John Maloney

My 9/11 story.

I lived with my family in Tribeca on the corner of Greenwich and Chambers Street, three blocks north of the towers. When you had kids and lived downtown, the WTC was NYC’s answer to the suburban mall - a place to go when the weather was bad and the kids could run around, we spent a lot of time there. 

It was my daughter’s first day of kindergarden on West 13th Street.  My son was a baby home in the apt with a babysitter.

After watching the planes hit, we began a series of very anxious phone calls with the babysitter, who was in shock and couldn’t leave the apartment. After the buildings collapsed (which enveloped our building with dust and small debris), my wife, 5-year-old daughter and I starting running downtown, against the stream of people fleeing uptown, to get my son and babysitter out. I can still see the faces of the people walking by us, and the crowds stopped to look at the bizarre suddenly empty skyline and awful scene. 

We stopped in a Soho hardware store and grabbed some dust masks. Mobile phones went dead so we stopped in a bakery - whose owner was beyond terrified because her daughter was stuck in Stuyvesant HS near the towers. She let us use the phone to make a final call to the babysitter.  

We walked to our building and got her and my son out safely. 

We didn’t know what to do next. We started to walk north and randomly ran into an old friend, Gene DeRose and his family, who insisted we stay with them.  We spent the next two days in the red zone of ground zero, with no electricity, taking it all in and trying to figure out how our life had changed. Gene and I woke up very early, still dark, on 9/12 and went to try and find milk. Our local deli in Tribeca was open with candles and generators - and giving free food (and milk) to the neighbors and emergency workers. Amazing scene. 

We ended up living in borrowed apartments and hotels, eventually moving back home. We had a mobile McDonald’s truck parked literally in front of our door giving free food to the workers, and the ground zero pit burned for months. 

Why didn’t we leave, move? This was our home, our neighborhood and city - which is how most of us felt.  Terrorism was brand new to NYer’s, but we reacted the appropriate way. We refused to give in to the fear. 

Eventually we did move - but on our terms, not theirs. 

Sad and scary time.