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Day 117 – The Triage Continues

While continuing to dig through my and my father’s surprisingly large photographic “archives” (aka “piles of stuff”) i stumbled across the following images that i’d not thought about in some time.

In 1993 i was working in the graphics department for the Chase Manhattan Bank. My office was on the 28th floor of “2 Chase Manhattan Plaza” (aka 20 Pine Street). I had a pretty crappy view as my office looked north directly at 1 Chase Manhattan Plaza so looking out the window, especially at night, gave the impression of a Blade Runner-esque purely-urban landscape. The New York Times had recently run a billboard campaign promoting the paper’s classified ads with my favorite being “I never thought I’d pull a bank job.” I thought about that line nearly every day i showed up for work having landed the job via The Time’s job listings.

One day in February i was on the phone speaking to one of my “clients,” a young, attractive recent business school grad who, my memory tells me, actually worked over in one of the WTC buildings. Not the towers, one of the low buildings, maybe WTC 6 or some place like that. She was a corporate climber, i was the film lab flunky she had to deal with on rare occasions when somebody in her department needed slides for a presentation. But i remember we always had fun, flirty conversations. Then suddenly i heard through the phone, and simultaneously felt, a low, powerful, “THUD.”

“What the hell was that?” i asked, “you drop something over there?”

“I have no idea… but the whole place just shook.”

Before we could finish our conversation, i heard the sirens. “Get out of the building” i said and hung up. I picked up the camera we used for grip ‘n grin shots, took the elevator to the street and hustled over toward where the sirens seemed to be headed. All I got to see was the smoke and then, several yards from the parking garage door, a piece of twisted metal blown out from the door. It would be later, after the cops established a perimeter, that the people with the now famous soot marks on their faces would begin pouring out onto the street. Looking down at that piece of metal i realized it had to have been a bomb.

[slidepress gallery=’wtc’]

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