The Day Everything Changed

September 11, 2001, shattered my assumptions about permanent personal freedom. I assumed my freedom. Never for one moment did I think that it could be taken from me. But all that changed on one day.

Any lover of freedom would have been tarred the same way I was, and many have been. I am but a proxy in this terrible, long war. What has happened to me is what happens, in small and large ways, to every American who stands for freedom.

My Journey

I was the quintessential New York City girl. My career was everything. Every day was new, exciting, different. I loved art, music and fashion. I loved dancing in my favorite clubs. I loved my life. I loved my freedom. I never thought it could be threatened. I pursued life with a passion—nothing stopped me.

But this stopped me. 9/11 stopped me cold. Nothing was ever the same.

I was the associate publisher of the New York Observer, and before that the Director of Agency Relations at the New York Daily News. But I had never been  political. When it came to politics, my generation of women was taught to catch and release, mostly, about abortion rights.

My overarching sense of life was my deep, abiding love of America. America is not the only good thing in the world, but it is the best thing in the world. I was wildly proud of being an American. America and American, at that time in history, were Jews as free to be outwardly Jewish and proud. No country was better to its Jews.

I didn’t grow up like David Horowitz, the famous left-wing activist who later turned conservative. Horowitz’s parents were members of the Communist Party until Horowitz was 17, when they left the party upon learning of Stalin’s atrocities. They raised Horowitz to be a left-wing activist. By contrast, my home wasn’t dedicated to any particular ideology or cause. I had a very normal upbringing. I grew up on the South Shore of Long Island. My parents were passive Republicans. My father was always a Republican and voted the straight Republican ticket. My mother was a Democrat before she met my father, but said she soon realized the Democrats were all about government controls and socialism. She was a great lover of individual freedom and capitalism. Right philosophy, wrong party.

It’s funny. I remember being very young in the back seat of the car listening to my parents discuss current events and other things I didn’t understand, when my father said, “Nothing is forever.”

“Not even America?” my mother asked.

“Not even America,” he said.

I lived in a post-historical mindset. The good guys had defeated the forces of evil in World War II, and since then, the good cop had been on the beat. What could possibly go wrong?

I assumed my freedom, for one moment, though it could be taken from me. I had always assumed my freedom. Never questioned its permanence or invulnerability. How wrong I was.

I grew up as one of four girls. Two of my sisters are doctors. Nothing stopped us. Ever. We could do anything and be anything we wanted. One only had to have the will and the drive. And I did. I pursued life with a vengeance. It was a wonderful time to be alive, an even more wonderful time to grow up.

It never occurred to me that growing up in late 20th century America was like hitting the mega millions lottery in the historical game of life. It was a golden era—fun, free, phenomenal. The long coup by the left was still bubbling, not altogether impotent, but certainly not overwhelming, let alone crushing.

America had her morality of individual rights very much intact. The country not nearly as divided and polarized as it is today. For women in my generation, the Equal Rights Amendment that feminists were shrieking about seemed absurd and redundant. Why pass legislation for something we already had?

Politics was not a priority for my generation. Growing up in the seventies, politics wasn’t top of mind. No one cared. We were out of Vietnam. And once Nixon was forced out, everyone left the stadium. The big show was over. America was America, land of the free, home of the brave, and whatever it was, we would work out the problem. We were “going to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony” with a Coke and a smile. It wasn’t until 1979, when Iran attacked our embassy and took our people hostage, that we began to awaken. That was a defining moment for many of us. That terrible, awful news. Then President Carter’s stumbling ineptitude and indecisiveness. In the lead-up to the hostage crisis, Carter backed the Ayatollahs. He helped oust our great friend the Shah. This was the poison fruit of his policy. And the story wouldn’t end. Every night at the dinner table, every night on the evening news, there was Frank Reynolds and Walter Cronkite’s daily dirge: day 100, day 200, on and on.

Americans were gobsmacked, ashamed and riveted. The ABC News Hour, Nightline, had its beginnings in 1979 just four days after the start of the Iran Hostage Crisis. At that time, the show was called The Iran Crisis-America Held Hostage: Day “xxx” where xxx represented each day that Iranians held our people hostage. The horror of all this and the impotent President made politics wildly relevant for an uninvolved, cynical generation. The bankrupt and bloody policies of the Democrats heralded the age of Reagan.

Through it all, I assumed the permanence of my freedom.

But all that changed on one day, in one moment.

On a beautiful, bright blue sunny morning, a perfect day in mid-September, I went about my usual routine of getting my gym stuff together to head out for my usual killer three-hour workout with my trainer, an ex-Special Forces Marine.

My phone rang. My husband told me to turn on the television. I clicked on my remote—and nothing was ever the same.

The World Trade Center was burning.

The World Trade Center was a city all its own. It had its own zip code, 10048. It was populated by 50,000 people at the height of the day, and 200,000 more people visited it every day. It was iconic for New Yorkers, Americans, and on a personal level, for me. I had my first important breakfast meeting there with the then president and publisher of the New York Daily News, Jim Hoge. I was a babe in arms in the newspaper world. What a thrill.

The building was an architectural marvel. It replaced the Empire State Building as the tallest building in the world, and did so with a design that was not just innovative, but revolutionary: it was designed so that columns and walls were not needed for structural purposes, giving tenants open spaces to work with. This had never been done before on this scale. The Twin Towers were the centerpiece of a complex that included four other buildings. Construction began in 1968 and was complete enough for the first tenants to move in in 1970; construction was fully completed in 1973. More innovative techniques were used to protect the structure from fire and even from a passenger plane flying into it, which everyone envisaged as an accident, not a terror attack. (When the planes hit on September 11, however, they caused far more devastation than the architects had ever imagined possible.)

Even its elevator system was designed to maximize efficiency and keep the space used to a minimum. The Twin Towers were full of architectural innovations in keeping with the very idea of a World Trade Center, a concept conceived when the United States was at the apex of its economic power and cultural influence.

Even its elevator system was designed to maximize efficiency and keep the space used to a minimum. The Twin Towers were full of architectural innovations in keeping with the very idea of a World Trade Center, a concept conceived when the United States was at the apex of its economic power and cultural influence.

There are countless, iconic film shots where the Twin Towers play center stage, they were so cinema. Watching those movies today, it’s always a ghostly, haunting experience to see the towers—at least for me. These scenes represented life in a New York, and an America, that was gone forever after September 11.

Looking out the passenger window of a 747, they were more than buildings. They were home. Flying into La Guardia Airport was a particular thrill. You could look out of the window and see those impeccable, utilitarian but elegant, towers proudly and loudly standing tall—like the city that loved them.

When they were attacked, I stood in front of my TV, paralyzed. And when the Towers came down in a blinding cloud of flesh, bone, paper, steel—the shreds of life—I wept for the people in the building. I wept for their families. I wept for my city. I wept for my country. I wept because we were at war, and unlike, say, Pearl Harbor, I didn’t know who we were at war with. I mourned for an old life, my life, which was over, dead. It had become history, a memory on that morning. I knew my old life was over when those towers came down.

War came to America.

The horror and death was on a scale that was unimaginable in America. People, who just hours earlier, had their morning joe, kissed their wives or husbands, took their children to school, maybe grabbed a McMuffin and hurried into the city to get to their desks, were faced with the most shocking, horrific, imminent death. Men and women waving shirts or jackets stood on the gashed edge of a gaping wound at the top floors of the towers. No one could get to them. No one could help them. The heat from the flames of the airplane turned into a fireball that left people with no choice. Burn to death or jump. Hundreds jumped to their deaths.

Eyewitnesses talked of a couple who held hands as they fell.

One woman, in a final act of modesty, appeared to be holding down her skirt. Others tried to make parachutes out of curtains or tablecloths, only to have them wrenched from their grip by the force of their descent.

The fall was said to take about ten seconds. If someone fell head down with their body straight, as if in a dive, it could be 200mph. When they hit the pavement, their bodies were not so much broken as obliterated.

The sound of the bodies hitting the pavement was deafening. I did not hear them at the time—but in the beginning, in the news reports, before all the news regarding the jumpers were censored and scrubbed, I heard the sound then. Years later, when I was editing my Ground Zero Mosque movie, I included that footage in the film, and that sound is horrifying.

I thought about John Florio, that big brave firefighter who worked out at my gym. He would come in every morning with a tiny infant and leave her in the windowed childcare center. I wondered if he had rushed to Manhattan when he heard about the attack, to help out.

John Florio had, and he had died there.

As had so many. The images shook me to the core of my being: the unimaginable destruction, the office workers jumping out of the building, preferring a quick death to a slow and agonizing one; the interviews with survivors describing the sound of the bodies of the jumpers as they hit the ground. I thought of the World Trade Center working girls, having ridden the subway to work that morning like so many others, and just arriving at the office a few minutes before the first plane struck and the world was changed forever.

Who had done this? The people who died that day weren’t our soldiers. They were regular folks—parents and brothers and sisters and children. And then I realized in this war, they were our soldiers, they were our fighters. And so was I. And so are you.

Who had attacked my country? I felt guilty that I didn’t know the answer to the question: who had done this? Then when I found out, I felt guilty that I didn’t know who this enemy really was, what they stood for, and why they wanted to destroy my country.

My journey began.

What 9/11 was like for veteran Post police reporter: ‘Nothing could prepare me’

By Larry Celona, NY Post, Sep. 11, 2026, 5:30 a.m. ET

Sept. 11, 2001, started out like any other Tuesday morning.

I was getting ready for my job as a police reporter for The Post, when I saw on TV that a plane had hit the World Trade Center.

By the time I got to Manhattan, the buildings had already fallen.

When I got to Church Street, it looked like a scene from a movie where planets collided and nothing was left.

The only problem was there was no director yelling “cut!” This was real.

On my right, dozens of ambulances were lined up with their doors open, waiting for the injured who never came.

Coffee carts were sitting empty with donuts and bagels covered in ash. I thought, just yesterday I was in Century 21, now its windows were broken and it was badly damaged.

Streets were buried beneath dust, twisted steel and concrete. Some piles were over 50-feet high.

Smoke hung over the ruins creating a cloud that covered as far as I could see – which wasn’t far.

Emergency responders carrying a person on a stretcher through debris-filled streets at the World Trade Center site.

The acrid smell was nauseating. I was covered in dust from head-to-toe.

As I walked around, I stepped over body parts and saw a wheel from one of the planes.

I had covered hundreds of crime scenes all over the city, reported on serial killers and talked to murderers in jail. I remembered when 87 bodies were laid out in a gas station on Southern Boulevard in The Bronx after the Happy Land fire.

I remembered 8 years earlier, I stood on these same streets while covering the 1993 World Trade Center bombing — but even that was nothing like what I was now witnessing.

A couple hours earlier, it was a quiet morning and now the world had changed forever.

As news of the plane strikes unfolded, I had called a friend I grew up with, who worked in the NYPD intelligence division, and he said, “They think it might be a terrorist attack.” It was the first time I heard that phrase — which I’ve heard thousands of times since.

Just then, my editor called, yelling hysterically that the city was under attack.

When I told her police were looking at a possible terrorist attack she asked, “Are you sure?” I told her the cops are treating this as a terrorist attack and everybody is being called in.

Firefighters search through the debris of the World Trade Center after the 9/11 attacks.
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Newly found photos of the aftermath of the World Trade Center attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, are pictured on Monday, September 5, 2011.
Matthew McDermott for NY Post
“Call me as soon as you get more,” she said.

I kept making phone calls — then the South Tower fell as millions watched on live TV.

The city was in emergency mode, closing off highways and access into Manhattan except for emergency responders.

I was able to get a ride with Brooklyn North Police Benevolent Association trustee John Giangrasso and we drove to Ground Zero.

The mayor, police and fire brass and the feds were trying to figure out who was responsible and how they could rescue the thousands of missing people who were under the tons of rubble from the collapsed Twin Towers.

Rumors were flying that hundreds of cops and firemen were dead, along with thousands of civilians.

During the afternoon, I got a call from police officer Kathy Vigiano asking if I heard anything about her husband, Det. Joseph Vigiano. They were friends I’d met in the 75 precinct, back when I covered the area’s record number of murders in 1993.

I told her that I hadn’t heard anything about him and she headed to Manhattan to look for him as she couldn’t get any answers.
I paused and had a funny feeling in my stomach. What if the rumors were true about the dead police officers and firemen?

I knew Joe well, and I knew if he got to the towers, he would’ve run to the roof and made sure everybody got out — unless the unthinkable happened and he was in the building when it fell.

I now started to think about the dozens of cops and firemen who worked in downtown Manhattan that I knew personally from my years as a reporter.

As I was calling in notes to the newsroom, I kept thinking back to Joe — and the other cops and firemen that probably were buried a few feet from where I stood.

Eventually, we went over to police headquarters where some of the families who couldn’t get a hold of their loved ones had gathered.

I saw Kathy, and then later that night, I saw a list of 23 names of cops that were missing.

We soon learned Joe was among the heroes who had been killed in the line of duty.

In the days after, I kept going back to police HQ and speaking with the families of the missing cops.

Now, I was sadly making new friends. I was meeting wives and husbands, mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters all waiting for a miracle – that never came.

I saw the constant pain as the days blurred into each other.

Continued….