small plane has hit the World Trade Center." When we realized it was real, I said, well that's downtown, my firm is midtown, I should be able to still drive into the city. 

I dropped off the girls and soon found myself right next to JFK Airport, when they reported the second plane hitting and confirmed that both planes were indeed jumbo passenger jets, not small planes. At that moment, all traffic on this normally busy thoroughfare came to a dead halt. I sat there very confused about what was happening, although immediately radio personality Howard Stern said, "We're being attacked." 

As I am that old, I quickly remembered the 1993 World Trade Center bombing that occurred shortly after Doug Ellenoff and I started our firm (now the very successful Ellenoff Grossman & Schole) together. Our office in 1993 was a half block from the Empire State Building. Once they evacuated the ESB in the ’93 bombing we shut the office right away. So, when the planes hit the Towers, I immediately called my office, then called Feldman & Associates, and closed it, telling everyone to get home and get safe (in a full circle moment I am now back in my own law boutique known as Feldman Legal Advisors). Most of the large law firms stayed open and told attorneys they could leave if they wanted to. 

After 20 minutes by JFK sitting there unable to move, I turned around and went home, worried about my daughter at that point (my son Andrew was not born until the next year). Her school closed eventually and she came home about an hour later. After that, pretty much all the middle schoolers in the metro NY area started going to school with cell phones. I will never forget weeks after 9/11 seeing the cars gathering dust in the Long Island Railroad commuter parking lots that were left by those who went to work that morning, but would never return.  

Since there were no iPhones with streaming news at the time, our staff left the office and gathered at Milan, the Italian restaurant (long since gone) next door to our office in the Bar Building on W. 44th St. to watch the TV news. They quickly realized they needed to scatter. Almost immediately all NYC transit, including subways and buses, was shut and the tunnels and bridges to and from Manhattan closed to vehicles. 

My assistant at the time, Sandy Butler, walked home to Queens over the 59th St. Bridge. My then very new associate Mike Nertney was worried about his Dad, thinking he was downtown (he was not). Another then associate, Rob Charron, was worried about his wife Karen. She came up out of the subway down there and saw everything. Luckily, she managed to turn around and catch a subway out before they were shut down. Adam Mimeles, also an associate at the time, walked to the upper west side and, once traffic was allowed to leave the city, ultimately hitchhiked across the George Washington Bridge to New Jersey that same night by jumping, uninvited, into the cab of a semi that was inching along in traffic. All three having since enjoyed very successful careers as lawyers in other firms and companies. 

My family and I were worried about my then brother-in-law, at the time in his early 60s with two young sons. Always an early riser, he was already in his office at Oppenheimer & Co. next door to the Trade Center at World Financial Center. From 8:45am to 2pm we did not know where he was or whether he was even alive. 

We later learned that after the second plane hit, with building elevators shut he walked down 36 flights and started walking north. Just 10 minutes after he got out on the street the first building fell. He told me afterwards, "Imagine a giant wall of black coming at you and you can't outrun it no matter how fast you run." He was thrown in the air, lost his glasses, shoes and briefcase and thought he was dead surrounded by smoke. About 10 minutes later, things cleared a little and two strangers lifted him over a fence at the Hudson River to get him on a passing tugboat that some CEO had commandeered to pick people up. Consider watching the very moving 12-minute YouTube documentary narrated by Tom Hanks about the little covered story of how a half million people were removed from lower Manhattan by boat that day. 

The tugboat dropped him off a little further north around Houston St. where nice people took him into an office to give him water. He must have looked horrible covered in soot and was coughing like crazy so they walked him to St. Vincent's Hospital, where he was pretty much the only customer. Frankly, that day you either got away or were killed (St. Vincent's, often ironically referred to as “ground zero” of the NYC AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, ultimately closed in 2010). He finally called us around 2pm to say he was fine and in the hospital, although those two things don't usually go together. After being treated for smoke inhalation, he disregarded the doctors and checked out around 11pm. 

He ultimately got home around 1am by hitchhiking onto an empty Madison Avenue bus then convincing a cabbie to take him to Long Island even though the Midtown Tunnel was open only outbound at that point and the driver couldn’t come back to the city. He told the cabbie he'd pay anything if he would take him. The cabbie looked him over and said, "Looking like you look I'll take you for free." He later told us of the horrific sights he witnessed as he exited his building, including a shocking number of people jumping from the upper floors of the Towers to their ends to avoid burning to death. 

I spent the day at home watching the TV and emailing basically every person I knew to see if they were OK. It took three scary days to find one friend and fellow Wharton grad, Matt Greene, who worked in the North Tower, who we didn't know was out of the country. The next day, Wednesday, with all bridges and tunnels closed to cars, almost all of us still made it in since commuter trains were running. There was no point, however, as our law firm’s phones in our otherwise unscathed midtown law office had gone out. 

We sent an email to everyone we could with our cell phone numbers and such, but no one was calling. Email was still pretty new back then, as were Blackberries, so few had email access except on their office computer or home hookup. And our phone provider made clear they had no clue when the phones would be back since their main transformer was at the Trade Center. Plus, well, New York City business just stopped. 

So that Wednesday in our phone-less office we all went for a very long liquid lunch and then went home. I remember my good friend and then counsel Jen Nosenchuk (then Rosen) meeting us there at the Penn Club. That afternoon I reached an old friend from high school, Steve Saltzman, who worked at Marsh & McClennan on the 107th floor of the North Tower, a floor that was hit directly by the terrorists. Thankfullyhe was in Florida at a conference. Butwhen I called him, he could barely speak. 

Steve told me he supervised a team of 12 people, and had ordered all of them to come in early that day, and they all perished. He said, “They’re gone and it’s all my fault.” Of course it wasn’t. His company lost over 300 people that day. Another friend of mine was fine. He was supposed to have breakfastwith a client enjoying the stunning views at Windows on the World on the 107th floor of 1 World Trade on Tuesday the 11th, but at 11pm the night before his client suggested they switch it to lunch. This is how it was that week. 

Then Thursday, two days after the attacks, we came in again. Now there were more people on the streets, but by noon there were over 100 bomb threats in the city and rumors the commuter trains might shut down, stranding everyone in the city with all the hotels fully booked. Still no phones. We closed again and said we'd stay closed the next day, Friday, and reopen Monday. 

I remember literally running from the office to the trains at Penn Station with our then associate Jodi Zotkow (then Snetiker), stopping only for a moment to pay a street vendor $2 for a small American flag which, until it finally fell apart irretrievably a few years ago, sat proudly in my office for years. I will never forget the thousands of “missing” flyers that hopeful friends and family had posted of people, almost allof whom were certainly killed. Good thing we kept the office closed because there were hundreds more bomb threats on Friday. 

Speaking of Jodi, the night before the attack, September 10, we finally closed an equity investment from an Italian investor for Jodi's husband, Adam's company. It had taken all summer to complete the negotiation and finally get the signatures over the fax (!) to our office at around 6:30pm on the 10th. All that was left was to wire the $3 million the next morning. Well of course late in the day of September 11 we received an email that the investor was suspending all wires to the US because of the attacks. It took three weeks and a complete renegotiation of the deal, to the significant detriment of Adam’s company, for our client to finally get the investor's money. 

I spent Friday, three days after the attack, at home on Long Island wondering what to do. We had no clue when the phones would be back. It wasn't like you could just call Verizon at that time and ask them to come put in new lines. A law firm without phones, especially then, was helpless. We weren’t alone. It took a week for me to reach a major law firm partner that was opposite me on a deal (their offices were near the Towers). Their phones just weren’t working, they must have had no remote access and there was no information on their website about what to do. 

The city was a mess. It was really only after this that firms and companies started seriously thinking about redundant off-site systems long before “cloud”meant something other than a source of precipitation. I sadly started considering moving my firm to Long Island and was planning to start calling real estate brokers that afternoon. 

Around noon on Friday, just for fun I called the office number, and miraculously the phone lines suddenly were working! I decided it was a sign, and all thoughts of Long Island went away. On Monday we all came back, still shaken up but determined. Clients started calling. That deal we were working on before this, let's get it done. It took a month or so but then things were back to humming as always. 

I allowed employees to volunteer to assist workers down at Ground Zero, as the area of the destruction and recovery was known, during work time if they wanted to. I offered space in our suite to attorneys whose downtown offices had been destroyed or become inaccessible. We did all we could. But we could not bring back the thousands who perished, including so many who died trying to save others and so many who developed illnesses from toxic air working on the Pile, as we also called the horrible huge mass of burning rubble that sat for months after the attacks. 

It took too long to finally develop the evidence linking cancers and other serious respiratory and other illnesses to work on the Pile after initial government denials about the toxicity of the air downtown. These brave responders and their families, as well as others who worked or lived in the area, were finally able to receive the financial help and care they need thanks to the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act that Congress passed in 2010. The law was extended through 2090 by Congress in 2015. Kudos to the likes of talk show host Jon Stewart whose passionate appeals to Congress in 2019 have helped extend the support for these heroes and over $7 billion in reimbursement paid or committed. 

Fifteen (!) years ago I was thrilled and sobered to add to this report that we had taken out Al Qaeda terrorist leader Osama Bin Laden, who waited until 2004 to admit he had ordered the attacks. And we are all proud that in 2014, the 104-story, exactly 1776-foot high One World Trade Center opened, as well as the 9/11 Memorial near the footprints of the towers and the beautiful reflecting pools where they stood. 

About ten years ago I took my now 24-year old son Andrew (long before hisvery successful film and theater career) to the amazing One World Observatory in what I still call the Freedom Tower. At first he was sort of whining not to go, but afterward he said, “That was really cool thanks.” Eightyears ago he and I had our first visit to the incredible 9/11 Memorial. We were both moved by the artifacts and memories of those lost. The Memorial is appropriate for all ages and I encourage everyone to pay a visit and to pay your respects at the dramatic reflecting pools around which are etched the names of the lost. 

You can be sure they are determined to do it again, and today we know there are other very well-financed groups seeking to destroy us and our way of life.I hope you will take a little time Friday, both to remember the bravery of those who died and those who risked illness to work on the Pile for months, and to remember our need to stay vigilant and resolute in our desire to rid the world of this horrific evil. And also, to remember the wonderful things that happened as the city and our nation came together in those difficult days. I remember about two months after the attacks I felt things were finally back to normal when a cabbie got out of his car at a red light to scream at another driver. 

And now that I have been living in the city for the last twelve years (ok we are also in the Hamptons quite a bit these days), despite the slow return march of the office workers following the end of the Covid pandemic, I feel pride in being an even stronger part of the attitude that does not allow any fear or terror to stop us from enjoying our lives as we wish. I continue to worry that a rapidly growing population of younger folks, including my son Andrew born after the attacks, and some of my current colleagues copied here who were maybe 7 or 8 years old that day, either know nothing about the tragedy or will learn about it as part of history- let's make sure they really understand what we faced. 

As I write I am thinking of two that I knew who did not make it that day, my former colleague and friend Dave Weiss of Cantor Fitzgerald and high school friend Neil Levin, head of the NY-NJ Port Authority. Also remembering those lost in the attack on the Pentagon and the crash of the terrorist hijacked plane in Shanksville, PA following the brave work of passengers to prevent further destruction. 

This article was written by David Feldman; it is for general informational purposes and does not constitute legal advice.