6

Ground Zero

If it had been a Monday morning, I would have been at 399 Park Avenue for the Management Committee meeting that Sandy convened every Monday at 8:00 am. But it was a Tuesday, so I was at my Citigroup Asset Management (CAM) office at Seven World Trade Center. I was working at my desk, and the view through my windows was of the Hudson River and New Jersey to the west, midtown Manhattan and the river to the north. The day had dawned particularly clear and beautiful. There really is nothing else quite like late summer in New York—bright blue skies, a mildness in the air, the thousands of glass and stone and metal buildings rising to the sky, millions of people, the trees still green but just about to turn russet and gold. Suddenly, from overhead but very close, a stupendous roar of aircraft jet engines filled my office, followed by the loudest noise I had ever heard in my life—an ear-shattering explosion behind me.

My office was on the forty-fifth floor, the top floor, of the northwest corner at Seven World Trade Center. The plane flew right over my head, with approximately three hundred feet clearance above our building, to smash into the eightieth floor of the building across the street behind me. Had Seven World Trade Center been a few stories taller or the plane dipped a little lower, I most likely would have died that morning.

Hersh Cohen was three floors lower, on the forty-second floor. He later told me what he saw and heard at that same moment. Visitors from a Cleveland real estate company were in his office. “I thought it was a sonic boom,” he recalled, “and I remarked, ‘It’s a bit early for that!’ but one of the Cleveland guys said, ‘That wasn’t a sonic boom, it was a seven-forty-seven and it just missed us.’”

Up on the forty-fifth floor, I jumped up from my desk and crossed the hallway to the empty conference room, where I stood and looked up across the street. There was a gaping hole in the north side of One World Trade Center, roughly thirty stories above me. Metal and glass were falling from the building façade around the hole and down into the street. As I watched, huge flames spewed out of the gaping hole. Then, small figures that were people appeared at the edges of the hole. Some crawled out and dangled from the bottom edges of the hole before falling to the plaza eighty floors down. Others looked over their shoulder a few times into the fiery inferno before jumping out toward the street in what looked to me like slow-motion free fall until their bodies smashed against the pavement far below. I saw dozens of people leap or fall and die on the ground. The heat from the flames must be so overwhelming, I thought, that people are choosing to take their chances on jumping from so high. It was a terrifying spectacle. I felt calm. Things seemed to be happening very slowly.

I walked back to my office and turned on the television news to try to get information about what was going on. CAM senior staffers came to my office. “Some people are rushing the elevators and stairs to leave the building,” they told me. “Should we issue an evacuation order?” Several CAM employees had been working in the World Trade Center during the 1993 terrorist bombing in the buildings’ underground garage, and now they assumed immediately that something similarly horrible and intentional was transpiring. “It doesn’t look like it’s safe to leave right now,” I said, gesturing to the steadily falling debris raining down from One World Trade Center. I wasn’t inclined to order an evacuation without more information on what was happening. “People who want to leave should be allowed to leave the building on their own decision,” I said. “But ask security to find a safer exit route through the rear.” Within a few minutes, building security informed us that it was safe to evacuate through the kitchen on the ground floor, north onto Greenwich Street. They had stationed officers in our building lobby to direct people who wanted to leave to exit by the rear route. A few minutes later, I was still watching television, hoping for information, when a plane flew into the side of Two World Trade Center. I immediately thought, “This isn’t an accident or a coincidence,” so I ordered immediate mandatory evacuation of all CAM employees at Seven World Trade Center. Seconds after my order was relayed, the alarm and flashing lights came on, along with an announcement through the PA system from Brad Thomas, CAM head of human resources. Brad and Evan Merberg, CAM chief administrative officer, walked the floors to ensure that all CAM employees were leaving the building. Around 9:30 a.m., twenty-seven minutes after the second plane struck, they reported to me that all CAM floors had been evacuated, and together we left Seven World Trade Center through the kitchen exit onto Greenwich Street.

I was unable to contact my driver, Ritchie Reyes, since there was virtually no operative landline or cellular telephone service, so I started walking north on Greenwich Street with Evan Merberg and Joe Deane. Joe had been on a call with people in Michigan when the first plane struck. He’d heard a tremendous roar and then a poof. He’d jumped over the credenza in front of his window, looked down, and seen that there wasn’t a speck of dust on the street, but then, after a pause, large objects started falling out of the sky—chunks of insulation, a chair. His immediate thought had been “This is a terrorist attack,” and he’d cleared the forty-first floor. After the basement bombing of One World Trade Center in 1993, where Joe had worked at the time, he and others had huddled on the rooftop for hours and then evacuated down the pitch-black stairwell. This time, the stairwell was well lit when he walked down.

Joe and Evan and I weren’t two blocks away from Seven World Trade Center when several women who were looking back toward the destruction started crying and pointing. We turned to see what they were pointing at. The smoke rising from the hole in the North Tower had gathered into a massive black cloud just above the building, and the cloud was in the iconic shape of the devil with horns and a pointy beard. “This is a scene of pure evil, triumphant,” I thought. Joe, a devout Catholic, said, “God always answers that.” And indeed, the next day we saw God’s answer in the newspaper: photographs of the World Trade Center wreckage where fallen steel girders formed the sign of the cross. In my office today I have a small rough-surfaced steel cross, approximately nine inches tall and six inches wide, which was carved from one of the collapsed steel girders at World Trade Center ground zero which formed that cross. A photographer for Time magazine captured that moment when the smoke formed the image of the devil above the ruined tower, but the photographic definition when it was printed in the magazine wasn’t sharp enough for most viewers to see Satan’s image as clearly as it had actually appeared.

As we walked north alongside hundreds of strangers, it gradually became clear that we would probably have to walk all the way to Citigroup’s headquarters at Park Avenue and 53rd Street. Subway service had been halted. The few northbound public buses passing us were packed, with no possibility of room for additional passengers. Every taxi was full. Sirens screamed. There was a steady parade of emergency vehicles, wailing and flashing, heading south toward the World Trade Center. We were walking on West Broadway just below Canal Street when Evan looked back and said, “I wonder if those buildings could collapse?” We stopped to look, and as if on cue, the North Tower began pancaking down, crumbling from the top. A giant cloud of dust and debris came billowing through the canyons formed by the streets and buildings. People around us started running and screaming. We turned east offWest Broadway and worked our way west-to-east and south-to-north via smaller side streets to avoid the funnel effect of the large north-south thoroughfares, which were being hit with the worst of the debris cloud and panicked crowds of frightened people. One World Trade Center collapsed at 9:50 am, just twenty minutes after we left Seven World Trade Center.

As we walked I thought, “This is a bad dream.” A perfectly beautiful September day with sunny, cloudless skies and mild temperatures had become a terrifying nightmare. Lower Manhattan looked like a war zone with refugees on foot streaming away from a battle. I tried repeatedly to call home and to reach my Citigroup office at midtown to let people know I was okay and making my way uptown, but I couldn’t get cellphone service. We continued walking east and north, and were on Park Avenue at East 23rd Street near Madison Square Park when Two World Trade Center collapsed at 10:29 am. Lower Manhattan was completely enveloped in dust, smoke, and ash.

Just after 11:00 am, we arrived at Citigroup headquarters. I went to Sandy Weill’s office to report on what had happened and what I had seen. The mood was very somber as we realized there was a high probability of Citigroup employee casualties in the World Trade Center collapse, and it was still very difficult to establish telephone communications with Citigroup offices around Manhattan. Evan Merberg activated the CAM disaster recovery plan, and Brad Thomas began the process of trying to account for all CAM employees.

Around an hour after I arrived, Citigroup CFO Todd Thomson came to my office to say Addie had called him and said she had been trying to reach me to find out if I was all right and had been unable to get through to my cellphone or my downtown office. She wanted to know if Todd knew anything about my whereabouts. I tried repeatedly to call my house in New Canaan, and eventually got a dial tone and my call went through. Addie sounded surprised to hear my voice and was very emotional. It seemed as if she might have been mentally bracing for bad news.

That afternoon I was able to get through on the telephone to my daughter Evonne at Georgetown University in Washington, and as we spoke she described the smoke she could see in the distance rising from the Pentagon. Later in the day I learned that Seven World Trade Center was on fire, apparently because fuel storage tanks in the building had exploded after being pierced by debris from the collapsed North Tower. At 5:25 that afternoon, Seven World Trade Center collapsed. All of my personal mementos there were gone, of course—family photographs, photographs of events with colleagues over the years, photographs of the apartment buildings we rehabbed in Boston, reprints of newspaper stories dating back to Cornell ’69, various awards and honors, daily diaries and business records.

All roads, bridges, and tunnels into and out of Manhattan were closed for security reasons. But I would not have been able to drive to Connecticut anyway because my driver had had to abandon my car in the chaos near the World Trade Center. We learned later that it was destroyed when the buildings collapsed. I stayed at my Park Avenue office until around 7:00 pm and then took the once-hourly Metro North emergency service outbound train from Grand Central Terminal. All trains ran as locals that day, making all stops, and each train station along the route was packed with crowds of people waiting and looking for loved ones, some of whom were never going to arrive.

The next day CAM commenced a schedule of twice-daily disaster recovery team conference calls to keep the entire management team informed and to facilitate immediate decisions as issues and problems arose. CAM had a designated block of seats at Citigroup’s primary disaster recovery facility in Rutherford, New Jersey. Unfortunately, much of Citigroup’s corporate disaster planning in the metro New York region was based on the premise of losing a single building for one reason or another. Now, all of Citigroup’s facilities in downtown Manhattan had been destroyed or closed, and sixteen thousand employees were displaced, including 2,500 CAM employees from Seven World Trade Center. As a result, CAM’s allocation of seats in the Rutherford disaster recovery facility was reduced significantly, and our teams scrambled to set up alternate recovery operations in temporary facilities at West 34th Street and at Broad Street in Manhattan, and at several buildings in Stamford, Connecticut. Our technology and facilities teams worked eighteen-hour days to prepare over three hundred workstation seats and telecommunications infrastructure by Thursday, September 13, when U.S. bond market trading reopened. Then they prepared an additional one hundred workstation seats and telecommunications infrastructure over the weekend of September 15–16 to be ready for Monday, September 17, when U.S. stock market trading reopened.

CAM portfolio managers, led by Hersh Cohen for equities and Joe Deane for fixed income, initiated portfolio manager conference calls for clients on Thursday, September 13. The goal was to reassure clients and calm their fears. Investment decisions made when emotions and fear are running high are rarely good decisions. Our portfolio managers conducted twice-daily client conference calls each day for two weeks, and over thirteen thousand clients dialed in. I believe our efforts, and other efforts like ours, helped to mitigate the potential for panic in U.S. financial markets.

Two months later, in November 2001, I commissioned a video that featured a montage of CAM employees’ faces and voices discussing the events we had experienced starting on September 11. My thinking was that we had lived through a historic experience together, and it should be commemorated in a form that employees could keep forever and share with their families. I wanted CAM employees and their families to have a tribute to their courage and dedication, as expressed by their colleagues. Each CAM employee received a copy of the video. My cover letter read:

The video was set to the heroic and majestic music of Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man and the theme from Chariots of Fire and was filled with heartfelt statements from employees, such as “We won’t let terrorists shut us down,” and “Commutes are now three hours each way, which is totally exhausting, but in life you get judged by how you act in a crisis,” and “We’re stronger, we’re closer, and that spirit will stay with us.” In my introductory remarks on the video, I said:

The CAM video was well received and was especially appreciated, I think, because it created a vehicle for our employees to share their experience with others. CAM was fortunate in having no employee casualties, while other Citigroup business units suffered six casualties. But directly across the street from CAM headquarters, there were over three thousand casualties at ground zero, One World Trade Center. If the first hijacked airplane had targeted the closest World Trade Center building in its flight path, or lost just a few hundred feet of altitude before impact, it would have been a direct hit on my office and probably resulted in hundreds or even thousands of CAM casualties. I probably would have perished instantly, without knowing what was happening. I occasionally think about that, and it reminds me of the fragility of life and prompts me to tell my wife and children more frequently that I love them. It is one of the reasons why I pray for God’s grace when I wake every morning, and when I retire every evening. I know that no person is guaranteed a safe return home on any given day.

I had a golfing friend, Michael Berkeley, who died that day in the North Tower. Ironically, it was his thirty-eighth birthday. I had seen him just two days earlier on Sunday, September 9, at the U.S. Open tennis finals. Michael had a lovely wife and two young sons ages seven and five. The image of his wife and boys at the funeral has stayed with me for years. It made me wonder how the lives of Addie and my children would have changed if I hadn’t made it out of Seven World Trade Center that morning.

Addie and I owned a condo in Tribeca at the corner of Duane and Hudson streets, approximately eight blocks from the World Trade Center. We used it primarily as a pied-à-terre for when I worked late at my downtown office, or when we had late evening or weekend charity events or other social commitments in Manhattan. One week after 9/11, when some lower Manhattan streets were opened to allow access for residents, I went to the condo, and the smell of death hung in the air. The odor of burning flesh permeated everywhere below Canal Street, a constant reminder that unimaginable evil had occurred in that place. I stopped using the Tribeca apartment in part because, no matter how late the hour, I preferred to go home to Connecticut every evening to be with my family.