Headlines from 9/11

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Twenty three years ago Dan Nicholls, a London based trader, printed out a page of headlines from the Bloomberg terminal.

He put it in his desk where it remained for decades.

Faded and rumpled, it’s incredibly evocative.

Three quarters of the way down the page, at precisely 3 p.m. London time, there is a headline that marks the event that prompted Dan to print it out:

*WORLD TRADE CENTER TOWER COLLAPSES

That news is preceded and followed by related stories covering everything from stocks and the dollar plunging to the Sears Tower in Chicago being evacuated.

Everyone who lived through 9/11 remembers where they were.

I was the New York Bureau Chief for Bloomberg News.

It was a Tuesday. The sky was blue. The air was crisp. I was at the office, which at the time was located at 499 Park Avenue.

The first plane hit the North Tower at 8:46 a.m.

We saw it on CNN. There wasn’t anyone assigned to the terrorism beat so I stood behind stock market editor Phil Serafino as he sent headlines. Reporter Josh Hamilton filed the first article.

As that initial story shows, we didn’t yet understand the scope of what was happening.

When the second plane hit, I asked for volunteers to head downtown to report on the disaster. Tom Cahill raised his hand. Mike McKee was already downtown headed to a conference for economists.

When the towers collapsed, everyone’s cell phone blacked out.

We couldn’t reach Mike or Tom for hours.

The subways and buses stopped running. People fled the city and by the afternoon there were virtually no cars or taxis in the streets.

Everyone who worked downtown had to walk home.

Looking out the window onto Park Avenue you could see thousands of people streaming north. The mass of people marching uptown covered the entire avenue and sidewalks. Most walked silently.

Mike McKee made his way back to the office on foot. He was covered in dust, but otherwise unscathed. I was relieved when Tom Cahill showed up later.

That day changed the world and everyone who experienced it.

Two decades later it’s getting harder to remember the small details, like how we had to shut our apartment windows from the dust that blanketed the city.

Bloomberg removes headlines after a few days so the uppercase announcement of the tower collapsing that Dan Nicholls printed out is no longer online.

It probably exists only on the piece of paper he stuffed in a drawer.

In many ways the tragedy seems like a long time ago.

But once a year it seems like yesterday.

BRIEF OBSERVATIONS

ADHD: I’m old enough to remember when ADHD was dismissed by many; It’s good to see it being taken seriously now.

LANCE ARMSTRONG: The insanity of the popularity of the Live Strong wrist bracelets promoted by Lance Armstrong is hard to believe today.

KAYAK POLO: There is a group of people who play kayak polo in the evenings in the Hudson River. It’s a magical thing.

PARK AVENUE: We think of our surroundings as established, fixed. But often they have been changed, sometimes radically, and they could be changed again.

SOCIAL MEDIA: In the past two years I’ve re-built my professional network, largely by connecting people on social media. Marty was one of them.