Episode 189 - September 11th Recall Part II - Memories, Aftermath, Rebuilding
Our discussion on 9/11 continues with memories of that day, the immediate aftermath, and the rebuilding of ground zero as the new world trade center and oculus.
Links
"It's Too Quiet" The Early Morning Television of 9/11/2001
Trump calls into a New Report on 9/11
Tribute in Light
BBC: Come From Away, Musical about Americans who Landed in Newfoundland
CNN (May 30, 2002): Ceremony Closes Ground Zero Cleanup
FBI: Black Tom Bombing in 1916 (German targeting of the Statue of Liberty)
Related Episodes
Episode 187 with Part I
Transcript
Max Sklar: You're listening to The Local Maximum episode 189.
Time to expand your perspective. Welcome to The Local Maximum. Now here's your host, Max Sklar.
Max: Welcome, everyone. Welcome. You have reached another Local Maximum. Welcome to Part II of our 911 episode. I almost said 911 special, but that just sounds so wrong.
Aaron Bell: It's a very special episode.
Max: It is a special episode, and it is kind of a difficult episode to get through. I think this second part is going to be even more difficult than the first, although I think we're going to run through the actual 911 pretty quickly, and then get into some of the stories that I remember in the aftermath of 911, which I think are not covered as much these days. It might not be covered in retellings of the story, but are more related to my experiences in New York.
Okay! I don't know what you did in your family. When we got up, first of all, it was incredibly hard to get everyone up early in the morning for these schools. I don't know why they started like seven, eight in the morning. Well, I know why. It’s not fun. We always had these early shows — not “Good Morning New York”, but like shows like that in the morning during breakfast. It was like Katie Couric and Matt Lauer were on. Matt Lauer doesn't do that anymore.
That morning, there was an early show. If you watch some of these clips, it's pretty amazing how all of them are talking about frivolous things. Very like “this is a perfect day”, very like “this is a really nice summer September day.” There was one kind of weather and traffic guy being like, ”Just a normal September day.” I think the actual quote is, “It's really quiet. We like quiet — maybe too quiet. Back to you.” That was the end of it. As the first planes were being hijacked — crazy enough.
Let's get back to that morning. We have you walking to what I believe is the North cafeteria, and me in the North cafeteria when we find out. Back then, Weston actually had two cafeterias. They had a North cafeteria and a South cafeteria. When they redesigned the schools, they were like, “No, that's not diverse enough or not…” They probably gave a reason for diversity.
Aaron: Don’t want to have a Hatfield’s and McCoy situation.
Max: I don't remember it being that bad. But it was notoriously…
Aaron: I think there may have been a little bit of like the jocks eat in this cafeteria, and the theater kids eat in this cafeteria.
Max: I was in the North for my free time. This happens, and all I heard was that a plane crashed into the World Trade Center. That's what someone said. The TV was not on. There was a TV in the North cafeteria, but it wasn't on. I don't know how to turn it on. I feel like the remote was really high. They went to reach it. I was probably doing homework. I was like, “Alright, it didn't really feel like a big news story” when I first heard it because your plane crashes all the time. There's Flight 800. There's plane crashes. I'm like, “You know what? Yeah. All right.” I don't know what your first…
Aaron: I remember where I was standing. I was walking down the hall, from the main entrance down that main quarter, past the office towards the T intersection by the cafeteria is there. Someone — I can't remember who — actually ran by me, and basically threw the news at me as they were running by. I can't remember how the story was developed at that point. I mean, it was certainly before plane number two. They couldn't have known that much. But I've been in the library for the last 30 minutes or so. I almost certainly missed part of the development of the story. It had just happened, but I had been oblivious until that moment.
Max: Part of our story happens in the library because I'm sure as soon as you left, people started bringing up websites and stuff. Whatever it is like MSN News Network or whatever they had back then. I don't know what it was. But there are all sorts of websites you can go to. But that first plane, it didn't feel like a world-changing event. It just felt like it was a catastrophe.
Aaron: Everyone was still assuming, “Well, this is a terrible accident.”
Max: I don't remember where I was when I learned a second plane hit. I just don't remember. I think it could have been one of those things where it was literally between classes — not like you walking down the hall, but when they were like everybody's walking down the hall. But I do remember the announcement that the principal made during math class, which was like the next period. I think the period right before lunch. Do you remember that?
Aaron: No. Refresh my memory.
Max: Oftentimes, I think I hear something recorded, and then I listened to it, And it sounds very different than what I remember. This is 20 years of memory. So, I remember her saying like, “I know many of you have heard of the attacks on New York and Washington and it was something like…” I don't remember what she said next, but I remember using the word “attack”, even though I'd already known there was a second plane was a little bit jarring to me because “terrorist attack” and “attack” sound very different.
I know that's weird. It's like, “A terrorist attack sounds like a kind of attack. But attack, it was almost like the nation is under attack versus a terrorist attack is more like “the Oklahoma City bombing” or something. Terrible thing. Maybe it's the same thing, but it almost sounded less, I don't know — it sounded more official. Because I hadn't seen the pictures yet, I almost thought they might have been overreacting. I don't know. Of course, there's obviously more to that announcement. I don't remember what it was. It probably was saying — maybe “you can go home”, maybe “you could use the phone.” I don't remember at all what the second part of the announcement was.
Aaron: Some context there is that we went to school in a small town in Connecticut. It's perhaps an exaggeration to say that 50% of the households had someone who commuted into the city.
Max: I forgot that. I forgot.
Aaron: But a significant portion of the households in our hometown, where people who worked, rode the train into New York City, and — I'm racking my brain to remember if any of our classmates actually had parents who were in the towers. I can't recall.
Max: I don't remember any
Aaron: I know I had a next-door neighbor who used to work in the towers, who at that point was no longer doing so. But it wouldn’t have been unusual to know somebody who did work in the World Trade Center.
Max: I remember someone who was saying, like a parent who was saying, “I was supposed to be there that day.” Lunchtime comes around. I don't know if you remember this, but I had lunch with you that day.
Aaron: I do not. It's all a blur.
Max: First of all, this was — I remember where it was. I remember it was in the South cafeteria. Now, like you said, the theater kids went to the North cafeteria, and it was the jocks at the South cafeteria. I was theater, so I usually went to North. But for some reason that they were eating in South. I don't know why, but I definitely remember we were in South because it wasn't like you couldn't eat there. Sometimes, I eat in the South cafeteria. I don't know. Maybe it was like my classes. I don't know. I mean, we were talking about it, but I don't remember all the details of the conversation. I wish we had a recording of it — republish it at this point.
Aaron: I do remember. I want to. It was in Mr. Sidoli class.
Max: I remember speculating — I remember trying to speculate with you who it was. We had no idea. Like who would do this? — Sorry. Go ahead. What was that?
Aaron: I want to say that we were in — maybe I wouldn't have been taking — was taking the class with Mr. Sidoli at that point? It was one of our history teachers.
Max: I was too. But I don't know if it was the same class. Was it the Western Civ?
Aaron: Would we've been taking that senior year? I think so.
Max: It might have been multiple ones.
Aaron: I'm pretty sure he either wheeled in, or I guess there probably wasn't a TV in the room, but I think he wheeled in one off the AV cart or whatever, and we were watching.
Max: Because I was going to get into the science teachers, but that happened.
Aaron: It's possible that I'm mixing up memories there. But for some reason in my brain, Mr. Sidoli was in the room there. Maybe he retreated to the science wing.
But there was definitely an acknowledgment from at least some of the teachers that, “We're not getting anything productive on the syllabus done today. This is something important, and we're going to watch this.” Because I'm sure they wanted to know what was going on just as much as we did. It was a big deal.
Max: The administration didn't want us to do that. I remember —
Aaron: They wanted to keep things as normal as possible, right. At that point, that ship had sailed.
Max: First, I heard that they cut the internet. It was like, “What? They cut the internet?” That was the first. I've never seen the internet cut before. It was so new. It's never been cut. It's gone out, but it's never been cut. Then, in the afternoon, I had science class. Science was kind of in the back of the school — we can explain it.
They set up the TV in the back room all the way. Basically, walk out the door there, you're walking outside into the woods. That back room was not where class was. They just brought all the science classes in there every period for the next thing. Now even when I go into the school, even though it's completely renovated, when I go past that room, I'm like, “That's the 911 room.” Because I didn't do anything else in that room the whole time we're in high school. It turned on. I remember, like thinking, “Okay, so there's a plane crash.” I remember the first thing the news was saying, ‘It's hard to believe, but this is New York.”
I saw basically the entire downtown Manhattan covered in smoke like it because the tower had fell. It almost looked like the entire — all of lower Manhattan is like —
Aaron: Was on fire.
Max: That's sort of what it looked like. It was like, “Holy shit!” I feel like that is when people changed from “kids being all excited sharing news” to “this just got real.” I remember, some people were crying. People were all of a sudden became very somber. Nobody was, at that point, nobody was joking around about it once we saw I was gone on TV. It took me a while to figure out that the whole tower had fell. I'll get into a little bit because I feel like that moment is probably the most dramatic moment of the whole day — that first tower falling.
Aaron: In particular because the world was watching.
Max: The world was watching. That’s probably when most of the deaths happened.
Aaron: That too. Well, I’m sorry. I was thinking when the second plane hit because all the news cameras and everything were already tuned in on it, and then they saw that actually happened. That's when it became clear that this wasn't just an accident. When the tower came down, there were probably a couple of hundred people who died on the planes, and some number of additional people who died in the buildings from the impacts. When the towers came down, that's what really — the majority I'd say — of the fatalities happened that day.
Max: I have on my phone, and the reason why I have this on my phone is because I downloaded it from Napster back in 2002 which was not quite legal. I have I still have the file, and it's Howard Stern's broadcast from that day which interestingly enough, they don't want anyone to have anymore. I see the reason why.
Aaron: It's locked away in the archive.
Max: But I have so that I can listen to it. I'll report on what I said. It's no longer widely available. First of all, it starts off like every other morning news report. It's like totally normal day. They were talking about totally frivolous stuff. They're talking about you — they did a very kind of like mean skit about the kid who was — there was a kid who was like supposed to be in Little League who won the championship, but it turns out he was 15, not 12.
You wouldn’t do that today because they were making fun of his Latin — the Hispanic angle to it. Then, the whole hour before was the fact that they were saying that Howard Stern was at a club once, and Pamela Anderson kissed him, but he didn't go further. They were like giving him crap for that for an hour.
Aaron: That sounds like classic Howard Stern.
Max: This was just like the whole set, and they kept just coming back to it. They wouldn't let him go off to another story. He'd be like, “No, she didn't want it. She didn't.” And they were like, “You're a coward. You're a coward.” They also meant it like, “Well, now she's going to marry Kid Rock, and that's it.” And blah, blah, blah. Spoiler alert: that marriage did not work out for very long. Although, I believe both are alive, or all of those figures are alive and well in 2021. But especially Kid Rock, he's still doing stuff, right?
Aaron: I can't say that I followed closely.
Max: Can you run for Senate? Or at least he —
Aaron: He was doing something in politics. I don't know if that should be taken with more or less gravitas than when Kanye was running for president.
Max: But still, it's doing something. Eventually, he finally gets them off this topic by saying, “Ah, I'm sorry to interrupt the fun, but we have a serious news story to cover.” He said like a plane crash, and the World Trade Center. They looked out the window, and they could see it. They're like, “Well, hat's a huge fire.” I've heard from other people in New York say basically they just heard an explosion, or just saw an explosion. Despite what you hear from conspiracy theorists, there are videos of that first plane going in.
Aaron: New Yorkers, of course, have this reputation for nothing fazes them. I'm sure there are plenty of people who say, “I heard an explosion. I just kept walking to work. I got right back on the subway.” Then, everything changed.
Max: The thing about the broadcast, though, is it gets increasingly upsetting over time. I think at one point, he says, “This is really bad, but then every few minutes it just gets worse” which I thought was really what it was, so you can get the second plane. Then, you get callers calling in, or some of it. I think some of his people were increasingly frantic. He has to stop a guy from saying like, “Go to your 711 and take him out” or something. He's like, “Alright! Get this guy off the air.” Real, real crazy stuff. At one point, he's like, “Yo, we got to go to war. We need to level the entire Middle East and turn it into a parking lot” which is probably the reason why it's not replayed.
Aaron: Which I'm sure he's not the originator of that sentiment that
Max: That was natural sentiment. It was just like what —
Aaron: Even pre-911, there were plenty of people who saw that as the only resolution to the unending conflict in that region. But this would certainly dredge that up in the moment for a lot of folks.
Max: Then, you do see them decide to stay on the air for longer than expected because apparently, people like them on the air, but he's like, “I’ve got to be careful here.” He did say, “I've got to be careful here because I don't want to be the guy to tell everybody what they should think.” But probably a lot of people were — he was kind of a shock-jock comedian type. But a lot of people took him way too seriously. Maybe it was a time when you didn't have as many people like that, or maybe that's always true. If there's somebody who's pretty, who's like a comedian, and pretty charismatic, a lot of people will take everything they say seriously. That might happen.
I think there are a lot of other media broadcasts that were actually they did surprisingly well for the media graded on a curve that day. Especially graded on a 2021 curve. Another thing that I remember from that night well — during the day seeing that first tower fall was kind of the craziest moment. For me, those buildings to me represented New York, sort of like the death of the entire city in some way. I was like, “Can’t you just rebuild them?” I was kind of like — then the second tower went down, and then it's just like — it’s almost like if you have an unexpected death in the family, you don't believe it at first.
Aaron: Did you have any thoughts at the time about the plane that hit the Pentagon, or was that very much in second place given the connection to New York?
Max: Very much in second place. I mean, it's still happening. Then, Pennsylvania happened. Then, they would say, “Well, we think there might be other planes.” There might be like a fifth plane, sixth plane, and the seventh plane. We don't know.” I do remember in the science class, there was — in the broadcast, they said, “We don't know who this is.” Osama bin Laden comes to mind. Apparently, the people in the media who are in the know knew this was going on.
Actually — I kind of skipped over this — but the day before, there was a news story that was very much related about General Massoud who's killed in Afghanistan. Who's that? Well, that was a guy that was one of the political leaders in Afghanistan. He was one of the members of the Northern Alliance.
Aaron: Opposition to the Taliban.
Max: Opposition to the Taliban. Another guy there is a General Dostum. He's still around. He actually escaped into Uzbekistan, Tajikistan — or one of those in the last couple of weeks, and there's like a video of the Taliban in his house, which I — there's kind of a Twitter thing where it's like, “Oh, wow! They see how nice his house is.” And I'm like, “That house is like — take your living room, and take all your great grandmother's furniture, and shove it all in there.” That's what it looks like.
Sorry, that's maybe unfair to that style. That General — I don't know a whole lot about the politics there — but that General was supporting of the Soviets. Massoud was against the Soviets, so he was with the Mujahideen. I guess that's why it was an alliance. It was alliance with people who were opposed in the previous Civil War but now were together in the Civil War.
Aaron: United in their opposition to the Taliban?
Max: I guess so. Somebody who knows more will tell me. I still think just by knowing who the people are, I already know more than 95% of people. This guy, Massoud, he was killed September 10. There's actually a 911 in the New York Times, it said, “The day after assume a suicide bombing aimed at Ahmad Shah Massoud, the leader — ” By the way, I'm sorry. I don't know if I'm pronouncing that right, “ — the leader of the last remaining opposition of Taliban.” Conflicting reports persisted today over whether he had survived. We now know he did not survive. We now know, or we now think like that was part of the plan probably can all connect it.
Aaron: You mentioned that people were speculating that morning that before any formal responsibility had been taken they were saying, “Could be Osama bin Laden.” Presumably, the reason they were saying that was because of his history of previous attempts on the World Trade Center.
Max: His declaration of war against America was ‘96. The First World Trade Center bombing was ‘93. I was kind of confused by that. I looked into it. ‘93 was a family member of Khalid Sheikh Muhammed, who was by 2001, working with bin Laden, but it gets confusing. I remember when they captured Khalid Sheikh Muhammed you almost can't burnish it from your brain like —
Aaron: Even that dirty shirt.
Max: Dirty shirt. Yes!
Aaron: Another one of those enduring images — probably more vivid in my mind than anything specific related to Osama bin Laden's killing. Actually, I'd say that the images surrounding Osama bin Laden come more from — was it “Zero Dark Thirty”? The movie that was made about finding him, and tracking him down, and killing him, than anything actually released. I don't think they publicly released much information about it other than we confirm he’s dead. We dumped his body in the ocean in a place we're never going to tell you.
Max: I remember whenever they would talk about bin Laden in the news. They would play a clip of one of his videos where he's like sitting in this cave next to a gun with his finger. I have things to tell you, but you can't understand what he's saying.
Aaron: So much analysis has gone into like, every little thing in those in those videos, trying to determine what kind of signals is he sending? Where might he be? A lot of both open source and government intelligence work on that type of stuff.
Max: And there was a — why am I now remembering “Family Guy” — what I'm talking about? They have a scene where they're actually trying to film one of these videos, but he keeps on laughing or screwing up the words, and then they have to restart. For some reason, I remember that more than the actual bin Laden.
Aaron: I know there was an in-depth academic paper on the firearms that appear in Osama bin Laden videos. What videos have common elements, and what have distinct ones, and what that might be indicative of?
Max: — where are we?
Aaron: We didn't have this in the notes, but was when was the bombing of the USS Cole?
Max: That was earlier that year.
Aaron: Okay. I think bin Laden had taken credit for that. That may be part of why he was on the shortlist at that point.
Max: They were waging war again. That one didn't faze me as much as it should. A US warship was attacked. I mean, think about how crazy that is. But to me, it's just like, “No, these things happen.”
Aaron: Did anyone — did any Americans die in that attack?
Max: I think so. Yeah. I think like six or seven.
Aaron: I know it was a big deal. At the same time, it was an attack on a military asset. It kind of felt like that's what they're there for, to draw that kind of fire. Very different than an attack on civilians.
Max: I think it might have been discussed in the presidential campaign. It might have been 2000 — I'm not sure. I have written here. Then, looking at it later that night and into the morning, the other images are not just the smoke and the buildings, the people coming out covered, and then the fact that everybody went to donate blood, but there was no — people didn't need blood. Maybe somebody did.
Aaron: But people were desperate to do something.
Max: Once you start zooming in because it was all news for the next — I want to say six months — but really for the next week. I think that's when the new scroll started coming in on the [inaudible], right? That was not there before 911. They put that up.
Aaron: Or if it was, it was only for dramatic breaking news, right?
Max: Well, there was so much stuff happening at the same time that you had to keep up on all of it.
Aaron: Let me pull back to something you mentioned earlier on the day of when we didn't know if there were more planes in the air. They did basically ground everyone at some point. I think it was not too far into the day. I don't know the veracity of this, but I've read in a couple of places that there were four planes that they did hijack. There were the two that hit the Twin Towers. There's the one — it’s the Pentagon. The one that went down in Pennsylvania was supposedly targeting the White House.
They did not hijack a fifth plane. However, supposedly, the plans when they were setting up their list of targets, option number five was MIT which strikes home for me, presumably because of MIT's involvement — less so at that point in time, but historically with the military-industrial complex. I think that's what kind of put a target on their back. There was, on the one hand, a kind of a survivor's guilt thing a little bit going on at MIT at the time, but also a —
Max: Even when you were there.
Aaron: Because I didn't get there until 2002.
Max: It’s about a year later.
Aaron: There was a little bit of that survivor's guilt, but also the knowledge that we are very much on the target list. When the next attack comes — because there was no reason to believe we wouldn't see more whether it was aircraft or other mechanisms that were on the shortlist. The closest thing to happen to Boston, following on that, was the Marathon bombing. That’s a completely different story.
Max: That would have been very different if it happened in 2000.
Aaron: Something over a decade later. It would have been a very different world if it happened around then.
Max: I don't know if they would react differently, but it would have seemed much more connected.
Aaron: Well, I guess —- and getting a little bit ahead of ourselves here.
Max: I still have stuff from that day.
Aaron: One of the things that was very apparent in the ongoing in the aftermath of the Marathon bombing was the bringing to bear of the Security State and the Patriot Act domestically, which were all things that dramatically grew out of the immediately following 911. We mentioned enemy of the state is kind of a foreshadowing of that.
Max: You're right. To come back for what you said. Being at Yale as well, I felt the same way. When there was the Yale-Harvard game, there's like a lot of celebrities there. There's a lot of children of people who are maybe more — the president's daughter was in my school. I remember the year after I graduated, in 2007, there was some kind of a bomb set off at the law school, and people were all freaking out. As I'm gonna get into a little bit, we're still in the day after, but this was hanging over our heads for the next 10 years.
Aaron: There was certainly a sense of loss of innocence because — I'm trying to think of what — I guess it matters whether you couch this as an act of war or not. When was the last time that America had been attacked on its own soil? There's a couple of very minor things during World War II with Japanese balloon bombs.
Max: Or Pearl Harbor thing?
Aaron: That wasn't the mainland, though. I don't know if that's a worthy distinction. If you go back further than that — I don't know if the Civil War counts. You've got the invasion in 1812 with — The War of 1812.
Max: We're already talking like past anyone's lifetime.
Aaron: This is several Fourth Turnings prior.
Max: There had been terrorist attacks on the country before, but not at that scale.
Aaron: And not foreign terrorism. I mean, there was domestic terrorism. But foreign actors, not so much.
Max: Maybe some of the assassinations had foreign involvement.
Aaron: Do you count the Puerto Rican independence movement as a foreign — ? Or I guess technically they were territory at the time. It depends how you slice that. While the 60s and 70s had lots of bombings and terrorist activity, the majority of those had no or minimal human casualties. They were — publicity stunt is not the right term for it — but they were making a statement. They weren't trying to rack up a body toll. Certainly, Osama bin Laden was trying to make a statement, but he had no interest in avoiding a body toll.
Max: No, he wanted to create a large body toll. I felt like we were being hunted down just as people who resided in America basically. He was targeting people who were citizens, non-citizens. He was targeting people of all religions — Jewish, Christian, Muslim. It didn't matter. He's just going to blow them away.
Aaron: As with all terrorism, it's the indiscriminate nature that amplifies the terror. yeah. So let's
Max: That's jarring. I think that is relevant to the day of. I just think like one of the things that I remember from the day after, or that night was when you started to see individual people —- now a lot of people who were at the site say how crazy it was. They started hearing thuds and it was bodies hitting the ground. But you really started to get that night, I think pictures of people jumping out. Now I remember, seared into my brain, and ‘93 bombings —- ‘93 or ‘94? I always get that confused. They have people breaking windows in the World Trade Center —- dead air.
This was just people jumping out of windows, and it's hard to imagine how bad it must have been in there for people to do that. Then, you also learn of the numbers of firemen and police who went into the building to get people out who were just there, and to only to get themselves basically disintegrated.
Aaron: It's hard to call it a failure of planning or protocol.
Max: No way to plan for that.
Aaron: There was at least a significant period where people were being told to just, “Stay in your offices.” Because if you're up a hundred something floors, and the elevators are down, then you can't expect all those people to be able to efficiently and effectively evacuate out. If you think, “Well, it's just a fire. We've got it under control.” There was a window where perhaps they could have had evacuated a significant portion of people, but they didn't realize that the clock was ticking on that. I'm sure there are plenty of people who had serious, guilt and PTSD that they realize they could have taken action. There's no reason they necessarily would have known it at the time, but they felt that there are things they could have done that they didn't. They feel that they failed those people.
Max: I mean, I'd imagine. If there's a fire alarm, I just run right out. I always imagined I'd be one of the few people from a high floor out. But then you'd have a survivor because I heard that there were announcements saying, “Get out.” “Don't get out.” They didn't know what to announce. Then, the firemen were coming up. Were they saying stay? Where are they saying go? We don't know necessarily.
It must have been crazy for them that day because it's like — I always think about this way. It's one way to say, “I'm going to be a fireman. I'm going to be the one who's going to put my life on the line for other people.” That sounds very noble, and that sounds like a good thing to do. It's another thing to wake up one morning, and you have a family whatever saying and find out, “Yep, today is the day.” And they did that. That’s why they were considered heroes for —
Aaron: It wasn't just the New York City Fire Department because I think —- even in the short amount of time that it took for the towers to come down, I think they'd already activated mutual aid from all over the greater metropolitan area. I'm almost certain that they had folks coming in from Long Island, in New Jersey, and Westchester County, and possibly even from Connecticut. Those folks certainly came in in the aftermath to help with searching through the rubble and that kind of stuff.
Max: I remember hearing like, “You could see this from space. You could see this from Connecticut — maybe parts of Connecticut.” It's like smoke in the background. It was enormous. I'm pretty sure emergency for 100 miles were being tagged. At least, also to cover the people going in because now you have emergency workers from all over the city coming in, and you have a lot of areas —
Aaron: People don't stop having heart attacks because there's a terrorist attack in downtown. You still got to deal with everything else going on in the city.
Max: One thing. During the pandemic, that was true as well. That night, they had 10,000 missing people. I think it was down to 6000. I think for a few weeks, we thought it was 6000 dead. Ended up being under 3000. I know that night, we got a call. It turned out that my dad's friend was missing, and he was in the building. We knew what that meant.
I remember seeing on TV, a lot of people who — they basically aired these people who were showing pictures of their relatives like, “They're missing. Have you heard seen them?” It's kind of hard to watch because you know they're all dead — almost all I mean. There was actually a small group of people that were recovered from an air pocket, which is actually pretty crazy story, there were on the stairs. The building, the entire building crashed above them, but they were safe in the stairs. From what I heard, the noise was incredible.
Aaron: I can't even imagine.
Max: They said like they thought they were dead, but they weren't even touched crazily enough. They were also these rumors going around, “Oh, there's one guy who wrote it down, and was fine.” Stuff like that, which probably comes up a lot when these sorts of things happen. The casualty rate got revised down to under 3000. The next day. Now, I remember going to school the next day and getting back to work. I don't know about you.
Aaron: I must have. Yeah.
Max: Because Foursquare gives us the day off and they're like, “Oh, people are really upset about Trump, so take the day off. They said that which — I don't know. I feel like people are so like, “Oh, we need a mental health day.”
Aaron: If we hadn't gone in, what would we have done?
Max: Honestly, I feel like in that situation, it was better for mental health to just get back to work and be together, which is scary because that's what people have been avoiding for the last two years. I remember going to get a car. We got a Pathfinder later that afternoon. I remember school ended at like 2:10, so we could like do things afterwards. On the TV there, that's when the World Trade Center 7 was collapsing. That was a building about half as tall as the World Trade Center that had been badly damaged and collapsed from all the debris and wreckage. Then, there was a fire ongoing for a long time for 100 days until December.
Aaron: That's kind of mind-boggling that the pit was still smoldering for so long.
Max: I went with my family to New York the next month, in October 2001. We got into a cab, and having my dad like, “Take us to Ground Zero.” It was called Ground Zero back then. It's not called Ground Zero anymore, but it was probably called Ground Zero for maybe for about 10 years. I don't know. Maybe by the time I moved there in 2006 — no, it was still called Ground Zero I think. Now, not really. We can get pretty close. I remember there are people selling like little trinkets of the World Trade Center, and people were offended by that. That almost seems like such a small issue now that —
Aaron: On the one hand, it kind of feels like how you — I don't know if you still can but used to be able to get like a chunk of the Berlin Wall.
Max: Oh, it's not actually… It's like little you know… You can get tiny statue of little …
Aaron: I see. Okay.
Max: It was like tiny. It wasn't like chunks of the wreckage.
Aaron: So, little tchotchke World Trade Centers.
Max: Exactly.
Aaron: They were intact, right? It wasn't it wasn't like a collapsing.
Max: No! They probably constructed. They're probably mass-produced before.
Aaron: Oh, sure. Yeah.
Max: You could probably still buy them down there now. But yes, there was that. I remember seeing in the distance like there's — I don't know if it's a famous image, but you can see the shell of one of the outside of the building. It's all like jaggedy, but it's still reaching up in the air 10 or 11 storeys. I remember seeing that. I remember getting this cloth for the next few weeks. That could have been from something else, but I don't know. Let's see, what else do I have here?
There's actually an interesting — speaking of Trump, there was a Trump Tower down there is actually an interesting video of him calling into an early morning show on 9/11, talking about basically more from the builder’s perspective. He definitely did give this like, “My building was the second-highest, and then that went up. Now, my building is first highest again.” All this time, we haven't even mentioned the president, which I guess that was the Trump. Before there was a Trump, it was Bush.
It's amazing I want to talk about it, the President's almost a second thought. I guess when you’re going through it, it's almost a first thought. I remember his first couple of speeches were pretty bad, but then he got better over the next few weeks.
Aaron: The one that everyone remembers is him at Ground Zero with the bullhorn. That certainly made an impression.
Max: That pumped people up. I also remember at the beginning when they first put the microphones in front of him, right? Probably when he was outside that school that he was just giving — he's like, “Yeah, we're going to get these folks.” We're like, “These folks?”
Aaron: I believe — I didn't go back and look at the speeches — but I believe he did make some comments not too long after, making it clear that, “There's a very specific group that we're going to go after who's responsible for this.” This isn't about going after all Muslims, or all Middle Easterners.
Max: That was very important.
Aaron: Because like you said, there could have very easily been, and there were some deranged, perhaps too strong a term. But some of those callers calling into Howard Stern. There were certainly people who were very ready to jump to the conclusion and seek out people to pin this on, and not just verbally abuse them.
Max: I've heard people say things about Muslims and Arabs in New York that were not good. But I think overall, and I'm going to get more into this, there were some incidents that I witnessed that were not so great. But I think, in the big picture, Americans actually held it together pretty well on that. There weren’t any incidents of real violence. I mean, maybe you can come up with one. There's definitely some nasty shouting in the street and stuff.
Aaron: As much as people have commented on the global war, on terror, and said that, “America wasn't — the military went to war, and America went to the mall” that the public wasn't really engaged with it. I'd say that immediately following 911, the whole nation was on a war footing. That we were united together. There was this drive to just support each other. Not necessarily in a, “Let's go get those guys!” But in the sense that we need to be stronger together because of this.
Max: Yeah, because I remember people actually expressing a variety of different opinions, but it was all there was still like — they all seemed in the spirit of patriotism, whether you're anti-war, or whether you agreed with this or that policy. Remember, everyone was kind of being “Now's the time to be patriotic.” Who was I trying to remember? Oh! One of the things about Bush's speech though that comes back to the Taliban is that he said, “We are going to go after Al Qaeda, but we're not going to distinguish between Al-Qaeda and the terrorists and those who —” The terrorists. “ — the terrorists, and those who harbored them.”
That was the Taliban because the Taliban had kept them basically —- they harbored them, just like he said. That wasn't a lie. It's sort of interesting too — I mean, I don't want to get into this, but how does that change over the course of 20 years? Was that really the wrong thing to say from the beginning? Was that something we could have shifted on at some point in the future if we're like, “Well, we don't want to rebuild Afghanistan.” I don't know these questions, but it brings up a lot of interesting questions.
Aaron: Leaving the Iraq aspect of the wars that followed this. Out of it for a moment. I think there was a pretty strong consensus that that action needed to be taken. There was not a “turn the other cheek” option really on the table, following something of this magnitude. There may have been some airstrikes following the attack on the USS Cole, but it was proportional, if not less than that, to the degree of the damage inflicted on us. A restrained proportional response was — you could say it was not an option on the table here. But I think maybe that the issue was that the threshold had been crossed such that even a proportional response was going to be massive in scale.
Max: They're the idea that you're just going to do very little or nothing was not going to happen. Although I did run into a lot of people who were anti-war at the time. I even think a lot of teachers said things that were anti-war. But it was very different. It was like a much more respectful thing than the way people talk now if that makes sense.
Aaron: Yeah, it was. Then, there was also kind of a — but much like when you said that people were rushing to get blood, even though they didn't need blood. My understanding is there was a huge influx of people volunteering for the armed services that they need to step up and do their part that. This was before the Authorization for Use of Military Force, and before we declared that we were going into Afghanistan with the coalition.
Max: This all happened very fast by the way.
Aaron: Because there are a lot of people who have stories of going on September 12, or the week following to recruiting stations and saying, “Sign me up. I want to do my part.”
Max: Because the Taliban fell by the end of the year. It's already September here. Well, I think there was like a month where nothing happens, and everybody's really on edge. Then, something happens. Then, it was very easy to basically remove the Taliban to the fringes, and basically get their last stronghold at Tora Bora, wherever that is. Then, it was Osama bin Laden goes across the border, and then we stopped hearing about it for a while.
Aaron: Well, it's certainly entered into a different phase of the war.
Max: So let's talk about what the rest of the year was like at school. Definitely, the culture change was more somber. I felt like people actually were nicer to each other. I don't know if you've experienced the same thing, especially in the first few weeks. It was a lot less than —
Aaron: You could easily see how a stressful event like that could cause people to tear apart at the seams, and lash out at each other. That is not what happened.
Max: Right. It could be what had happened today, unfortunately. We did it in my senior year, just talking about my life. I don't know if this is relevant, is going to be a little bit relevant. We did “The Crucible”. We had that. Then, things changed a little bit in 2002. Then, we did Sugar, “Some Like It Hot”, and I basically had to dress up like a woman the whole time in front of the entire high school. That was a little bit less dark and depressing than “The Crucible”, even if I was the one who was kind of suffering, but also providing comic relief to other people.
Then, we came out with the “Dictator of Easton” movie, which has very bad production value, and my storytelling isn't so great —- but some of the ideas in there do hold up after 20 years. We're going to have to replay that. How would you explain to the audience what that was and what's its relation to 911, if any?
Aaron: So many things to unpack there. I'm not sure which thread to pull.
Max: Well, we'll give it a try because I'm at a loss for words.
Aaron: There was an analysis of power structures, censorship.
Max: But what is it? What is it?
Aaron: I guess the simple plot device is there's Easton and Weston. For some reason, we had Easton being taken over by a dictator who needs to invade Weston and annex it.
Max: We never came up with a good backstory for that. I feel like that should be filled in.
Aaron: I feel like the narration had some sort of an explanation, but I don't know that it held much water.
Max: I feel like your character, the narrator, was kind of more of a propagandist for Weston than anything else. I mean, the dictator resists all evil. I feel like the moral of the story needed to be told. Anyway, we could get back into that another time.
Aaron: Are you suggesting that we should have made equal time for dictator apologists to present their side of the story?
Max: No! Not at all. Not at all. Not at all. Although we did apply. I mean, most of the scenes, like the dictator got the most air time in the show.
Aaron: He is the titular character of the series.
Max: I think a lot of the ideas in there — you're right, you had censorship. Did we have censorship? I think we did.
Aaron: We definitely had a book burning.
Max: We had a book burning. We also had a lot of ideas in terms of division, and what will happen in politics.
Aaron: Corruption in politics.
Max: We'll have to get into that, and actually see what we said. I'm not going to have you take credit for stuff that we — because I honestly edit it together. But I think you wrote parts of it. We’ll see —
Aaron: I certainly had a hand in there.
Max: We'll see what happens when in the 20th anniversary of that, which comes up — that was 2002, so that comes up later. You also wrote here we had a senior trip on a harbor cruise around New York City. I remember that.
Aaron: Was it like the night before graduation that we did that?
Max: It was the night after.
Aaron: Yeah, that night after midnight. We all drove down into the city, and I think we — did we do something like an arcade?
Max: We went to Chelsea Piers.
Aaron: That's right, and it ended with us doing this harbor cruise around Manhattan.
Max: One in the morning. It was cool to see all the teachers there just hanging out, sipping the champagne one in the morning.
Aaron: And it was a fun, light-hearted experience until we came around a bend of the island, and we saw the Pillars of Light.
Max: Yeah. And the Statue of Liberty was there too because it's kind of impetus all downtown.
Aaron: This was, I assume, they did it with lots of searchlights, but it was two vertical beams of light coming up from what appeared to be the Ground Zero, commemorating the loss of the towers. It was a little bit of a surreal moment to go from kind of partying away, finished having finished high school, to cruising past that quietly in the night.
Max: A couple of things I remember that trip. A few thoughts. I don't know, I'm trying to think which ones go first. Let's talk about the light because they do that now in September every year in New York. This is the first year where I'm not going to be there to see it unless I take a little trip down there when I'm in Connecticut. I don't think I'm going to though. That's kind of saying something that I'm not going to be there this year. It's sort of like an end of an era for me, but that they do that every year.
I've gotten up close to it. It's actually not on the site, it's in the garage. It's in a garage, a few blocks down. That was the first time. That was really crazy. You could see all my Foursquare check-ins in September — you'll see them because you can see them from Brooklyn. I would see them from Brooklyn. I would see them from the East Village. Another thing I remember about that trip. Well, two things. First of all, you mentioned Mr. Sidoli. Before, I remember him actually giving us the history of the Brooklyn Bridge is that we're going under it. That's actually a lot of really interesting history.
Aaron: I read a great book on that earlier.
Max: There was a good podcast on it on History That Doesn't Suck. Maybe I'll post that. Then, I just remember passing the Statue of Liberty, and thinking like, “There's no guarantee that will be there in the near future.” You know? And I would just think that about all sorts of things. That just seems —
Aaron: Nothing was safe. There was a sense of everything could come crashing down around us again at any moment.
Max: Exactly. Exactly. 20 years later, the Statue of Liberty is still here. But it felt like if I had to guess then, it'd be like maybe not.
Aaron: Fun Statue of Liberty story. I may need to be fact-checked on this, but I believe I read not too long ago that the reason they stopped allowing people to go up into the torch was because — I think it was it was during World War II, some German saboteurs had set up some explosives which had weakened the arm. It wasn't just things decaying, or not being safe. It was actually the victim of potential terrorist attack. I may need to fact-check that in the show notes. Everything old is new again.
Max: Let me see what else I have written down here on the aftermath. I actually remember having a discussion at my synagogue later because it was Rosh Hashanah, which is actually tomorrow. It's actually going to be the day this comes out. I remember there was a lot of concern about anti-Muslim sentiment that would happen in the country. I don't think you'd be able to have an adult conversation about this kind of thing today, with like critical race theory and stuff.
Thinking about it then, it was like, “Oh, wow! There was actually an adult conversation about that.” A few years later, I did witness an incident at Yale, and it's only funny because well, it's kind of horrible, but it's also the kicker at the end is kind of funny because there was like a drunk guy who saw some people with turbans and he was like, you know, “Get out of here you effing terrorists!” This is like, right to the Quad in Yale. Then, those guys and people like, ” F you!” They were actually Sikh Indians.
Aaron: There have been a number of stories of Sikhs being targeted with people assuming that they're Muslims.
Max: This happened on an Ivy League campus. You don't understand the dumb college drunk people could probably do just about anything. They wouldn't — I don't know. They wouldn't think twice. People have problems. I don't know what to say. Let's compare. Last episode, we talked about the news stories before. Let's talk about the new stories after. I have a few. Do you remember the anthrax scare?
Aaron: Yep.
Max: Okay, there was white powder coming in the mail, and you're all going to die. Then, you have the capital sniper which almost seemed like it was related, but it wasn't.
Aaron: It's hard to believe that that was in the same time window.
Max: Almost exactly the same time window where you had some people just picking people off at gas stations in DC. Imagine how scary that would be to go to a gas station. I know I'd be. I would think twice. Then, over the next few years, you had planes going into buildings. There was one plane that crashed into a building on the east side in New York City. It was like a small plane. That was like an accident.
Then, there was another plane that was flying low that — I think that I already moved in there. People were freaking out. People were like, “Don't do that. Don't fly low.” For some reason, that they don't like that. There's all sorts of things for that. As I said long term, this is probably hanging over our year. I started out talking about the capture of Osama bin Laden. I would say this is hanging over our heads in the top of mind probably until that moment, possibly.
Aaron: I mean, there was infamously the “mission accomplished” moment. But I think even when that happened, it was pretty clear that we hadn't really cleared the debt. That didn't make things back to normal.
Max: I'm thinking more like that was Iraq. Also, I'm talking about you're getting up in the morning and watching the news, thinking like, “Okay, there could be a terrorist attack today.” Maybe in the future, there will be one, but it'll take us by surprise again. Okay, I have some things listed here about the perpetrators and their motives. I kind of want to go by this quickly. But, we talked about Osama bin Laden, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Basically, there's a lot of problems with the word terrorists.
It's very hard to define what a terrorist is. If you were to construct a belief system that you'd say, “This is a terrorist belief system”, you'd almost have to find what these guys were saying. They're just like, “We're going to target civilians, and we're going to try to take out as many of them to try to make our point.” If you've listened to them, it's a very muddled point, as probably many of these organizations have. All of his speeches and stuff, it's not like he has one thing he has all these grievances that kind of add up to just, “It's this, and this, and this, and this and this.”
Aaron: They definitely go with the laundry list approach. There may be some valid concerns in there, but they throw everything at the wall.
Max: Right! Exactly! What are some related stories in the aftermath? I don't know if you have any more to say about that. I don't want to dive too deep into it.
Aaron: Let's move on from that because I'm sure there'll be plenty of discussion in other venues of all those particular details.
Max: Actually, my related story is in the aftermath, except for a few of them. A lot of them are positive, believe it or not because they're all about what it was like moving into New York. Before we have that this is actually positive. Planes were grounded that day. Some planes ended up never making it to their destination. But tons of planes had to land. They were kind of on their way from the US to Europe, and they had to land in Newfoundland. This one town in Newfoundland, Canada had to host thousands and thousands of Americans. This plane was grounded in their tiny airfield. There's a musical about that called “Come From Away”, which I found to be very — I didn't see the musical, but I found that fact to be very interesting.
Aaron: There was a lot of people who weren't in New York, but still got caught up in the ripple effect of stuff that day because, like you said, once they realize what was actually happening, they grounded all flights in the continental US.
Max: This is why I still get a slight thought when I'm on a plane. When there's announcement — and maybe this is a problem that I have. But I always feel like there's going to be like things have really gone downhill back on the surface. We're going to have to do something. You know what I mean? Something bad is — I always think, not something's wrong with the plane, but something bad happened outside the plane. I don't know why that is. Maybe that's from this.
Okay, the fires were distinguished December 19. You had some failed terrorist attacks afterwards. December 22, 2001, you had that shoe bomber. That's the reason why we always have to take off our shoes unless you have TSA PreCheck, which I have. Unless you have TSA PreCheck, which I have, so I don't have to take off my shoes which is good. That was followed eight years later. In 2009, with the underwear bomber, and I remember after that they were like, “Oh, really?” But no, we don't have to take off our underwear. But they both failed. They were trying to set off bombs.
Aaron: I don't remember the specific details of the specific incident, but I vaguely recollect that there was some attempt made where they were mixing together a number of liquids, so that's part of why you've got the — what is it — the three-ounce limit on…
Max: You can't bring your coffee in there used to pre-911. I bet you could just walk in with a coffee or something, or whatever. Big Dunkin Donuts? I don't know if Dunkin Donuts had their — I think they did. But I think it's very hard to pull off something quite like this anymore. Especially, you can't do it the same way. Don't have box cutters on planes. Don't allow — people are aware…
Aaron: What’s the other thing?
Max: Just people being aware of it.
Aaron: They didn't have guns. There weren't actually any bombs. It was the novelty of the approach that made it feasible for them to pull that off. We could go on a long time about the effectiveness, or lack thereof of the TSA sure, and what can reliably slip through their system. But I think the bigger change are some of the systemic things, like the fact that cockpit doors are now by regulation, are locked and armored. The protocol for dealing with hijackings is different. In a post Flight 93 world, that the passengers do not have much tolerance for just sitting back and trusting that things are going to work out okay.
Max: Well, if you think about it, they couldn't even pull it off a fourth time and that day because the passengers in Flight 93 fought back. There was a very interesting documentary I saw last year where they treated like the Battle of Flight 93 like the first battle of the war on terror, where American civilians overpowered the terrorists on Flight 93 — are Al-Qaeda in the Flight 93. Very interestingly to put it like a battle in the air among — through the aisles or whatever.
But I actually think the most powerful documentary that I've seen that I have not been able to find again because it's on TV like 10 years ago was when they did 9/11 through home videos, and it was all people on their camcorders from apartment windows or from the streets — seeing it and reacting to it the first time. I think that was the most powerful one I've seen, and I have not been able to find any evidence of that documentary but I know it must exist.
One story that comes out of this is the story of New York City, and the rebuilding of New York City because surprisingly enough, this did not end up being a permanent blow to New York City. I moved downtown. Not far from the World Trade Center in 2006. You were kind of like a pioneer. It was like, “Okay! Crime is down across the city, and now they're turning a lot of these office buildings near Wall Street to residential.” Because in digital worlds, you don't need as many people working near Wall Street. There's a lot of security. If you want security, there's a lot of security down there. Buildings were going back up, and they really redeveloped the downtown really well.
Aaron: Who was part of that move of, or the decrease in demand for office space in that area? Was that also an outgrowth of 9/11? I heard there were a number of folks who had previously been in the towers are in the immediate area who had to relocate in the short term. But did a lot of them not come back, or — ?
Max: I feel like it seems like it was actually more of — this is the story I got. I'm sure you could get like Economists and stuff. But the story I got was, it was actually more of a market change over where in 2006 now, you don't need as many people physically close to Wall Street. You could have them in New Jersey or whatever. In the post internet world — broadband internet — you don't need that. You don't need people right next to the trading floor.
Aaron: I don't know enough about the history of the hedge funds to gauge whether all the ubiquitous Connecticut hedge funds are from a post-9/11 era, or if they were already around prior to that. Because I can imagine that a lot of those folks would have previously been in the city.
Max: But they weren't necessarily hedge funds there. There were a lot of traders, which, it's a little different. Also, people who were there —
Aaron: They used some cross pollination, but —
Max: People that they were supporting the trading floor, and all that — doesn't exist anymore.
Wall Street exists. Like the stock exchange exists, but it's not as many people.
Aaron: Very different beast.
Max: Interestingly enough, there's a building nearby. A very old building that has marks in the side from a terrorist attack that happened on Wall Street in 1920 — killed 33 people, and you could still see the… It would be like if they damaged the World Trade Center, and they just left it. That building is still there. That was by an anarchist — kind of a terrorist from I figured like a European kind of guy in 1930. The reaction to that was very different. That's a very interesting historical thing because it was like they were back to work the next day.
Rebuilding downtown Manhattan. That was something we made progress on. The cleanup ended in May 2002. I think bodies were found years later. There was a little ceremony for it. Later on in 2002, World Trade Center 7 started going up. They decided to build the same building a little higher. That was actually recommended for the Twin Towers — just rebuild the twin towers as was a little higher. There was also one thing going around online where it was like these email lists that you're on where they would give you— they Photoshopped in five Twin Towers, where you're like giving the finger, and it's like, “Come and get it, terrorists!”
Aaron: I remember seeing that one. There was a lot of debate and discussion about what the design for the rebuilt tower should be. That went on for, I feel like for years.
Max: They rebuilt 7 pretty quickly because it's one site across the street. How do I be nice about this? Nobody really cares about World Trade Center 7. It's a nice building. I've been in there. Machine Learning Symposium was in there. When I moved in 2006, they decided to use World Trade Center 7 — newly reopened — to unveil the plans for the World Trade Center site. I was like, “This is cool. I'm going to go to this.” I went to this. I went to a floor of the World Trade Center 7. The whole floor is open. They didn't even have the walls yet with the different offices. You can see the whole floor, and they had their whole plan there.
Aaron: Not that that was the plan designed, just they hadn't finished building it out? Or?
Max: They hadn't put the walls and the dividers. It was like the entire floor was like one giant office. Even if you want big open space, you might want a section for an auditorium, and a section for — These are big buildings. In this design, you had One World Trade Center, which at the time was called the Freedom Tower. We still call the Freedom Tower sometime, that's the big one that went up. But then also World Trade Centers 2, 3, 4, and 5. Not as tall, but they're going to be very tall buildings as well. It's kind of like World Trade Center 7, or maybe even taller between 7 and 1. One World Trade is taller than the Twin Towers were. Then, those other four or five, or whatever, are close.
There were also deconstructing the Deutsche Bank building, which had been damaged too much to be functional. They were still deconstructing that when I was there. There were some fires there from time to time because — I don't know why fires would start, but things were all messed up inside there maybe. It was kind of dangerous to be there when they were demolishing it. I forgot — terms of planes into building. I forgot about there was a plane into an IRS office in 2010. We'll skip that. Let's talk about the rebuilding.
The Time Square template, also in 2010. 2010, two things that year — wasn't successful. World Trade Center, starts getting built in 2006. People are very upset about the delays, it's actually called Pataki’s Pit at one point by the media because the port authority seems to be delaying the rebuilding of it, and that's controlled by the state government. Tacky was the governor at the time. Then, the museum pools opened in 2011, so those were the footprints of the building. Those are now pools of waterfalls going down. It's actually kind of nice because you smell —- you're in New York City, but there you just smell water, like freshwater which is kind of nice.
The names of people. The names of the victims are all around the pools, and people leave like flags there. They'll be a ceremony there in a few days. Then, the museum opens in May of 2014. I was actually in that museum that first couple weeks. It was only families of first responders were allowed in. For some reason, I was there. Somebody got a ticket. I don't know why. Anyway, I was there the first week, and it was like — I think it was three in the morning, so it must have been a situation where you can go at three in the morning if you want. A very powerful museum. I recommend people go there. A lot of stuff about the construction of these buildings, and some of the artifacts that were found. Even when building the new world trade, they found artifacts from things that existed there before the original World World Trade Center.
Then, later that year in 2014, the first tower went up. Then, in 2016, the Oculus opened up, which is right next door, that's the new train station. It's actually pretty nice. Very high end stores in there. There’s an Apple store. There's a Casper mattress. You can go to New Jersey if you want, for some reason. I have actually went to New Jersey a few times. I don't know why, but I was thinking — but I did it. That's sort of when you feel like it's complete.
That site — it came back and was developed quite a bit. It's actually way better than it was. There's actually ongoing development in there because there's still two towers waiting to be built. Tower 2. Now 3 and 4 are already up. A lot of big buildings there. Tower 2 is on its way. Tower 5 is planned. It's still ongoing in development, but really over the next few years, that neighborhood came back in the city. The city was kind of in the middle of a golden age at that point, which sadly has ended in the last few years. But in New York City really felt like the most resilient place in the world after that happened.
Aaron: It certainly bolstered that reputation, that attitude that New Yorkers can handle anything. Perhaps, deservedly so.
Max: Without getting into what's going on now. It really felt like — it really felt good to live down there, and then later on spend time down there, and do things down there, even with the history. Then, you learn the history down there is way more varied, like a lot of American history took place in that general area. You're right, we should have ended with you talking about the resiliency of New York City. I think I would like to end there. This has been a tough episode. I feel like my voice is getting a little bit raspy right now. I don't know about you. But I feel like we should close up.
Aaron: It’s a heavy one. We're wearing ourselves out a little bit. There were a lot of things that needed to be said.
Max: There are things I wanted to say. I think we're about to wrap it up. Is there anything I missed that needs to be said? Are we good?
Aaron: Nothing I can think of. It still feels like it's a little bit difficult to convey how different the world felt afterward.
Max: I remember walking by last year, or the year before being — when the museum first opened, I was like, “This is something that happened recently. Now I'm walking by being like, “No, this is like ancient history now.”
Aaron: We've now been — more of our life has been lived after than before.
Max: That's a scary thought.
Aaron: Like I said previously, for our generation, this was the equivalent of the Kennedy assassination. It's one of those moments that you remember where you were, and everything changed. Maybe another parallel moment to that would be like the moon landing, but that was a celebratory moment.
Max: Maybe Pearl Harbor.
Aaron: If you go back another generation before that.
Max: Alright! I'm going to wrap it up here. I don't know exactly how to wrap this up, but I feel like I've said everything that needs to be said.
Aaron: I guess just remember that it's not all facts and figures, and timelines. That real people lived that experience. It shaped us
Max: If I may say so, I think we did a good job of combining historical facts with personal experience, and I hope that people got a lot of value out of it. Alright, that does it for today. This is a monster two parter. Have a great week, everyone.
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