It was September 2018 and I had just moved to New York City. The summer was getting ready to give way to fall and you could sense it in the cool, humid breeze. I had started school not a week before at my new, posh private school in Lower Manhattan. My stepdad worked there, so my brother and I had gotten our tuition waived. The classrooms were on the 19th, 20th, 21st and 22nd floor, overlooking the Hudson River, New Jersey and the rest of the bustling metropolis that is Manhattan. I had never been up so high before. We were quite literally a stone’s throw away from the tallest building in New York, One World Trade Center, simply abbreviated to WTC amongst my friends who had grown up with it in their window.
The only term fitting for the WTC was skyscraper. I used it as my guide when elsewhere in New York. I once stood at the base of the 1,776-foot-tall building and looked up. It seemed to wave and sway in the cold New York breeze.
One of the first excursions my stepdad took me on in New York was to the top of the WTC. We walked through the doors of the building and the sweet smell of AC pushed up my hair. We rode an elevator up to the top floor and were greeted with a sweeping view of Manhattan. “I’d love to work here,” I told my stepdad.
We were walking through the Financial District, where it’s hard to see the dark purple sky with all the buildings and scaffolding. We reached the Duane Reede (New York Walgreens) that was on Beaver Street— known for 60-mile-per-hour gusts during the winter— when I looked up and saw two beams of light. “What is that?” I pointed and asked my mom. “It’s a memorial,” she responded. “For the 9/11 attacks.”
My school had a yearly trip to the 9/11 museum, but it was always after September 11. It was exclusive to the Upper School (grades 6 to 12), so my brother never went. I had learned about 9/11 in my Tacoma middle school, but I never really paid any attention in class. It seemed so far away anyways.
The museum was located across the street from the WTC and next to the 9/11 memorial. The museum affected me when I left. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, the videos that looped on the monitors looped in my head. I felt tears creeping on as I walked home.
In fall of 2019, I kind of stopped hanging out with friends at my place. I was a freshman in high school, and I felt, no matter how convenient for me and my friends, I should steer them away from my parents. My stepdad was the director of the school’s boarding program, so he had access to the empty dorm rooms. My best friend would come over and we’d buy Starburst jellybeans from the now-defunct Duane Reede across the street from where I lived (fun fact, the New York Post once called it ‘Manhattan’s swankiest Duane Reede’) and we’d watch ‘The Good Place’ in an empty room. When the heat subsided, which was around when school started (we started after Labor Day, and early into our school year, we’d get a five-day weekend because of Rosh Hashanah), we’d go to the Oculus, which was next to the WTC.
The Oculus was a huge building. It was in itself a memorial. It was in the shape of an eye looking upwards toward the WTC. I had taken an architecture class in high school and the first building we studied was the Oculus.
The interior was mostly white marble, and it smelled of AC. It was a transportation hub, a tunnel led from the not-as-fancy, but still undeniably stunning Fulton Street Station. Another tunnel led to the PATH train station, which went to New Jersey. For some reason, most flights to Seattle leave from Newark airport, so when I’d visit my dad in his sleepy Washington State town, I’d have to take the PATH. And it was a shopping mall with stores lining both floors. A tunnel led to Brookfield Place, or Brookfield Palace, as I called it, in Battery Park City. Brookfield Palace was a luxury mall that I could never be able to shop at. It was a beautiful space, with a garden outside, a stunning atrium and 12 indoor palm trees. Brookfield was damaged during the 9/11 attacks and underwent extensive remodeling and repair in the years leading up to my arrival in New York.
From Brookfield Palace, you could take a skybridge to a green-domed building that led to Liberty Park, where The Sphere lived. The Sphere was once between the two Trade centers. During the attacks, The Sphere was buried by debris. It survived, a little wounded. They placed it in the center of Liberty Park, among benches and greenery, next to St. Nicholas National Shrine, which seemed forever under construction.
“You wouldn’t know it, but the Burger King on Liberty and Church is a historical landmark,” I had told two of my friends in August of 2020. They looked at me, confused. We were walking to the Oculus. This was the first time we had seen each other since that March 13 get-together when COVID had shut the school down the day before spring break and we decided to ‘risk everything’ to hang out. At that time, we still had to wear masks anytime we went outside.
I started to explain that the Burger King on Liberty and Church had been HQ for the NYPD during the 9/11 attacks. With nothing to do during the worst of COVID, I had gone on walks through the empty city and had noticed a plaque. It’s not like we ate there, though; there was another Burger King just a few blocks away near my school. We continued talking about the guy I was kind of, not really, dating.
With my newfound knowledge of the city and its backstreets, when September 11, 2020, came around, I decided to find out where the beams of light came from. I had been led to believe that the two light beams that soared into the sky came from the 9/11 memorial. However, the year before, I had visited it and saw no lights coming out of the giant squares.
When the sky darkened, the lights shot up into the air. I followed the lights south of the memorial through streets that looked familiar until I reached a parking complex near my school. I saw two thick white beams piercing the sky from the top of the parking garage. I could see moths and other bugs ensnared in the light.
On September 11, 2021, my school had planned a trip to the top of the WTC. Well, it was kind of an annual thing the boarding program had every year, but COVID had prevented it previously. I became a boarding student after my mom, stepdad and brother moved back to Washington State. The school had agreed to significantly reduce the tuition for me.
It had been 20 years since the 9/11 attacks and we were going to be at the top of the WTC. That blew my mind. It was me and a few other students; we quickly became the core group of the weekend boarding program excursions. Most of the students were either too busy with International Baccalaureate work or had enough money that they spent the weekends in rented penthouses on the Upper East Side. We rode up to the top floor and I gasped as I saw the vast city unfold through the thick glass window.
The big events had already happened, and morning was pushing into afternoon. I learned later that Bruce Springsteen had played at the memorial that day. Mere weeks from then, I would listen to ‘Dancing in the Dark’ for the first time and my life would change.
In 2024, my first assignment for The Daily Evergreen was to cover the 9/11 commemoration at Pullman City Hall. I was content with the assignment. I moved away from New York and back to Washington State during my senior year of high school. I’d take any chance to be connected to the city I love. I interviewed the mayor during the event, and he talked about the 9/11 memorial in New York. He described the memorial to me. I was going to tell him I lived mere blocks away from the memorial, but held my tongue.
I also talked with some of the firefighters who were in attendance. One firefighter explained to me how he joined after 9/11. I really respected that. He was attending WSU at the time, over 3,000 miles away, and he was moved to become a firefighter because of the New York first responders.
