I was 18, sitting in a cubicle in a drab office at the northern tip of Manhattan, transcribing interviews with people who had evacuated the World Trade Center on 9/11. It was 2003, late summer September in the city—a day like today, bathed in sun, not yet fall, still far away from the grey and early dark of winter.
I listened carefully to a middle-aged man who described in quiet, precise detail how he evacuated down a dark stairwell from his office in one of the towers because the elevator shafts were on fire, engulfed in burning jet fuel. I typed slowly, making sure I got the transcription right. I listened to the tape again. And again.
I’d never heard anything like it—and still haven’t. Another evacuee described a fireball exploding out of a bank of elevators in the World Trade Center lobby. I remember thinking that this kind of awful detail was missing from the instant, mass memorialization of 9/11 that defined the Bush era, which elided some of the specific horrors of that day even as it commanded you to “Never Forget.”
But in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, there were things America wanted to forget. For example: the people who jumped, trapped on the highest floors of the Twin Towers, above where the planes had hit—the “falling man” photographed by Richard Drew of the Associated Press, an image that quickly became a taboo in America when it was published the day after 9/11 in newspapers across the country. “Ran once and never again,” as Tom Junod put it in his seminal Esquire story, about trying to identify the man in the photograph and, with it, make sense of 9/11 and what we remember—or don’t—about that day.
“The picture went all around the world, and then disappeared, as if we willed it away,” Junod wrote. “One of the most famous photographs in human history became an unmarked grave, and the man buried inside its frame—the Falling Man—became the Unknown Soldier in a war whose end we have not yet seen.”
That was 2003, and the war had only just started.
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, there were things America wanted to forget.
Amid a sea of black magazine covers, TV montages, and so much fitful commemoration of 9/11 in those first two years after, the details of what happened were flattened, smoothed out, some things deemed too horrific to remember, some muddying the binary picture of heroism and terror. I’ve tried searching for news coverage and reporting at the time about how the towers’ elevator shafts became giant chimneys for cascading jet fuel, to corroborate what I still remember transcribing from survivors 23 years ago—a terrifying image of inferno I have never forgotten and never will. Each tower had 99 elevators, some of the largest and fastest ever built at the time, and miles of elevator shafts. But there isn’t much beyond a few snippets of survivor testimony. Instead, like other terrible but no less real details of 9/11 that have been brushed out of official remembrances, the towers’ burning elevators have been confined to Reddit threads.
I was an office assistant at Columbia, in the university’s school of public health in Washington Heights, where I worked half the week when not interning at a magazine in Midtown. The Department of Sociomedical Sciences describes itself as being “dedicated to understanding and addressing the social, political, historical, cultural, psychological, and economic forces that influence health outcomes.” After 9/11, that meant a three-year, federally funded study of the evacuation of the Twin Towers, “to help determine how individual behavior, the structure of the buildings and emergency management procedures affected who survived and why,” as The New York Times wrote when the study was announced in late 2002.
As many as 15,000 people evacuated the World Trade Center on 9/11, the other side of the horror of all those who were lost in the towers after the planes hit. “The best estimates are that about 1,200 people were trapped in the buildings at the time of the collapse below the points of impact,” the public health professor whose office I worked in, Robyn Gershon, told The New York Times in 2002. “This is an opportunity to look at what might have saved those people, at least.”
The World Trade Center Evacuation Study makes for a sobering if dry read. Preliminary results published in September 2004 in the Centers for Disease Control’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report described the factors that led survivors to begin evacuating the towers. Among them: “Direct evidence of the magnitude of the event (e.g., observing an aircraft strike a building, smelling fuel, or feeling a building move) caused some persons to leave immediately.” But another factor was “concern over leaving their work areas without the approval of executives or managers.” A building-wide announcement was also broadcast in the South Tower after the first plane hit the North Tower, which “urged persons to remain in the building and likely led many to return to their work stations.”
An elevator motor from one of the towers is on morbid display at the 9/11 Memorial Museum along with so many other remnants from the wreckage of the World Trade Center. (The museum, which sits like a tomb 70 feet underground in the bedrock and foundation of the twin towers, has been criticized for “ritualizing grief.”) Richard Drew’s “falling man” photo is on display at the museum, too, but only briefly and practically hidden from view. In a small alcove off the main exhibition halls, it is shown in a short projection of photos of people falling from the towers, which appear but then soon fade away—an image of impermanence we are still trying to forget.