9/11

Jack Whitten: The Black Monolith

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Written & Photographed by Kenn Sava. (*- Unless otherwise credited)

Show seen: Jack Whitten: The Messenger, MoMA, 2025.

After a quiet Summer, 2024, Summer Blockbusters brought the heat back to Manhattan in 2025. Four shows stood out to me: a pair at the Whitney1 and two at MoMA. Having already written about MoMA’s Hilma af Klint: What Stands Behind the Flowers, here, simultaneously upstairs on 6,  Jack Whitten: The Messenger, was the kind of show that made MoMA what it is for many around the world: one of, if not THE, leader in presenting excellent Modern (even Contemporary) Art shows. I’ve written about many of them in these e-pages these past 10 1/2 years.

Few Artists were more Contemporary than Jack Whitten. In fact, he invented some of its language, and a good deal of its emphasis/focus/center.

Man about town. Jack Whitten, a transplant from Alabama, was an NYC resident for 58 years, spending most of that time Downtown, before moving to Queens- except when he was “gone fishing,” as he wrote in his Notebooks on his departure for Crete each summer. The Artist is seen here on the corner of Broadway & Broome Street in the early 1970s on the Introductory wall card. When I see this Photo, I’m reminded that later he owned a building on Lispenard Street, a few blocks north of The World Trade Center. I tell the story of Jack Whitten on 9/11 further on.

Still, it left me with a deep sadness that after decades of struggle, Jack Whitten (1939-2018) didn’t live to see it.

Installation view of the first gallery of Odyssey: Jack Whitten Sculpture 1963-2017. The Met Breuer, November 24, 2018

He didn’t live to see the other great show of his work either- Odyssey: Jack Whitten Sculpture 1963-2017, the Retrospective of his Sculpture which he mostly kept from public display, which came to NYC at The Met Breuer in 2018, and which I wrote about here. Together, they make a very compelling case for Mr. Whitten’s extraordinary creative & imaginative range, the extremely wide range of his talent & skill, his accomplishment, and his place as a 20th & 21st century Master.

Installation view of the first gallery of the final Jack Whitten solo show during his lifetime at Hauser & Wirth, February 7, 2017. It was the first time I had seen one of his Sculptures. Quantum Wall (A Gift for Prince), is on the back wall. It can be seen in full in my piece on Jack Whitten: Odyssey, here, an installation view of which is shown above.

Both shows point out a sorry reality for too many great Artists. Jack Whitten is just one of many who waited in vain for their U.S. Retrospective. Meanwhile, numerous deceased Artist receive show after show (I’ve seen ten shows of the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat in NYC since 2012, for example, and written about almost all of them), while too many deserving living Artists go ignored, until years- even decades, after their passing.

Jack Whitten: The Messenger, Installation view, MoMA, July 31, 2025.

Nonetheless, all the while, his Art continued to ascend the ranks of appreciation and acceptance. It wasn’t always thus. Getting to this point has. been a rough and rocky road. An excerpt from MoMA’s Exhibition Catalogue (which is recommended as the most comprehensive book on Jack Whitten ever, in spite of its cardboard binding) looks back to his beginnings-

“Whitten made some of his earliest images as a teenager, painting hand-lettered signs for local businesses in his hometown of Bessemer, Alabama, in the 1950s. One of his first paid jobs was for a Civil Rights protest on the steps of the county courthouse. These images were meant to travel: to say something, to have reach. Whitten learned the technique using tools left behind by his mother’s first husband, James Monroe Cross, a commercial sign-painter who died before Whitten was born. It was unusual for Cross, a Black man, to have a skilled occupation and own his own business in the deeply segregated Jim Crow South. The artist suggested that Cross was always under threat of suspicion, even violence, for his profession. Making images was a rebellion and a risk… ‘Transmission is the key,’ he said2,'”

The earliest work in the show reveals Jack Whitten’s life long passion for Jazz. The Messenger (For Art Blakey), 1990, left, and Homecoming: For Miles (Davis), 1992 (the year after Miles passed), right. Both Acrylic on canvas.

Reading that, my thoughts turned back to another MoMA blockbuster that was full of “signs,” literal and figurative: Ed Ruscha/Now Then, which occupied these same galleries not long ago, the subject of a 3-part series I wrote. There are surprising similarities, and differecnes, between them. Largely contemporaries, Mr. Ruscha (b. 1937, Mr. Whitten born two years later in 1939), is perhaps best-known for his word Paintings. Though he started with a paying job making protest signs bearing words, Jack Whitten’s Art is almost exclusively wordless, except for its titles. His Art transcended words while honoring his mantra, “Transmission is the key.” Both Artists were born and raised in the South. Jack Whitten in Alabama- “in apartheid,” he said, Ed Ruscha in Tusla, Oklahoma, considered part of the South by some. Both left and attended Art schools, Mr. Whitten at Cooper Union, NYC,3, and Ed Ruscha at CalArts in L.A.. Both stayed put in their new locales for the rest of their lives and their extraordinarily long careers. Both used their Art to regularly comment on the world around them, though Jack Whitten seemed more the Activist. It’s also interesting that both Artist oeuvres are almost entirely devoid of images of people.

NY Battle Ground, 1967, Oil on canvas

As for their significant differences, Jack Whitten had to survive the 1960s, including the violence that surrounded the Civil Rights Protests. Deeply effected hearing Dr. Martin Luther King speak at the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955-56 after Rosa Parks’s arrest, the event that brought Dr. King to prominence (and the event at which Jack Whitten met Dr. King), he soon became fed up with the violence surrounding the Civil Rights Movement, so he moved to NYC in 1960, then graduated from Cooper Union with a bachelor’s degree in 1964, before finding his voice through the influence of the Jazz Musicians he met and the 1st generation Abstract Expressionists who he encountered here. His work would remain abstract his entire career. In spite of all of this history, Jack Whitten skips it and begins his riveting, 568-page collection of his studio notes from 1962 to 2017, Notes from the Woodshed, (the closest thing we have to an autobiography), with the 1960s & with his move to NYC.

Light Sheet I, 1969, Acrylic on canvas

“Never in my wildest dreams did I think that I would reach thirty years of age without self-destructing. . . . The 1960s were coming to an end; I was still alive and in one piece.”

He would go on to live and work for another forty-eight years.

“1970 was the turning point,” he recalled4. At the start of a new decade, the Artist moved to a studio on Broome Street and had a breakthrough. He stopped making figurative art and got rid of his paintbrushes(!), which may be unprecedented among Painters in Western Art history to his time. The studio became a laboratory designed to experiment with acrylic paint5. The medium, a recent innovation made from plastic, offered a vastly expanded range of color, texture, and handling. Seizing the opportunity, Whitten invented tools and techniques that were entirely new to the history of Western art.

Welcome to Jack Whitten’s post-1970 practice in which he “made” Paintings (he said) without using paint brushes. With this, they were “developed,” akin to how Photographs were. Introducing The Developer. At 12 feet long, creating Art with it is the other part of the equation. Especially since none of the Art I’ve seen that Jack Whitten may have made with The Developer have a dimension of 12 feet. He’s using this on pieces that are smaller than the tool.

From an Afro-comb to a twelve-foot-long wooden rake, which he called The Developer (a reference to photography), novel implements were maneuvered by the artist to pull layers of acrylic paint across canvases laid on his studio floor in one sweeping movement6.” Inventing a technique is impressive. Making Art using it takes mastering it first. Easier said than done with a 12-foot long rake in your hands! In this extraordinary video from 2017, Jack Whitten talks about growing up in “American Apartheid,” as he calls it, meeting Dr. King, and demonstratesThe Developer-

What stands out to me is that Jack Whitten, when faced with violence, met it with non-violence. He turned his anger into Art. Art without words. Abstract Art, at that. Revolutionary for a Black Artist. An Art that continued to represent those he admired and “transmitted” what he experienced in ways never before seen. It seems to me that that says all you need to know about the man.

Back at MoMA, the result of all the techniques he invented and perfected and his seemingly endless creativity made Jack Whitten’s work is so unique, and different from itself, that MoMA’s curators chose to install the show with numerous one-work walls. I previously experienced this in diane arbus: in the beginning at The Met Breuer.

Installation view. Installing one work on a wall is something that works extremely well for Jack Whitten’s work, in my view, since so much of it is so different from everything else. It allowed each piece to be considered singly, and then as the viewer moved around, as part of his whole. It made it very easy to “get lost” in the work & the show, something I went back to it to experience again.

Here, I thought this worked brilliantly and the resulting installation of these walls is one of the features I’ll long think of when I think of Jack Whitten: The Messenger.

The First Loading Zone, 1973, Acrylic on canvas

Today, Gerhard Richter gets a lot of notoriety as a “squeegee master,” yet he didn’t begin using the technique until 19857! Still, techniques do not make a work “Art,” with a capital “A,” as I write it. Yet, at least to my eyes, having seen Gerhard Richter: Painting After All on its last day (my look at it here), and the last day of the lost & lamented Met Breuer, what I saw over both shows left me feeling that Jack Whitten’s “Developer” works will continue to rise in esteem & appreciation. Since I believe that comparing Artists or Art works is subjective, I’ll leave it at that.

Chinese Doorway, 1974, All work are Acrylic on canvas unless stated. At 89 1/2 × 43 1/4 inches, it’s hard to say if this was created with The Developer, but if not, it appears he used another of his scraping tools.

But his “Developer” works are just one part of the work Jack Whitten created over his 58 year career, a part that fit in seamlessly with everything else he created as was to be seen in the incredibly rare opportunity to experience a large body of his work. This is in itself, remarkable. I’ve seen countless group exhibitions where different styles didn’t mesh well with each other. Yet, in The Messenger they meshed brilliantly and coalesced into telling one story: his.

Black Monolith II (Homage To Ralph Ellison The Invisible Man), 1994, Acrylic, molasses, copper, salt, coal, ash, chocolate, onion, herbs, rust, eggshell, with razor blade on canvas. As close as Jack Whitten comes to “traditional Portraiture.”

Walking through it left me realizing that it’s hard to think of another Black Artist who captured the times he lived in and so many of its leading figures in her or his Art, besides Charles White. For me, at least, when these works (including his Black Monolith series) are taken as a whole, the result is something of a Self-Portrait of the Artist: a man of his time, in his time, who rose above his time and all the travails he encountered to create something completely new and completely Jack Whitten, leaving echoes & impressions of his experiences.

Chalk editor’s note- Insert “This” in front of “was once.” (No, I did not write it.) NYC is “only” 402 years old, still you can be sure that with every step you take here you’re walking on history. So it is here in front of this nondescript residential building. But back in the late 1950s and early 1960s this was the location of “the hippest place on earth”- the now legendary Five Spot nightclub. The list of Jazz immortals who performed here is only matched by the legends of Art, Music, & Literature who hung out here to hear them.

Among the leading, now legendary, figures of his day that Jack Whitten encountered and even spoke with are Jazz Masters Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane, the latter, who was embarking on his own spiritual quest after a period of drug use, had an especially deep and lasting impact on Whitten’s Art.

John Coltrane: Giant Steps, 1960. One classic that’s in both of our collections (Jack’s on LP as shown in the catalog. My LP was replaced with this CD after wearing out), John Coltrane is shown here, Photographed on the cover by Lee Friedlander, around the time he was frequenting The Five Spot.

Jack Whitten frequented the legendary Five Spot nightclub on East 5th Street, and came to amass a terrific Jazz record collection.

Asa’s Palace, 1973, Acrylic on canvas

Another thing that stands out for me is that Jack Whitten was one of the earliest Black Artists to adopt abstraction, something that has continued in the work of Mark Bradford among quite a few others.

“There are two kinds of abstraction, the abstraction of Pollock and the abstraction of [Piet] Mondrian,” Jack Whitten wrote in 1969. “It is possible to create a third abstraction based on the theory of transcending these two8*

His titles often “ground” the work, but then the viewer is left largely on her or his own, often with a staggering amount of detail to consider. This last puts the lie to theory that abstract Art is “dashed off,” perhaps born of a misunderstanding of Jackson Pollock’s “dripping” technique, or the appearance of Franz Kline’s brushwork. Walking through The Messenger, I was hard pressed to find a single work that looked “dashed off.” On the contrary there were works where Mr. Whitten first had to invent, then perfect, the technique he used before the work could begin!

Atlantis Rising, 1966, Acrylic on canvas

Jack Whitten was  an eyewitness to the first plane flying into World Trade Center 1 on 9/11 from 14 blocks away! Incredibly, his voice is heard on the only video there is of that plane impacting the North Tower, by the Naudet brothers who were making a documentary on the New York Fire Department. Following them around, that morning they answered a call about a gas leak at the building Jack Whitten owned on Lispenard Street. The Naudets happened to be filming the firemen who were trying to find it when the plane flew right over their heads! Jack Whitten’s voice is the one heard making the expletive as it crashes into the North Tower9. The NYFD immediately jumped in their trucks, accompanied by the French crew under the direction of the Naudet brothers and James Hanlon (making the renowned documentary 9/11) and headed off to Ground Zero. Mr. Whitten-

“I was in the street that morning. This plane came right overhead, and when that sound came overhead, you could feel your flesh crawling, I mean, seriously, rippling. We looked up, this plane was right on top of us. At first you didn’t see any flame, any smoke. You just saw this big gap and hole, and the sky was filled with a chandelier of glass. It was later you saw the smoke and the flames. My gut feeling told me that that was not an accident.  This is what I call the particularities of violence—close to 3,000 people were murdered in my neighborhood. People were screaming, crying.”

He stopped making Art, except for this piece, which took him five years to complete-

9.11.01, 2006. Acrylic, ash, animal blood, hair, and mixed media on canvas, 120 × 240″ (304.8 × 609.6 cm). In what I think was a brilliant move, the Baltimore Museum sold some of its older masterpieces, inciting an uproar, and used some of those funds to buy it, saddening me that an NYC museum hadn’t stepped up.  After five years of agonizing over it, Jack Whitten created one of the most stunning pieces of Art to come out of the tragedy.

“I wanted that painting to be more raw and visceral. A lot of emotional stuff in there. I’ve had people that stand before that painting and cry,” he said10.

Jack Whitten’s signature and inscription on the right edge of 9.11.01. This also shows a detail of the mosaic tiling the work consists of, each tile hand-crafted.

The work is also created with another technique he invented. Beginning in the 1990s, the Artist cut hardened sheets of acrylic paint into thousands of mosaic tiles that he used to assemble 9.11.01 and other works. In my piece on Jack Whitten: Odyssey, “Jack Whitten: Secretes from the Woodshed,” I show an Art21 video that shows Mr. Whitten actually creating one of his “mosaic” works.

Southern Manor, 1974, Acrylic on canvas

“Perhaps the ideal approach to the work of literature would be the one allowing for insight into the deepest psychological motives of the writer at the same time that it examined all external sociological factors operating within a given milieu. For while objectively a social reality, the work of art is, in its genesis, a projection of a deeply personal process, and any approach that ignores the personal at the expense of the social is necessarily incomplete,” Ralph Ellison speaking of a way of engageing Literature, c.194611.

Though he was here (NYC) during the heyday of Abstract Expressionism, arriving in 1960 on the tail end of the first generations’s success, he doesn’t seem to have been overly influenced by them directly when looking at his work. Their influence seems to me to have been more in freeing the young Artist to explore other ways of communicating in paint. Maybe this can be seen when he said his Paintings weren’t Painted, they were “made.” In fact, it seems to me his attendance at the numerous Jazz clubs that were in a golden age at the time may have had a deeper last effect. In the Music, he found other Artists who were familiar with what he had experienced, whereas the first gen AbEx Artists had not. Their influent may have helped Jack Whitten focus on what was most important for him to express. They were doing it without words. He would do it without representational images using techniques he invented.

One recognition Jack Whitten did live to receive was the National Medal of Arts by President Obama. “WASHINGTON, DC – On Thursday, September 22, in the East Room of the White House, President Barack Obama awarded the 2015 National Medal of Arts and the National Humanities Medal to distinguished recipients. First Lady Michelle Obama attended the ceremony.” *- Photo by Cheriss May, www.cherissmay.com. White House caption in quotes.

It’s become apparent that Jack Whitten is the spiritual and influential “godfather” of much of what we see today, less than a decade after his passing. He turned his back on so-called representational Art and found a new way of “transmitting” all of what he had witnessed, all he had heard, and all he had inside, in abstraction, forging a new path forward that others have turned into a highway.

For Michael Merriweather.  

*- Soundtrack for this piece is “Nutty” by Thelonious Monk, heard here with John Coltrane, recorded live at The Five Spot in 1957-58, with some rare Photos of them performing in the club-

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  1. Amy Sherald: American Sublime, which I wrote about here, and Christine Sun Kim: All Day All Night, which I wrote about here. ↩
  2. Jack Whitten: The Messenger, Michelle Kuo, P.37. ↩
  3. After attending Tuskegee Institute as a pre-med student. ↩
  4. ibid, P.47 ↩
  5. ibid ↩
  6. MoMA wall card ↩
  7. https://www.christies.com/en/artists/gerhard-richter?lotavailability=All&sortby=relevance ↩
  8. ibid, P.45, 47 ↩
  9. Jack Whitten: Five Decades of Painting, P.43-4. ↩
  10. https://www.moma.org/audio/playlist/345/4715 ↩
  11. Ralph Ellison, “Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity,” in Shadow and Act, 27 n. 1. ↩

Remembering 9/11

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Written & Photographed by Kenn Sava

Preface- I lived in Manhattan through September 11, 2001 unscratched. I lost no one I personally knew in the attacks (as far as I know), but we all lost 2,713 irreplaceable New Yorkers. 20 years later, 9/11 remains one of the most unforgettable days in my life. My days in the World Trade Center area go back to before the construction of the Twin Towers. Then, the weeks after the attacks were equally gut-wrenching. In Remembrance of the victims on the 20th Anniversary of the 9/11 attacks I decided to share my experiences and the pictures I took of the World Trade Center before, on 9/11, and after, for the first time, not because I think they are anything outside of the ordinary, but because they are just that- the memories of one average person living in Manhattan on September 11th, 2001, of the World Trade Center, the attacks, and the weeks immediately after. 

Facing south, looking up at Tower 1 on the right, Tower 2 on the left over World Trade Center 6, the black shape, right, and a piece of World Trade Center 5, on the left. Vesey Street, June 20, 1998. Click any picture for full size.

1- Witness to Unspeakable Horror

September 11th, 2001 marked the first of the “life will never be the same” moments that have characterized the first century of the new millennium, the latest of which we are all still living, wherever we are. Wherever we were that September morning 20 years ago as this was happening here, in Washington DC, and in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, I doubt many of us had any idea what was really happening and how all of our lives would change.

I didn’t.

Just unimaginable. The view from my window shortly after 9:05am on 9/11/2001 showing the North Tower, 1 World Trade Center, on fire.

I woke that morning at 9:05am. I switched on NY1, the local news station to get the weather, as was my habit each morning. When the set came on, I saw a stunning image through my waking eyes. Smoke coming out of the top of the World Trade Center! What? HOW is that possible? They were saying “a small plane” had crashed into it. As we know now, at 8:46am, hijacked American Airlines Flight #11 had been purposely crashed in to the North Tower.

Dwarfing everything. The Twin Towers and 7 World Trade Center, the taller brown building in front of them, seen on June 20, 1998. I remember the neighborhood before the WTC, and the white College of Insurance in front of it, were built. It all looked like the rest of the buildings in the picture. For a look at the destruction of the area to build the WTC check out Danny Lyon’s PhotoBook The Destruction of Lower Manhattan.

A little over 8 months earlier I had been to the Windows On The World Restaurant at the top of Tower 1 (the North Tower, the first to be hit on 9/11, the Tower on fire in the picture earlier) for a company holiday party, the second time in 3 years the company had held it there. For those who never set foot inside either Tower of the World Trade Center, I’m sorry. You really can’t begin to imagine it. From a distance, the WTC is the highest thing in sight, visible in almost every picture of the NYC skyline. It was visible for almost an hour away on various roadways approaching Manhattan. As you moved closer and closer to it on the street, it’s height went from gigantic (above), to overwhelming (as in the first picture in this piece) to impossible, as in the following picture-

Standing at the base of World Trade Center Tower 2 with Tower 1 looming above on June 28, 1998. If I lowered my head, at eye level was a magnificent Tapestry by Joan Miro on display right beyond the girders in the lobby. Created in 1974 by the great Spanish Artist himself by hand for the building, it was also destroyed on 9/11.

Each building contained 110 stories! Looking up, you couldn’t see the top. As if 110 stories in each Tower, wasn’t enough, each floor was an acre in size. That fact still staggers me.

Riding up to the top was a special experience, even here, in the land of very tall buildings. With “local” and “express” elevators, it was a little like taking a vertical subway. When I got to Windows On The World, of course, I had to look down from those windows, though I’m deathly afraid of heights. I never made it to the roof, but this was close enough. Looking down, at night, was like being in an airplane and looking down on dots of light far below you. I really couldn’t make much else out. 

The World Trade Center and I went back a long way, to before there was a World Trade Center when it was “Radio Row.” My father had an office two blocks from the WTC for 45 years. He used to take me to work there on Saturdays and in the summer as a kid, which I absolutely hated. We used to park under the old West Side Highway at Vesey Street and I’d walk along the site of the WTC as the towers and the complex were being built after the area had been demolished to make way for it. I went to work, two blocks away, the day of Philippe Petit’s incredible walk between the two Towers on August 7, 1974. Over the years, I frequented the legendary J&R Music World on Park Row, one block east of the WTC, and I was there two and a half weeks before 9/11. I lived about a mile and a half from the Trade Center.

That morning, after seeing the smoke on TV, I opened my curtains and, sure enough, I could see from my windows the North Tower was on fire! After dressing, I walked out of my building heading east. As I got to 7th Avenue, I asked someone what happened. He said a plane had flown down 7th and crashed into the World Trade Center! So much happened that day, and the weeks after, that thought didn’t really hit me right away. Later, as I put the whole thing together, I got it-

The first plane (American Airlines Flight #11) on 9/11 had flown down my block!

People frozen in their steps in disbelief, unable to tear themselves away from the horror unfolding in front of them to the left on 6th Avenue around 9:30am on 9/11.

In the months that followed, somehow my sleeping mind grasped this thought my conscious mind had forgotten and concocted a nightmare in which the passengers of the first plane, Flight #11, realized in those final minutes what was going to happen, and jumped the hijackers (no doubt influenced by what really happened to Flight #93 in Pennsylvania) causing it to crash early- into my building!

On the corner of 6th Avenue, there were crowds of people looking at the Towers directly down the street. I pressed on to get to work. On 5th Avenue, that scene was repeated with many more people who lined the Avenue on both sides as far as I could see down. 

The view down 5th Avenue with both Towers on fire just before 10am on 9/11.

By now, it was close to 10am and BOTH Towers were on fire, the second plane having hit the South Tower, a bit lower than the first had hit the North Tower. 

On 5th Avenue, people strain to watch a tiny TV set perched on the widow of a truck, just visible beyond the woman’s blue blouse, as the horror was unfolding to their left at about 10am, 9/11.

I checked in at work. Other staff members were there but most were listening to the radio. Nobody was working. I went back out to 5th Avenue to watch again. When I got there, I immediately realized the South Tower was gone! It had collapsed!

The South Tower had just collapsed leaving something I could never imagine seeing- only one Trade Center Tower standing. Seen on 5th Avenue.

As I said, unless you’d been to the WTC, you have no idea how immense they were. HOW could one collapse?? As it turned out, most New Yorkers, including the first responders, apparently had no idea the Towers being about the biggest thing in NYC could ever collapse. It’s hard to articulate the feeling of seeing something impossible right in front of you. The fires looked like terrible fires, but I’m sure most people felt they would be put out. But, no! That MASSIVE building had collapsed! 110 acres of steel, glass and people were somehow just gone. That was the first realization that our long-held unassailable assumptions were assailable. I remembered hearing someone say years ago that if one of those buildings ever fell it would destroy everything for blocks around in that direction. Having lived for must of my life with those Twin Towers defining the famous skyline of Manhattan. Now, there was only one!, it too was on fire, and had been for longer than Tower 2 was!

A few minutes later, as I stood there in a crowd of fellow New Yorkers, I saw THE most horrific thing I’ve ever seen in my life happen right in front of my eyes.

Tower 1 collapsed.

The North Tower, World Trade Center 1, in the midst of collapsing at 10:28am.

It looked like it happened in slow motion. A huge, eerie, grey cloud slowly rose where it had stood, and kept rising. I stood there open-mouthed watching in utter horror. How many people did I just watch die? 

After watching Tower 1 collapse, my immediate thought was – What’s gong to happen next? I immediately turned around 180 degrees. There, 13 blocks behind me, straight up 5th Avenue, stood the Empire State Building. In 1945 a B-25 Bomber, a large plane indeed, had accidentally crashed into it. Yet, it remained standing after that, and it was still standing now.

The scene after both Towers had collapsed around 10:45am leaving billowing clouds of smoke that would last for days.

Numb, and in a state of shock, I headed back to my office. We closed for the day. Some of my co-workers began the walk over the Brooklyn Bridge. I headed back across town. I dropped my bag off and headed back out with my camera. 

West Side Highway at Houston Street as far as the NYPD was letting pedestrians go on the afternoon of 9/11.

I walked over to the Hudson River, where you could see the WTC all the way down. As I started walking along what is now Hudson River Park, a steady stream of Emergency & construction vehicles sped past me on the Highway. At Houston Street, a bit north of Canal Street, all pedestrian, and non-emergency related traffic was stopped. I stood there for a few hours, most of which was spent watching the biggest cloud of smoke I’d ever seen rising up then bending over east towards Brooklyn (which was a lucky thing, for me, at least, as it turned out).

7 World Trade Center collapses at 5:20pm. Seen from Greenwich Street, September 11th.

Finally, I headed inland. As I reached Greenwich Street, it was now 5:20pm. Just as I got there, 7 World Trade Center collapsed! 7 WTC was a nondescript brown square building across Vesey Street from the Twin Towers. It would have seemed to be a fair distance away from them, but given the immensity of each Tower, not far enough. There was also a huge shopping center under the Towers and other, lower, buildings and a hotel I once stayed in, as part of the main complex. ALL of it was destroyed in the 9/11 attack. 

Wow. I had personally witnessed TWO of the three main World Trade Center complex buildings collapse! 

I found out later, 7 WTC had been evacuated. Unfortunately, as we all know, that wasn’t the case for 1 or 2 WTC, the Twin Towers. 

After watching 7 World Trade go down, I began making my way home. I walked through Greenwich Village. There, I came upon an incredible sight that has stayed in my mind along with the collapses as indelible.

The heartbreaking scene outside of Saint Vincent’s Hospital. Doctors, nurses and staff wait for the arrival of victims. Before 6pm, September 11th.

As I came upon Saint Vincent’s Hospital, the closest hospital to the WTC, I saw their side of 7th Avenue lined with green hospital scrubs, with a few white coats mixed in, doctors, nurses and hospital staff, all of who were standing alongside empty, clean gurneys. 

It took me a moment to realize what that meant. And that moment was the moment I lost it. 

NO ONE was coming to be treated. 

EVERYONE was dead. 

2- Union Square

That night, I went to my local watering hole and commiserated with friends and neighbors. As the hours and days passed, you could not go anywhere around here and not see “MISSING” fliers posted on every available space. These were often unlike most of the typical “MISSING” fliers that pop up from time to time. Many of these went beyond the basic stats needed to identify a missing person, into the realm of biography & memorial. A few days after 9/11, I walked with 2 acquaintances heading south. We passed through Union Square. I was stopped dead in my tracks. The central lawn area is rung with a brick wall all around it, and there was a fence inside that protecting the grass. There, on every square inch of this wall and fence were MISSING fliers! In front of them, spontaneous memorials, with thousands of candles burning bright at 3am. I parted from the couple and went home to grab my camera then walked back. I stayed until after 7am. It was just overwhelming to walk among so much loss, to get a tiny sense of who someone was, from a smile, from a few words, from someone else’s pain who was left behind.

Blurry night photo of Union Square, September 19, 2001. The entire Park was blanketed with MISSING fliers, candles and remembrances left by the constant stream of visitors, here ringing the entire lawn to the right and all the way in the back. Never, before or since, have I seen such a huge outpouring of love, loss and incalculable pain.

I found out in the week following 9/11 that two people I knew had been in the Towers that day. Both got out. To this day, I’m not aware of anyone I personally knew who died. Of course, many, many “MISSING” fliers were NYFD, NYPD, PAPD, EMTs, and other first responders. Those that got me hardest were those seeking everyday people. People who either just happened to be there, or who worked there.

MANY of the MISSING fliers were so poignant they stopped me in my tracks, like this one. When they talk about 9/11 heroes, and there are many, people like Mayra Valdes, who served as a Fire Warden for her company on the 103rd floor of the South Tower, deserve to be counted highly among them, “…last seen screaming to her co-workers to get off the floor, to get out…” Ms. Valdes left a 12 year old son. Union Square Subway Station, September 19, 2001.

Imagine just going to work on a Tuesday morning only to be the target, and the victim, of the biggest terrorist attack on US soil since Pearl Harbor, and the biggest targeting civilians? I thought back to the staff members of Windows On The World, who would have had ZERO chance of getting out if they had been there when the 1st plane hit1, and those others I’d seen who worked at the WTC. 

3- Christmas at Ground Zero

Having no family, I’m alone most holidays. It’s never easy when everyone else is with someone. Hell, no one had called me on 9/11 to see if I was ok. Christmas, 2001, was particularly hard because of what had happened that September day and after. Starting to feel depressed Christmas afternoon, I realized I need to stop that in its tracks. I decided to walk down to the World Trade Center site, by then, commonly called Ground Zero. 

I walked down along the West Side Highway, revisiting my youth when I had to park the car there often in gale force winds whipping off the Hudson. This was a particularly cold night. I was frozen to the core, but I was determined to get there and meditate on what had happened and those lost. I walked along the highway and as I approached Vesey Street, I saw some faint lights in the distance. No one was around. My only companion was the wind, the coming dark, and the cold. 

A Christmas Tree installed by construction workers on the West Side Highway at Ground Zero with the Overpass to the World Financial Center behind, the severely damaged World Financial Center to the right. Christmas Day, 2001.

As I approached Vesey Street, I could make out a Christmas Tree with some lights on it. I imagine the construction workers had set it up. No one else was around. Whoever had put it here was off somewhere else with his or her others. It was fitting it was here. Off to my 10 o’clock “the pile” of debris from the collapse sat, the smoldering finally ended, containing the remains of who knows how many in complete stillness in the dark. I stood there letting ALL of this wash over me for a few minutes, staring over at the dark emptiness that had been the World Trade Center complex. I had stood on this very spot before the World Trade Center was built. I was here when they were being built. Now, I am standing here after they were gone, something I never imagined possible. Though there was a lot of damage and destruction to the surrounding buildings, it always felt like if the WTC Towers had ever fallen over entire City blocks would have been taken out by them. But no. It wasn’t like that for the most part. Most of the buildings right around them, including 3 landmarks, were still there. It struck me standing there that what happened was like a giant hand had come down and lifted the Towers clean out the damage from two such immense collapses was so confined. While it was happening, then as I stood there on Christmas, and to this day 20 years later, when I look out of my window, it’s still very hard to believe they’re gone. But it happened, largely right in front of me.

A woman walking around keeping the candles lit. Union Square, September 19, 2001

I said a silent prayer for all of those we lost, and realized that things could ALWAYS be worse. Then, I turned around and walked home.

The view from my window, tonight, September 10, 2021, with the Tribute in Light just behind where the Twin Towers stood.

This Post is dedicated to all those lost on September 11, 2001, and those who continue to be lost since the attacks due to related illnesses.

*-Soundtrack for this Post is “Life In The Air Age,” by Bill Nelson of Be Bop Deluxe and recorded on their classic Lps Sunburst Finish, 1976 and Live! In The Air Age, 1977, below-

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  1. It turns out the Restaurant was open at the time, and the staff members and guests who were there all died. ↩