ian, on John Podhoretz:

I was living on W. 10th Street. The Twin Towers were a couple of miles away give or take and completely dominated the skyline to the south. I was late for work, needing to be up in the Bronx that morning early. The first indication of something amiss was hearing a neighbor run down the stairs. I never turned on the television that morning rushing to get where I need to go. I came outside and the first thing I noticed was people lined up on 7th Avenue. However I could not see the Towers. I started walking north and I heard a newscast coming over the radios of cars parked on the street. I got half a block when I asked someone what happened. He told me and I immediately wheeled into the street and saw it. When you saw it with your naked eye it left a strange impression. Surreal would not be adequate. It was a fine, sunny day, yet there were the Towers with two gashes venting smoke. The holes did not look big, and if you told me they were caused by commercial airliners I would not have believed it. I remember a lot of smoke and paper floating in the air. Anyway I saw it, got very angry, then having no sense of the scale of events, proceeding to the subway and went up north to the Bronx, probably the last subway out of Manhattan. I got there and found my business canceled. By then the subway had stopped running and I had to walk back over the 138th Street bridge. By that time the Towers had collapsed and you saw what looked like a volcanic eruption on the horizon. As I walked south I kept hearing jet fighters over head. there was also a rumor about a hotel also having been bombed. I got to my office at midtown, which was deserted. I then walked south again to my apartment, passing St. Vincents Hospital near 14th Street where a crowd had already gathered looking for loved ones or just watching. I walked by to W. 10th Street and I remember just people standing staring silently at the jet of smoke where the Towers had been. There was no traffic, and by night the place was eerily silent. About a block away from my building there was a fire house. I didn’t know the firefighters, but I would see them standing in front of the station from time to time. They were all young. By nightfall the neighbors started placing flowers and candles around the sidewalk in front of this station. As it turned out, every single firefighter from that station had been killed. Today there is a small commemorative plaque on the door. I spent the day watching the news. I recall a scroll that WTC 10 was about to collapse. The next day the area was still very quiet. They had prohibited traffic below 14th Street. At St. Vincents there were photographs of loved ones placed on the wall. The Hospital eventually had them framed as a memorial…

Anyway that’s my recollection.