Nightmare in a Cardboard Box Part 2: The 9/11 Photos

THE NEWSPAPER HEADLINES were bad enough. "U.S. Attacked," the New York Times said. "Acts of Mass Murder," blared Newsday. Closer to home, the weekly National Law Journal posited days later, "After the Unthinkable."

Five years ago in this space, I wrote about my compulsion to retain those documents, sacred and hallowed they may be, at least to me, in Nightmare in a Cardboard Box: The September 11 Papers. It's the world I know.

Or knew.

The day those planes hit and destroyed the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan, I was working about 3.5 miles uptown, at Madison Ave. and 30th St. I'd gone to vote that morning in Queens, and arrived that the office just after American Airlines flight 11 had slammed into the WTC 1, the north tower. 

Reflexively, instinctively, I ran out to the nearest drugstore to buy one of those single-use throw-away cameras, thinking I'd just be taking pictures of some awful mishap, that the fire would be extinguished, the building repaired and the incident would pass into New York City lore, like when a fog-bound bomber struck the Empire State Building in 1945.

Of course, I was wrong.

The camera was technologically not far advanced from Kodak's original Brownie, nothing more than film and a lens, in a box with a shutter and a button to activate it. I never really looked at the results. I just put them away.

Photo editing has since advanced to the point where with a bit of adjustment on my laptop -- but no use of artificial intelligence -- the most salvageable ones from that day and those that soon followed, now better illustrate my own memories.

Twenty-five years have passed, seemingly in the blink of an eye, or the snap of that shutter button. I'm still haunted by the feelings of fear and helplessness of being a bystander too far away and ill-equipped to do anything but watch in awe and sorrow, to merely bear witness.

The view from the office window at 105 Madison Avenue, fourth floor. 

September 11th nightfall on Queens Blvd. in Rego Park, nine miles away. The smudgyness just above the treeline is smoke from Ground Zero, formerly the Trade Center site. My girlfriend met me at the top of the stairs as I emerged from the R train, only to look west in disbelief.

We went downtown days later, as did many others, to see for ourselves what couldn't be imagined.

Visible here is a remaining vertical shard of WTC 2, the south tower, second to be struck and the first to fall.

We're standing two blocks east on Liberty St., looking across Liberty Plaza.

Now four blocks north, we're looking west along Fulton St., at the ruins of WTC 5, which was bombarded by debris from the collapse of the twin towers and WTC 7 across the street and -- like that northerly neighbor -- gutted by uncontrolled fire.

Nearly 3,000 people died that day for no reason better than the hatred of some religious fanatics, literal evil incarnate.

Of course, we didn't know just how many in the immediate aftermath. 

Barring confirmation, the hope was that some made it to one of the city's many hospitals, or were simply trapped someplace, praying to be discovered before it was too late.

The posters of the missing were ubiquitous. 

Among the unaccounted for was Joanne Weil, an attorney who worked for a law firm whose offices were destroyed that day. I didn't know her, but my lawyer friend Norman did, and worried that she was gone.

Six and a half years later, so was he at age 44 -- a dad for just three months -- dead of cancer before his time. 

So much sadness in the world. It's a wonder that some of us feel the need to inflict it upon others.