‘I never imagined this view could vanish’: What it meant to see the World Trade Center every morning

It is the morning of August 1, 2001.

I’m in bed. My alarm goes off. First thing that goes through my mind: Today I’m moving home, back to Seattle.

I open my eyes. The first thing I see, outside my bedroom window, is the World Trade Center. It is just a mile from me across the Hudson River. No buildings between us and this high up. Nothing blocks the view.

This is the waterfront panorama I’ve had every day for the past year. Two towers standing solid. Touching the sky. They are massive. Powerful. Beautiful. Permanent, I think.

From our 19th-floor apartment in Jersey City, they dominate the skyline. They are the skyline. Morning light bounces off the glass. The sky is crisp and clean and so blue. This is my routine: When I wake up, I look across the water at the towers to see what the weather is like. Today, it is perfect.

I never imagined this view could vanish.

I had moved from Seattle to Jersey City the year before, for a job at a startup dot com. I worked in Manhattan. The commuter train dropped me right beneath the Trade Center.

Down there, it was always alive. The smell of bagels and burnt coffee drifting through the concourse. Yellow fluorescent lights. A blue paper cup in one hand, a Daily News in the other. The click of shoes on tile, the rumble of trains below, the low hum of thousands moving to work. The same faces every morning. People I never spoke to. But people who became part of my life, my routine.

Every morning, I rode the escalators up, through the lobby of those buildings, out onto the streets of Lower Manhattan.

One morning, I was late. I cut through the line for the escalator, a dumb 25-year-old in a hurry. A man grabbed my backpack and told me I was rude. He was right. I’ve never forgotten him.

Months later, the dot com went bust, and it was time to go.

So, I moved home to Seattle. And 41 days later, I was in our little rental house in Lake City. Bedroom upstairs, phone downstairs. Hadn’t set up the answering machine yet. It was before 6 in the morning, and the phone wouldn’t stop ringing. I stumbled down the narrow stairway to pick up. A friend on the other end told me, “Turn on the TV.”

My wife and I sat frozen, staring at our old view. The same view from our old place. Only now it was burning. And we watched, trembling. The image on that screen was the same one I had woken up to every day for a year. But now it was smoke and fire. And then, nothing but dust and death.

That day taught me how fragile life is, how nothing is guaranteed. Just six weeks earlier, I thought I’d be able to go back one day and walk through those towers again. Instead, they were reduced to craters in the ground. A tomb.

For a brief moment after 9/11, we weren’t divided. We weren’t shouting. We simply stood together, grieving. I think about that now, in the wake of yesterday’s assassination.

One event shook the entire world. The other shakes our politics. But both test whether we turn toward each other or against each other. We can’t let hatred become the air we breathe. It poisons us all. It must never become the new normal. Our strength is in unity.

And that is what today, Sept. 11, should always remind us of, because we live on a veil. A thin veil between life and death. Between what we expect and what can vanish in an instant.

I remain haunted by thoughts of the commuters I saw every morning. The people who lined up beside me on those escalators. Some of them must have worked in those towers.

I still think about that stranger 24 years ago, and how he grabbed my backpack. I don’t know his name. And my God, how I hope he made it.

Charlie Harger is the host of “Seattle’s Morning News” on KIRO Newsradio. You can read more of his stories and commentaries here. Follow Charlie on X and email him here. 

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