9/11 — 25 Years later
NEW YORK, NEW YORK - JULY 1989: Jerritt Clark with brothers Kenny and Bryan and sister Meggin pose for a photograph in the South Tower observation deck at the World Trade Center on July 29, 1989 in New York City, New York. (Photo by their mother Susan Jones)
I couldn’t have asked for a nicer day. The sky was blue, the weather was perfect and I was standing on a golf course on the south shore of Long Island. I was getting hungry and luckily for me, Mike was about to pull up and ask what we wanted for breakfast. I wasn’t playing golf however; I was renovating Timber Point Golf Course as part of a construction crew that my father Gil Simmers had organized to complete the county-run course refurbishment, and Mike was our site supervisor.
Sausage, egg and cheese, salt and pepper, ketchup, with orange juice and a bottle of water. I had the same breakfast order every day and today was no different — or so I thought. As I was leaning on the driver’s side door giving Mike my order, the radio inside his pickup truck played at a very low volume and I heard something coming across the radio that I thought I must have misheard. I asked him to turn the volume up and the radio host repeated himself. Reports had just come in that a small plane crashed into the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan.
I was at the World Trade Center two days prior with my friend Kristin who was a student at FIT in Chelsea. We were marveling at how unique New York was as a city and how the buildings were so iconic with no other city skyline in the world having even come close.
Imagining one of the towers that I had just been standing under filled with smoke and fire from what was believed to be a small Cessna-sized aircraft was incomprehensible. It wasn’t just one of the towers, though.
By the time Mike returned with our breakfast, the second tower had been hit. The confirmation of a second plane hitting the second tower sent shockwaves through the world. Speculation began.
How could both towers have had planes accidentally crash into them? Were the pilots both suicidal? Terrorism didn’t cross our minds. Then the news began to sharpen. The descriptions of the two planes were now much more accurate. Two commercial planes had flown into both towers.
Breakfast finished, and we headed back to work, but we were fixated on the reporting we had listened to, and everyone moved at a snail’s pace. We couldn’t turn on the news and watch it on TV. We had to go off the descriptions we were hearing on the radio. We had Nextel phones without internet browsers to Google images or videos. In 2001, that technology hadn’t made it to the mainstream yet and certainly wasn’t going to be found on the cellular devices of construction workers earning $15 an hour.
Before long, Mike came rushing back in his pickup with the latest news; the Pentagon had been hit and reports of several other planes missing were starting to flow through the airwaves.
It was announced that U.S. airspace was being shut down and all planes were ordered to be grounded until further notice. We believed this was the easiest way to weed out which planes still in the air were hijacked and help the U.S. military narrow down which of them might still be a threat.
At that moment two F-15’s roared past us and were headed at supersonic speeds directly at a small plane that was flying westward along Fire Island on Long Island’s south shore. The sound of their engines was deafening.
We watched as the fighter jets flew head-on at the small plane, blew past it and looped in the sky before pulling up behind and to the side of the plane. Was this another hijacked plane? Fortunately, no. They escorted the plane towards Republic Airport in central Long Island, and I’ve always wondered if that pilot knew how close he was to being evaporated right in front of us.
The rest of the day played out in ways that none of us could have ever imagined, even in our worst nightmares. The towers collapsed 30 minutes apart from each other, and none of us could picture what the radio was telling us. What do you mean they collapsed? Part of them? The whole thing? Where did they land? How much of the buildings are still standing?
It wasn’t until I arrived home around 4 p.m. that I could finally see what I had been hearing about all day. The horror played repeatedly on my television, and I sat and watched for hours on end. It wasn’t real. It couldn’t be.
People immediately sprang to action, my father included. The construction company he ran had tons of large machinery that could help. He and the company owner, George Guidi, went down to the yard, grabbed two dump trucks, a big crawler loader, which is a type of bulldozer, and a Caterpillar 988 eight-cubic-yard rubber-tired loader, also known as a payloader, and headed to lower Manhattan.
They weren’t hired. They didn’t get a call for help. They simply knew that there were millions of pounds of rubble and people would be trapped underneath. They spent the next two days there helping in the recovery efforts.
That is what New York became in the weeks and months to follow and for the most part, America as a whole did the same. Our differences didn’t seem to matter. We were united. It is the one time in my life where I can say it felt like every single American put the collective whole ahead of ourselves as individuals.
When I finally saw the rubble that was strewn across multiple city blocks, I couldn’t believe it. Two of New York’s biggest icons were gone. It looked like something out of a Hollywood post-apocalyptic movie. I had idolized these two buildings my entire life. They were more New York than the Yankees. They were more New York than Wall Street. The World Trade Center was a twin-towered global beacon of New York wealth, business, success and power that stood strong, like two guardians watching over the city.
Eventually, I left the construction field and got a job working in a local watch and jewelry shop on Maiden Lane and Broadway in lower Manhattan, just one block from the World Trade Center. I was hired as the watch service manager, and during my first month at work I spent the entire time organizing the backlog of customer repair jobs that were never picked up.
Some of them were hundreds of dollars’ worth of repairs where customers either didn’t have the money to cover the repair; others were just forgotten repairs, but the vast majority were watches that were dropped off before 9/11 for repair whose owners had perished in the attacks.
It was a very solemn duty to try to get in touch with loved ones, family members, coworkers, or friends of those to whom these watches belonged.
I could just imagine a young boy having lost his father, growing up wearing his dad’s watch every day as a reminder of him, and I felt it was my job to give him the opportunity to do so. Many of them were picked up, but dozens remained when I left my position a year later.
For months we listened to various pitches and reports on how the WTC would be rebuilt. It’s been 25 years since that clear September day. The new WTC stands strong, an icon in its own right, but no matter how it was rebuilt or how long it has been, there will always be two unfillable holes in the heart of lower Manhattan.
As someone who lived in New York for 34 years of his life, 11 of them in NYC, I will always consider myself a New Yorker. I’ve been out of New York for 10 years now, having relocated to Los Angeles in 2016 but there has not been a single time I’ve gone back that I look at lower Manhattan and don’t think about what it used to be.
The feeling that something is missing remains present inside me 25 years later. That something for me was a couple of buildings that I enjoyed visiting. I can’t imagine if that “something” had been a someone.
I was fortunate not to lose any loved ones or friends that day and yet, when I browse Instagram like I have this week, watching and listening to the testimonies of those who did lose family members, I often check the comments and am horrified by some of the things I read.
The anger I feel when someone peddles false claims of implosions and controlled demolitions is something that, I feel, will never leave me.
The youth of today weren’t alive when these attacks happened. They don’t feel the emotion we all felt that morning and the weeks, months and years to follow, and so it’s hard to blame them for their ignorance.
But those of you that speak of that day as a government or corporate conspiracy, and talk about the matter like you’ve received a doctorate in jet engines, fire investigations and architecture don’t understand the amount of division you are sewing into the fabric of American society.
You’ve become so focused on “debunked” theories on what happened rather than the humans it happened to. Families are still hurting and missing loved ones. If you want to try to prove your debunked theory of what happened that day, don’t do it in the comment section on a loved one’s post in remembrance of those they lost. Put on your tinfoil hat and go form a Facebook group.
You are as toxic to America as the ash that blanketed lower Manhattan was to those first responders.
Those who grew up around those towers, who witnessed their collapse and who worked in the area remember exactly where they were, how they felt and the emotions they still carry with them, in many cases, right alongside the health complications.
We remember tuning in to our TV’s every day in hopes that they would announce they found another person alive in the rubble.
We remember the 122 days after the attacks where we would hear and see F-15 and F-16 fighter jets running 24-hour loops around NYC looking over us, protecting us against future attacks. .
We remember the more than 400 first responders who showed up on 9/11 to save lives at risk of their own.
We remember the firefighters and police officers who ran into the buildings to get people to safety and never made it out.
We remember the thousands of non-first responders who perished in one of the three buildings and four airplanes that were used in these attacks.
We remember the thousands of deaths that occurred after 9/11 from health complications directly related to those attacks, including thousands of cancer deaths.
We remember the folks like Jon Stewart who have been fighting for over two decades to get permanent healthcare, compensation, and government accountability for first responders who are still suffering physically from the effects due to the toxic exposure during their rescue efforts on 9/11 and in the weeks that followed.
We remember the blame and hatred spewed towards the Muslim community post-9/11, the physical attacks they faced and the outrage in 2009-2010 when Park51, more commonly and yet incorrectly referred to as The Ground Zero Mosque was slated to be built.
We remember the physical, social and economic attacks the Muslim community faced in the years that followed 9/11 despite having nothing to do with the attacks.
And as of Sept. 8 2026, we remember that it took 25 years and the city’s first Muslim mayor, Zohran Kwame Mamdani, before we saw the release of 170,000 pages of city documents on health concerns, air quality and the city’s response to that horrific attack.
Those records could help New Yorkers seek documentation needed to access federal programs for health care and compensation yet people hate him, even though he is helping us, simply because he is Muslim.
Yes, he is Muslim. Yes, he is allowed to attend the 9/11 anniversary service. Yes, he is an American and yes, you might need to take a good hard look in the mirror and ask yourself why your bigotry towards him fails to recognize that the four mayors before him failed New Yorkers in all the ways that he is currently succeeding for them.
“Never Forget” is a slogan that was created post-9/11 so Americans could honor the lives lost, the first responders who showed up and the serious lapses in preventing these attacks on behalf of our government agencies, but for those of us who were alive back then, “Impossible to Forget” seems like a much more fitting phrase.
“Never Forget?” My friend, trust me — we remember.