I was sitting in my apartment in Maspeth, Queens, NY. From the back of the apartment we had a clear view of the East River, from the Empire State Building to the Twin Towers. On that fateful day, as the Today show was interrupted by a news bulletin, I heard that a plane had crashed into the WTC. My immediate thoughts were "how could they not see that building?" Of course, we found out within a couple of hours that it had been a terror attack. I watched the collapse of the buildings from my window. I could smell the smoke for days, an otherwise sunny sky overtaken by never-ending grey. The banks were immediately closed. The courts were shut down (my husband was working in the courts at the time). There was no cell phone service. The schools were on lockdown until parents could pick the kids up. Friends and neighbors had to walk home from Manhattan, either over the 59th Street bridge, or one of the bridges linking Manhattan to Brooklyn. Buses were running, but subway service was halted. A friend was killed. That night, the bright lights of the search and recovery effort could be seen for miles. The eeriest thing that night, though, was the sound of fighter jets in the sky, instead of planes getting ready to land at LaGuardia.
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