Never Forget

Hell Visits Manhattan

September 11th, 2001

Dan Henninger was walking near the World Financial Center, where The Wall Street Journal had its offices. In the next day’s newspaper, he described what he witnessed:

“As I walked toward the coffee shop, at about 8:45, I glanced upward, and then downward. Quicker than these words can convey, my mind said: I think I just saw the wing of an airliner below the top of the Trade Center. Then the loud sound. I thought, my God, it hit it. But when I looked up, there was no plane. There was a wide gash across the north face of the tower, very high up, and gray smoke was billowing out of the gash, and there was a large fire inside the building. There were little, shining particles floating down from the building. I never saw the plane, or a fuselage or a wing. The plane seemed to have vaporized. 

Way up there, the building just burned. There was a lot of smoke, but for a time, despite the horrifying tragedy, it somehow seemed like a containable event. The smoke was billowing upward and about three-fourths of the building looked fine. It seemed that the people below the gash would be able to descend. For awhile, the gathered crowd on the ground mainly watched amazed as the Trade Center tower burned from this one awful, open wound. Then the back of the other tower blew out. Then hell was in Manhattan. 

A guy came running toward us who said another plane had crashed into the other tower, and now the sky was filling with a massive wall of black smoke and orange flames. Staring upward at the two majestic buildings, one had helpless thoughts about a helpless situation. It was so high up, there was no way to put water on these flames; it was just going to keep burning. Maybe it would just burn out the top of the building. 

For awhile, aside from the flames and smoke, it was oddly uneventful. Sometimes windows would fall off the building and float down; sometimes a piece of smoking debris would arc downward. Then people started jumping off. 

Now we were all running away, hard, because the smoke, about 40 stories high, was racing outward, toward us and all of lower Manhattan. My editorial-page colleague Jason Riley told me later that he got caught in the first collapse’s fallout. He couldn’t run faster than the smoke and crawled under a van to avoid the debris. But he started choking and his eyes were burning and the air had turned black. He said he thought the van would move and kill him. He banged on the van’s window and they let him in. Then they opened the door to let two other guys in, and the van started filling with floating debris and smoke. He got out and cops were telling people to “make for the water.” Jason headed toward the Brooklyn Bridge, and made it across.”