The Cernikovsky's family 9/11 memories ...
.... for the 10th anniversary, here are some of our photos and experiences of that day in 2001
 
 
 
  • Our story of 9/11/2011 was, thank goodness, a lot happier than those of many other people in lower Manhattan that morning.  In the years soon after, we often told it, but for the 10th anniversary, here it is in detail and almost all of it with photos that we took at the time.

  • On Tuesday morning, September 11th, we set out early in the morning for JFK, the start of a three week trip to Tokyo for a couple of days and a long planned tour of China.  We prepared 21 envelopes on the wall of our apartment in 80 Nassau Street, two short blocks from the World Trade Center, one for each day for Jenny and David, with instructions about what to eat, or money to order a pizza.  We also stuffed the freezer full of food for them and, before leaving, took out a chicken that they could cook that evening.  We arranged with friends and the "super" of our apartment building and his wife, that every afternoon, after Jenny and David came from their schools, someone would either call or stop by to make sure they were OK. 
     
  • The evening before, I quickly went to the Borders bookstore in 5 World Trade Center to buy a 2002 calendar for a colleague who asked for it ... she was going to be our tour guide for a couple of days in Tokyo and asked for one with photos of New York City.  It had some photos of the WTC towers.   (The bookstore was destroyed the next morning.)

  • It was a beautiful sunny, early Fall morning and as we took a taxi to JFK, the East River was still, like a mirror.  We reached JFK, checked in and, given our first class award tickets, tried to eat some strange food in the Japan Airlines lounge.  Suddenly, on TV, news images of a plane hitting teh World Trade Center and, from the lounge, this view:
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  • The twin towers smoking, Jenny in a school a few blocks to one side and David in a school a few blocks on the other side, and both returning to our apartment two short blocks from the towers.  As we started wondering what to do, the airport started closing down, Japan Airlines announced that all flights were cancelled.  I was so silly, I tried to rebook for the following day, but they had only business class seats available. We got our suitcases back before the airport closed and tried to get a taxi to lower Manhattan.  No taxi driver would go there, so we rented a car to go home and look for the kids. Jenny was 18 and David 17.  We did not know, of course, that the towers would fall, but when we heard that on the car radio on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, we bought gloves, glasses and masks in a hardware store.
  • Let me set the scene to describe where we lived at the time. Below is a photo that we took some years earlier from "Windows on the World", a restaurant on the 106th and 107th floors of the North Tower (the first one to be hit on 9/11, read David's description of how he actually saw that happen, below). 
     
  • In the photo, Manhattan and Brooklyn (right) bridges cross the East River.  For 20 years, until the Spring of 2001, we lived on the top floors of 145 Nassau Street, see the dot.  This looked over City Hall Park and was 4 blocks from the WTC towers.  We were planning to move to Antigua, Guatemala, and sold the apartment.  To help Jenny and David finish their high school studies, we rented an apartment at 80 Nassau Street, see another dot, two blocks closer to the twin towers.  Also in the photo is the Murry Bergtraum High School, where Jenny was that morning (the low triangular building at the foot of the AT&T tower).  The Woolworth building on the left side of photo.
  • To give you an idea of how close we were to the World Trade Center, below is a photo from our rooftop office at 145 Nassau Street.  For 20 years, we saw the towers from our living room, dining room, even one of the bathrooms.  To the right of the towers is the tall white 57 stories-high Woolworth building, built in 1913, one of the oldest skyscrapers.
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  • In August 2001, my mother Sasha visited us from Germany.  Because the new apartment was smaller, David lent her his bedroom and slept on a sofa.  With Sasha, we went sightseeing, including the Cloisters and then to the Statue of Liberty Island, where someone took this photo, the last one that we have of the World Trade Center:
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  • We took almost all the photos on this page, but of course, not the one on the right.

  • OK, so let us get back to the morning of 9/11.   On the way from JFK, we heard on the radio that both towers collapsed and saw clouds of smoke as we got closer. 
     
  • We heard that bridges into lower Manhattan were closed, so we parked near Manhattan Bridge and tried to go on foot, but the police were allowing thousands of people OUT of Manhattan, but not IN.  However, what they did not know was that below the main roadway, which was crowded with people leaving, there is a small walkway, which was still open.  So we walked to Manhattan.

  • Where were the children ?  Surely with the towers fallen, there must be thousands of people dead!  My cell phone was not working, but someone let us use his for the $20 we offered him, as long as we walked faster, along with him, toward Manhattan.  We called home, but neither David nor Jenny were answering the phone. 

  • This was the view, we saw, below, with clouds of smoke rising from the site.  To the right of the smoke is the Woolworth building and to the right of that the AT&T, which was next to Jenny's school!

  • The BBC has done a good job making a summary of 22 images and short video clips from that day, click here.

  • Rutgers Law Review just published, for the first time, in September 2011, full audio transcripts of conversations by air traffic control and the aircraft, show the extent of confusion that morning and, obviously, how unprepared the country was for such an attack.  Thank god the FAA quickly stopped all take-offs and grounded all aircraft, possibly preventing a few more planes from taking off and being hijacked.
 
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  • Once in Manhattan, we went through Chinatown, toward home, but soon ran into a police cordon.  The whole of lower Manhattan was closed.  People could only leave. We pleaded with the captain in charge of the barrier, and explaining that our kids were somewhere in there, that he allowed us in, with a female detective as a guide, who had orders to take us in and bring us out, with or without kids.  There was devastation everywhere and soon we started using the goggles and masks we bought in Brooklyn.  Here is an image of a deli on the corner near our apartment, with flowers covered in ash.  The World Trade Center, or "Ground Zero", as it would soon be known, is two blocks down at the dark end of Fulton Street:
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  • Here is one more image of Fulton Street that morning, probably about 10-10:30 a.m. Ash everywhere and smoke billowing out of the burning buildings.  And, for a contrast, a photo that someone took of me, when I visited the same spot 10 years later.  The whole neighborhood is still a building site, and at the end of the street is rising the new One World Trade Center, formerly known as the "Freedom Tower".  This is about half of its planned 104 floors and it is going up fast.  You may see that in both the 2001 and the 2011 photos, on the right, on the third floor, is a flag of the "Cables and Chips" computer supplies shop.  Click on either photo to see a larger image.
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  • Anyway, we got home and there was neither Jenny nor David.  We looked for Bill Brad, the "super" of the building, he was not at home either.  We heard a TV in a nearby apartment and asked someone, who said that Bill had been told by the police to evacuate everyone, because they expected the underground gas lines to explode.  This person, however, was not leaving.  With our police detective in tow, we had to leave the area again, without kids.  However, right after leaving through the barrier, my cell phone started to work for a while and we called Bill.  He told us he was nearby, in an apartment building in Chinatown, where his brother was a super, and they had Jenny!!!!!  They took her with them!

  • What we did not know at the time was that a teacher took Jennifer part of the way from school to home and then she walked alone home to 80 Nassau Street, two blocks from the towers, toward the towers, BEFORE they fell down.  The internet was still working.  It stopped, until the end of 2001, at 5 p.m. that afternoon, when the 7 World Trade Center skyscraper also collapsed, next to the old AT&T building, and cut all the lines.  Well, Jenny was at home and assumed that we were already on our way to Tokyo.  She sent us an e-mail that I have saved the past 10 years.  I think that either the computer she was using or hotmail had a problem with the time ... it says 9/11/01 2:32 AM, but it must have been sent at 8:32, just before the towers collapsed:

From: jenny cernikovsky (jennystar2@hotmail.com)
Sent: Tue 9/11/01 2:32 AM
To: Tomas Cernikovsky (cernikovsky@hotmail.com)

hi dad and mom i am home because school got called off because the world trade center blow off
into flames and smoke came and eveybody had to vacurate the buildings and there is no work today
and no school today and no homework either. i am all rigth and david migth come home or
stay at school if he is all rigth. are you worried about us now if you are write back.
love your daugther jenny
  • Now, to set the scene again, here is a photo that we did not take, that came a little later, of Ground Zero, after a good part of the wreckage was cleared which shows the locations of 80 Nassau Street, Jenny's school by Brooklyn Bridge, and David's Stuyvesant High School, a few blocks north of WTC ... the next story.  In the lower right part of the photo is, again, the Woolworth building and just to the right of that City Hall.  (Also marked is P.S. 234, three blocks north of WTC, where Jenny & David went as small kids and later worked to help in the after-school program.) 
 
  • Now we set out on a search for David.  Going to his school was out of the question.  It was inside the cordoned area and the news was that it was quickly evacuated and turned into a "triage center" for the expected flood of injured people from the wreckage.  Sad to say, later on we found that it was not much used.

  • I don't remember who told us ... there was a lot of confusion, that Stuyvesant students were evacuated to another school in Chinatown and so we went looking.  When we got there, the school was empty, but they told us that Stuyvesant students all went to another school in lower Midtown.  There was, obviously, that day, no public transportation, so we hitch-hiked and someone took us, who was going uptown.  People were bending over backwards that day to help each other, everyone was a friend.  When we reached that school, it, too, was empty.  We did not know where else to look, but someone in the school office said that "the internet is still working".  Magic!  We used their connection and there was an e-mail from David, which we also kept.  If his e-mail time is similarly distorted as Jenny's e-mail, then he did not write it at 7:30 AM, but 1:30 PM.  Must have been something with hotmail that day:
From: David Cernikovsky (harrycareyrules@hotmail.com)
Sent: Tue 9/11/01 7:30 AM
To: cernikovsky@hotmail.com; barbcern@hotmail.com
 
hey mom dad i'm fine they evacuated the school after the first building collapsed i'm at a friends house. 
his name is heath he lives on 9th st and 6th ave and the number is 5331208 or 5331209 if i can't get home 
i'm staying here i think but i don't know where jenny is so please write me please. 
thanx i'm fine, completely no scraches. write me bye 
  • As I explained, we sold the apartment in the Spring and moved two blocks closer to the towers, at 80 Nassau Street, where we built a temporary apartment and even did some gardening on the terrace, where we also spent some 2001 summer weeknights barbecuing hamburgers.  That barbecue, by the way, is now doing good service here in Antigua.  This was the garden after 9/11.
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  • So, this was it for the Cernikovskys on 9/11.  We were worried about both of them, while Jenny worried about David and he worried about her.  We found David in Greenwich Village and headed toward Chinatown.  By now it was late afternoon and the City of New York started offering free bus service to take people out ... the subways were shut down.  We got a bus across the bridge, picked up our rented car and headed through Brooklyn and Queens to our house in the Catskills.  Someone in the City was so smart that they opened all toll bridges and gates and let everyone pass for free and at top speed.  Behind us, for quite a while, a huge smoke to be seen from everywhere.

  •  
  • We were there for 10 days and watched, in amazement, all that was happening.  We used to run the Pratt Museum website, for the small museum in town.  The year before, our exchange student Sona wrote a series of history articles and now David used his time in Prattsville to write a detailed story of his 9/11 morning.  Here it is.
Zadock Pratt Museum Feature 

In 2000 and 2001, we ran a number of Prattsville History Features
This is a special feature, No. 13 in our series, by David Cernikovsky, 17, a student at Stuyvesant High School in lower Manhattan. 
David has also been a resident of Prattsville for 16 years on weekends and summers, and spent two summers as a tour guide at the Pratt Museum. 

 

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"I saw it all."

"I have to keep reminding myself of what I saw because if I don’t, I know I’ll end up convincing myself that I never really saw it.  However, maybe it would be better if I did forget.  What I saw was the most awful thing I imagine anyone could ever see.  This is the story of what I, David Cernikovsky, a Stuyvesant high school student and a lifelong native of New York, saw on September 11, 2001."                    

Lower Manhattan on September 11, 2001

           "The day started out normal.  I live within walking distance from school but I usually take a bike.  That day, however, I was having my senior class (12th grade) photos taken for our yearbook.  This meant that I had to walk, since my parents didn’t want me to ride a bike and risk ripping my dress jacket and good shirt.  My parents, themselves, had left that morning at about 7:45 for the airport; they were going to China.  My sister and I were to stay in the city and would have had a few of my parents friends look in on us from time to time while they were away.  My sister had also left at about 7:45 for school.  Her classes begin at 8:10 every day, but we live close to her school too, so she can walk as well.  I left at 8:15 for school as my classes begin at 8:45."

         
"About a third of the way to school I realized I had left the ticket that I needed for the class photos at home.  My school had sent me a ticket with my picture time and where to go to take them.  It also served as identification – there are 900 students in my senior class- that I really had that time for my pictures.  So I needed to return to home to get it."

           "Before I continue I would like to describe where I live.  I made a map that will describe locations.  My house is about two and a half blocks from the World Trade Center Twin Towers.  First there comes Church Street directly adjacent to the Twin Towers to the east, and then one more street east is Broadway.  Then one more and you get to Nassau where I enter my apartment building.  You can get a better perspective with the landmarks I drew on the map."

            "When I returned home I knew I was going to be late for school but since school just opened for the year I didn’t want to leave a bad impression so I decided to go against my parents wishes and, for speeds-sake, take my bike back to school.  So I rode to school, directly going past 5 World Trade Center on my way.  This is a shorter building with only about seven stories.  This, however was the building I most often visited because Borders, a good bookshop, was located inside. It too would later collapse. 

            "When I arrived back at my school it was – from what I know about the official time of the attacks – 8:44." 

            "Now I will describe the location of my school.  It is only about 5 blocks north of the Twin Towers on the other side of the West Side Highway.  From the WTC complex there is, in order from north to south, Vesey, Park Row, Murray, Warren, then the street Stuyvesant High School is located on: Chambers.  You again will see it better on the map.  I was under the bridge that spans the West Side Highway.  This bridge was made so that the students of my school and those of the Elementary school next to us can cross the highway safely. The West Side highway is a very busy and very dangerous street for pedestrians."

             "Under the Bridge is a series of bike racks made for all of us to lock up our bikes.  It was as I was locking my bike to the pole that it happened."

             "Now this next paragraph all happened in just a few seconds mind you." 

"The view I had was perfect, perfect I say in the sense that I could see well, not that it was something I wanted to see.  I heard a loud whirring noise like an extremely large truck go right over my head.  Naturally, as a New Yorker, very little catches my attention; but it was just so loud.  I turned to look at the street first, then I looked up.  What I saw was awful.  A plane flew directly into the North Tower.  I remember hearing a lady screaming and thinking to myself in such a New York way, “Come on lady no one screams in New York, nothing gets to us,” even as I watched it hit.  As I kept watching it exploded.   The tower exploded! Then it sank in. I stood mesmerized just watching this huge fireball.  Then as the fire cleared, I saw the hole in the tower.  It was shaped almost like an airplane.  I saw it before smoke started pouring from the hole, when you could actually see the airplane.  That hole was one of the most lasting images of the day.  I say “one of the most” because something later would top it." 

"When it all really came to me that a plane had hit the world trade center, it hit me like a sack of bricks.  I started cursing.  That’s it.  I started spouting off “What the F***!”, “What kind of S*** is that!”, and the one I repeated most through the day: “That doesn’t F***ing happen, man, that’s movie S***!”, or other such profanities to the same extent.  A biker beside me seemed to share the same opinion.  Next I heard a lady screaming, “My cell don’t work, my cell don’t work!”.  Then after about 2 minutes of staring, cursing and staring some more, I just turned around locked my bike up, (that was no easy task though, with my hands shaking the way they were it took about a minute and a half to lock the damn thing) climbed the stairs to my school and went in.  I was the only one who had arrived at that time so after I was literally pulled into the building by the security guard, I was the one who told all of the people hanging out around the lobby, “Hey, the World Trade Center just got hit by a plane!” Everyone needed a second to believe it - they all thought the sound was one of the many sounds you just hear in NY, a car backfire or something." 

"Then I went up to my classroom.  I was convinced at the time that there had been a malfunction in the cockpit, no doubt, and the poor pilots couldn’t do anything.  I entered the classroom and said again “Hey, umm, a plane just hit the World Trade Center.” They just didn’t believe me.  The class is on the north side of the building so they had heard nothing.  After a few minutes of explaining, they still didn’t believe me.  Then over the loudspeaker the principal of the school said: “this morning at 8:45 a plane hit the WTC”  - that’s when they believed."

"Now, I know they did not hear the first plane because I didn’t hear the second.  It wasn’t until another guy walked in and said, “I saw the second plane hit.” Now, this, no one believed.  Everyone, like myself, believed that the controls on the first plane had gone crazy, so we didn’t, couldn’t, believe that two planes had done the same thing.  After a little time we realized that it was intentional - an act of terrorism or something."

"The principal would later in the period come on and tell everyone to continue with the normal day and to go to the next class.  So we did.  My next class however was anything but normal."

"We had no lesson.  We just turned on the television we had in the room and watched the footage.  We discussed how they would evacuate the people in the WTC.  We determined that a helicopter would have to airlift all people above the crashes oblivious to the horrid idea that they would actually collapse.  We watched the footage of the second plane hit over and over from every different angle.  There was no footage from the first, so I was the only one in that class to have seen it."

"Later in the period, I went to the bathroom to put on my jacket for the pictures - my time was going to be during the next period so I might as well get my jacket on now.  When I came back from the bathroom, I heard about the Pentagon.  That really freaked me out, for two reasons.  One it meant that this was not just a New York thing, the nation was under attack and anything could be next.  The second was that I thought that without the Pentagon, how would we stop these people? The pentagon was our military, damn it, and now their all dead (one of my many irrational thoughts of the day: the pentagon is far to big to be destroyed by one plane, but forgive me, I was not really in the best condition then).  So, for another 20 minutes or so (I can’t tell how long) we just sat and watched footage over and over on Channel 1." 

"Now, again I go into a location description.  From my classroom we were too far east to see the actual towers, a building was in the way.  Just barely.  One classroom to the west and the angle would have been fine.  All we could see was the street directly adjacent to towers.  Also we were on the eighth floor so we could see the street clearly.  This is important, since what I saw on the street was horrifying.  From the windows we could see the police cars, ambulances, fire-trucks and rescue workers under the WTC." 

"Now, near the end of second period on the news a very calm newswoman was describing the scene.  The press is supposed to be calm, always.  Never are they fazed,  never are they scared.  This is how they seem to us.  So when the news lady went from almost casually describing the scene to screaming at the top of her lungs, we freaked.  She started screaming “Oh, my God, IT”S FALLING!!!!!!!”

"We ran to the window and what we saw was awful.  Now we could see the tower, or see parts of it anyway.  We saw tons and tons of 2 World Trade Center  (no doubt with people in it) falling.  Falling right onto the street below.  Onto the fire trucks.  Onto the ambulances.  Onto the police cars.  That wasn’t the worst part of what I saw.  I saw people: cops, firemen, good people there to help save others in the street between the vehicles.  I watched as the WTC fell on all of those people.  All of the cars and trucks; yes, that was an awful sight too but they were at that distance: still cars.  You had to imagine people in the cars to realize it fully there.  But there were people in the street.  I could see people on the street, people I didn’t have to imagine to see, and then I couldn’t see them at all.  They were gone, crushed, and most likely dead beneath the south tower."

"After that everyone went crazy.  The TV had gone out in the school and so had the lights, but only for a few seconds.  But after the collapse the girls (and some guys) started crying.  I personally was in shock and I just stood at the window screaming obscenities again.  This time, I wasn’t alone - believe me.  A good portion of the class was doing and saying the same thing.  After it fell we were evacuated.  They said the dust cloud was coming towards us, so we had to go.  On the way down the stairs a few other guys and I had to carry a boy in a wheelchair three flights because none of the elevators were working.  When we got down to the ground I met a few friends, and we all left the building.  The police men led us north on the now empty West Side Highway.  About two blocks into the walk a loud rumbling began and, as I turned to look, I saw the TV needle atop the north tower collapsing into the rest of the WTC and watched in horror as the rest of the second tower went down too.  We all saw, and were again all shocked.  But this time we were beyond cursing.  I guess we had just reached a point were we couldn’t curse or scream anymore.  We just turned around and started walking north again.  The idea that there were no Twin Towers started sinking in, oh, so slowly.  Even after watching the footage on TV in class and seeing the plane hit, it never occurred to me that they would fall.  I had kept thinking: “how the hell are they going to fix those holes?”…thinking, “God, there must be 500 people dead”! When they fell, the number that popped in my head rose to 100,000.  Irrational, yes but it’s what I thought." 

"Later, my friends and I went to the house of one friend who lived on 9th street.  On the way we stopped and looked down 6th avenue at the “nothing” that used to be the World Trade Center.  It was unbelievable." 

"The rest of the day was spent watching the news and waiting for news of my parents.  I knew I would be waiting longer than most anyone as my parents were in Brooklyn at the Airport.  It did go through my mind at one point that they might have been in one of the planes. There was really only one plane I knew they could have been on: the one that crashed in Pennsylvania the others were too early. Then I found out that was a United airline and we always use American, which is of course the company of two of the other three planes. (Later I found out they were on Japanese airlines so my worrying was pointless).  But, I spent most of my time worrying about my sister, who has Down’s syndrome.  How she was, where she was, was she okay? Her school wasn’t all that far from the WTC, and she was east of it, almost directly in the path of the dust clouds that would envelop lower Manhattan.  I couldn’t contact her because the phones weren’t working."

"There’s not really much more to say, really.  My parents eventually found me after I wrote an e-mail from my friend’s computer. They arrived about seven hours after the first plane hit.  They had walked from Brooklyn over the Manhattan Bridge.  My sister had gone home and there met with the superintendent of our building.  He took her to his brother’s house on 7th street - 2 1/2 blocks from where I was.  We then all walked back to Brooklyn over the Manhattan Bridge to a car they had rented from the airport - and drove to the house we have in upstate New York." 

             "I am still here in upstate New York writing this.  In the days after the tragedy I have received so much support.  I am not traumatized.  My “New York-ness” keeps me hard.  We’re hard to faze, so something like this surprised, shocked and scared me, but didn’t traumatize me.  What I’ve seen in these past few days has filled me with mixed emotions.  I personally went to give blood about three hours after we were evacuated.  I couldn’t - the lines were too long.  You may hear about how we are sticking together through this.  There is no way to describe how true that is.  In 4 hours from when the first plane hit there were already posters everywhere - and I mean everywhere - asking people to donate blood.  There were makeshift stands everywhere with people giving out water and cookies to the donators.  This has filled me with happiness.  Well, after something like this, it is hard to be happy but I have been touched.  Conversely, some things I have seen on TV have angered me.  Obviously, towards whoever did this, but as well, I also am disgusted by all of these things I see on the news.  I keep seeing all of these people from Michigan or Oregon crying as if they were the ones who saw what I did.  I know it is awful and they have the utmost right to but it still for some reason pisses me off.  The news channels should show people from New York or Washington reacting to this.  We saw the people dying, not on TV but with our own eyes.  Whenever I go over the building falling on those people in my mind I realize what I saw.  I saw hundreds of people dying less than one half kilometer from where I stood in less than one second from each other. We should be the ones crying on TV Except those from New York won’t cry as much as much as the others. We are a strong city and have steeled ourselves after this attack. We cried, yes, but many of us have stopped crying and started wanting to help others. When you are helping others there is no crying.  We must be strong, for if those we help, and the rest of the nation sees us strong, then they too can be strong." 

            "The ones who did this are cowards and I want them to know that those who were there are not afraid of you.  That there is not one person who could have witnessed what we did and not felt the way I do.  And the way I feel? I f you were here right now in front of me I would not cower in fear: rather, I would rip you apart."

"I am 17 years old and what I saw on September 11, 2001 I will never forget.  What I feel now is sorrow for those who died and anger at those who did this.  But President Bush could not have been more right when he said that all this did was bring us closer together.   I have no doubt that together we will punish the heartless cowards that did this, but with just actions – that will be our revenge."

David's map shows the location of his home, school and escape route on September 11, 2001

This history feature is written by

David Cernikovsky

Stuyvesant High Student

New York, USA

September 15, 2001

 

David has also been a resident of Prattsville for 16 years on weekends and summers, and spent two summers as a tour guide at the Pratt Museum.

You can write to David at:

harrycareyrules@hotmail.com

Note 2011:
David's e-mail now is
davecern@gmail.com

 

 

 

  • Now, the clock was ticking on the rented car, our own car was trapped inside the lower Manhattan zone and we had no idea what the apartment looked like, so with friends from Prattsville, Christl and Val, with whom we were supposed to do the China trip, we finally drove down to the city. 

  • The police allowed us into the secure zone to check on our apartment.  It was not a pretty sight.  Although we left doors and windows closed and no ash got inside, there was no electricity for 10 days.  Imagine a freezer stocked with food for 3 weeks, without power for 10 days.  And a chicken left on the counter for the 9/11 dinner was green and smelly.  Here are Christl & Val helping us clean up.  Our small terrace garden was covered in papers that flew out of the top floors of the WTC.  After the clean-up, we had lunch in Chinatown, that was as close as we got to China at that time.
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  • After this, we moved back to 80 Nassau Street.  We lived there that Fall, with fires burning, later just smoldering.  No phone, no internet, everything disorganized.  The smoke and the smell of metal and burning fires all day long.  We used to go take photos of the clean-up, but eventually the city put up barricades to keep it out of sight.  Here are a few of my photos from those long, dark nights of Fall 2001, two blocks from "Ground Zero":
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  • The happy end of our story:

    After that, we let our lease on the apartment run out in January 2002.  David moved, for several months, to stay with friends back at 145 Nassau Street, until his graduation from Stuyvesant.  I drove, in February 2002, from New York in a 48ft tractor-trailer, with a Guatemalan friend, down to Antigua with all our our stuff to close the New York City chapter of our lives and start a new one here. 

2002:  We're moving to Antigua !  Click to see photos of our trip with a 48 ft tractor-trailer.  Plan to visit us !
Click on the truck to see the February 2002 trip