NEW YORK CITY—Laura Rosen, an artist, photographer, and author with a lifelong interest in New York City’s buildings, bridges, tunnels, and landmarks, and the infinite variety of its architecture, witnessed firsthand the most devastating event ever to befall the Manhattan skyline, on Sept. 11, 2001.
For Rosen, as for so many others, it started like an ordinary late summer day, with no hint of anything the least bit unusual.
On that day 23 years ago, Rosen made her usual morning commute by subway from Brooklyn Heights to Lower Manhattan, where she worked as head of the photo and drawing archive for the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) at 2 Broadway.
On what stands out even now in her memory as a “gorgeous morning,” Rosen walked from her building in Brooklyn Heights to the 4 and 5 subway station a few blocks away. There, she got on a Manhattan-bound train, as she had done every day for 11 years.
Before the train reached her stop at Bowling Green near the southern tip of Manhattan, she said commuters, in a state of bewilderment, had already begun talking excitedly about reports of a plane hitting the World Trade Center.
In those early moments, the magnitude of the event did not hit home right away. For the commuters, it was still little more than a rumor, and people did not know what type of plane it was or under what circumstances the disaster might have happened.
Yet Rosen’s memories of those confused minutes on the morning of 9/11 remain vivid and powerful.
For some, she recalled, the tentative reports brought to mind the incident on July 28, 1945, when a B-25 bomber with poor visibility accidentally crashed into the Empire State Building, killing 14 people without destroying the building.
“Everybody’s trying to get to work, and there are rumors that a plane hit the World Trade Center. We’re all imagining those pictures we’ve seen of the little plane having hit the Empire State Building all those decades ago,” she told The Epoch Times.
“Finally, we pull into the Bowling Green station, and as I’m coming up the stairs, a lot of my coworkers are running down the stairs, getting out of there, and I still don’t know what’s going on.”
Rosen proceeded to 2 Broadway and went to her office on the 23rd floor, even as people were leaving.
From the office window, Rosen had a view of the World Trade Center’s North Tower, which the hijacked American Airlines Flight 11 had hit at 8:46 a.m. She saw black smoke billowing from the impact point at floors 93 to 99, and, still more ominously, saw the top portion of the tower, above where the plane had hit, begin to tilt.
“It tilted, and then it twisted, and then it went down. You can’t comprehend this. It’s absolutely numbing,” said Rosen.
Rosen allowed a security guard to use the landline in her office to call a relative and then went down to the lobby, where things looked completely different from when she had arrived a short time earlier.
“Imagine being in a glass cube with people, and that cube is submerged in a haze of heat, so you look through the glass, and all you see is black,” she said.
Tense Waiting
Rosen and the others then received instructions to go up to a second-floor mezzanine where the air was slightly better. It was there, a bit later, that the news came: At 9:59, the South Tower had collapsed. Both towers were gone, and the World Trade Center was no more.She made a number of calls to let people know she was all right. Rosen and the others remained there until 1:30 in the afternoon, when police officers came and told them all to leave.
The location was within walking distance of the Brooklyn Bridge, so Rosen and a number of others who lived in Brooklyn set out on foot.
The bridge was choked with people trying desperately to get home. In contrast to other leisurely strolls she had taken across the bridge, Rosen remembers a scene of utter chaos, the pedestrian pathway swaying from the weight of so many people.
“The other thing was all those boats in the water taking people back and forth—what if one of them rammed into the bridge? And there were all these helicopters and planes,” she said.
After Rosen’s party reached her building in Brooklyn Heights, she allowed the others to call friends and relatives to reassure them that they were OK.
Rosen and the others did not find out until later the fate of a neighbor who lived down the hall and worked for the Cantor Fitzgerald brokerage offices on the North Tower’s 105th floor. All 658 Cantor Fitzgerald employees who were at work that morning, including Rosen’s neighbor, lost their lives.
Things would never be the same again for Rosen, the city, or the rest of the world.
Rosen recalled the “terrible smell” from the smoke and ashes reaching not just her residence in the Heights, but as deep into the borough as the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens three miles away.
“And then, afterward, there was a whole new normal—walking past people with machine guns to get to the office,” Rosen said.
Rosen’s work for the MTA continued.
During her 20 years there, she worked on a special archive containing, among other things, construction photos and drawings that she found under the Triborough Bridge.
Her interest in local architecture and history continued to inspire her just as much as it had when she took pictures and wrote the text for illustrated books such as “Top of the City: New York’s Hidden Rooftop World” (1990) and “Manhattan Shores: An Expedition Around Manhattan Island” (1998).
But even before the 9/11 tragedy, in her vocation in particular, changes to security protocols had already made themselves felt.
After the February 1993 World Trade Center terrorist attack, when a bomb was detonated in the public parking garage below the towers, rules went into effect limiting the dissemination of such photos and drawings to the public because they might be of interest to bad actors looking for vulnerable points within the city’s infrastructure as potential targets.
In the aftermath of 9/11, the restrictions grew even tighter, Rosen said.
“The world changed that day.”
