Former NEWS reporter shares fear, horror of NYC tragedy

“Diary of a Tragedy” is a daily column written by New York City residents with Maine ties who have been sharing their experiences of the World Trade Center tragedy. Michael McDonald, a reporter and editor at daily financial newspaper The Bond Buyer in Manhattan, worked as a business reporter at the Bangor Daily News 1997-1998.

It wasn’t until I heard the first tower fall that I began to feel the fear and horror of the destruction of the World Trade Center.

When I got out of the Bowling Green subway station at the southern tip of Manhattan, the streets were filled with people looking up the financial district’s western side where the towers were on fire. It was around 9:15 a.m. and both of the 107-story towers had been hit by airplanes, sending flames and black smoke billowing out of the top floors.

I walked away from the blaze to a high-rise on the corner of State and Whitehall streets where I work at The Bond Buyer, a financial newspaper on the 26th floor. At one end of the floor, a small group had gathered at the windows watching the spectacle, which was around 15 blocks away, past Wall Street. I never imagined that the massive buildings would fall.

The first tower came crashing down just before 10 a.m., sending a resounding explosion through the canyons of downtown streets. At first I thought another terrorist attack had hit and I joined the people fleeing the newsroom. When we got down to the lobby, the blue skies had turned gray as the soot and debris were blown east across the financial district from the towers.

A nervous crowd had formed in the lobby, some trying to make calls on their cell phones, which didn’t work. People, their faces covered with rags and shirts, were hustling by outside, heading east and away from the catastrophe, as clouds of soot carrying pieces of paper blew by in the same direction.

Some in the lobby decided to brave it, shielding their faces and heading outside even though it was not clear how they were going to get out of the financial district.

Then the sky turned black. The second tower had fallen, sending up a second massive plume of smoke and debris engulfing the downtown.

People were no longer leaving the lobby. Instead, people were rushing into our lobby, many of them covered head to toe in a blanket of soot. They were shaken. Some of them sobbed. The lobby was getting crowded, filling with smoke and the sour taste of soot. A woman who had run in was standing next to me, crying and muttering to someone with her, “I could see people jumping out.”

A sense of panic was filling the lobby. A small group from my newspaper was debating what to do. Before the first tower fell, we were in the newsroom, putting together lists of bond market firms we knew that were in the trade center, investment banks such as Morgan Stanley and law firms including Brown & Wood.

The first firm on my list was Cantor Fitzgerald, a middleman in the bond market that had a trading floor on the 104th floor of One World Trade Center, the north tower that was the first hit by the terrorist attack.

I know Cantor’s trading floor well. I was there just a few weeks ago, meeting a friend for lunch. We went to the corporate cafeteria for food and took it back to his cramped and cluttered corner office where I couldn’t help but gawk out the narrow windows at the monstrous and unwieldy view of New York City below, spreading out for miles and miles.

Eight hundred people work at Cantor on the upper floors of Tower One. As of Thursday, the company said 600 had not been found. TK, my friend, is among them.

As the soot billowed across the downtown, we went down to the basement and waited it out. When we came out at noon the streets were carpeted in thick gray dust that was being kicked up by the wind and speeding emergency vehicles. Other people were straggling out of buildings. Emergency workers on one corner had run out of dust masks.

We walked northeast on Pearl Street. We could see the FDR highway near us along the East River was filling with people, forming a stream out of the downtown. The streets were littered with thousand of charred pieces of paper that had been blown out of the trade center towers when they collapsed. One of us reached down and picked up an invoice. It was addressed to Cantor Fitzgerald.

Police were guiding a line of thousands of people by the time we reached the base of the Brooklyn Bridge. There were lines forming at phone booths.

The perfect blue sky that first greeted me when I stepped out of the subway station had returned. I looked down and my shoes were covered in gray soot. I looked back to the west where the two trade towers used to reach up above the downtown and there was nothing but a black plume of smoke.

There were some words of hope in the aftermath. After the first tower was hit, people reportedly began immediately to flee the second tower, which was hit 20 minutes later. Morgan Stanley said almost all of its 3,500 employees survived. Brown & Wood had nearly 800 lawyers and associates in Two World Trade Center. I have been told almost every one of them has been located.

Our offices have been sealed off with the rest of the financial district as the search through the rubble at the base of the World Trade Center continues. I want to get back there so I can do some more sifting through the impact that the terror had on the bond market, the companies in the buildings, the people I talk to every day.