Former students at an elementary school blocks away from the twin towers detail their memories of 9/11 and how it changed their lives.
Former students at an elementary school blocks away from the twin towers detail their memories of Sept. 11, 2001, and how it changed their lives.About four blocks north of the former site of the twin towers sits Public School 89, a brick building with a playground that’s big and breezy and protected despite being nestled next to one of Manhattan’s only highways. On Sept. 11, 2001, dozens of kids between pre-K and fifth grade at PS 89 witnessed the terror attacks from their school’s own windows.
My teacher asked us to move away from the window, and then my next memory is my mom, who had just dropped me and my brother off and was still in the playground when the attacks happened, coming up to my classroom to get me. We ran to my parents’ restaurant, Sosa Borella, on Greenwich Street, just a little north, so we could gather ourselves. I remember a man with a mask and white ashes on his face sitting on a barstool talking about how he was able to get out of one of the towers and found his way to the restaurant. My parents offered him water and food. It was a surreal moment, this restaurant packed with so many strangers not knowing what was going on.
Truthfully, it’s a little uncomfortable for me to talk about 9/11. My family witnessed that day from a unique perspective, but it was such a collective experience. It impacted people in so many different ways. I was so young, but there’s a part of me that wants to own the fact that I was there and I saw what I saw and I remember what I remember.
We lived in a very tall building right on the corner on the 24th floor, so I thought that we needed to get the heck out of the neighborhood. I went right back upstairs, and the kids were all sitting in the middle of the room. I just quietly and softly said, “Hey, I need to pick up Anabel.” My biggest impression was the faces of the teachers. There was a lot of fear.
We ended up hanging out at the restaurant, and it was a tough day. My restaurant became, at that moment, a little bit of a hub. There were people who showed up completely covered in white coming from the trade center. The cell phone towers were dead. People asked if they could use our landline, drink water. The stories you don’t hear about are the people who were on the streets.
Anabel Sosa and her classmates at a party in Rockefeller Park during spring 2002 after PS 89 reopened. We casually walked home along the water, probably a football field or two away from the towers. When the first tower fell, it just started crashing, and everyone looked up, and my dad was frozen watching it fall. Everything was covered in smoke, papers, random stuff flying everywhere. Everything was black, and you could only really make out the lights. Boats were going around, and I remember there being some kind of light, and I was on my dad’s shoulders.
We lived in New Jersey for a little bit over a year. I went to school there. Even more damaging from an emotional perspective was leaving the neighborhood, not being able to go back home because it was destroyed and having to be in a new place with brand new people. I didn’t really want to be friends with anybody there. These planes fly into my neighborhood and uproot my whole life — it was a bad way to move.
There are defining parts about the neighborhood you live in, and for us, in Battery Park City, that symbol was the trade towers. It was an event that struck everyone deeply, even as a kid, because we could recognize the seriousness of the loss of the towers and what that meant. We were just really close to it.
We started walking uptown since my mom had friends in the East Village. I remember her pulling me along and telling me to walk really quickly. I hadn’t had experiences with my mom until that point where I saw her with an intense focus and stress. Sophia Williams and her mom, Lee, in Battery Park City in the early 2000s.
It was impossible to drive out of New York City for a while after the crash. The next day or two after that, we were finally allowed to find a way out of the city and ended up going to my grandparents’. I didn’t return for kindergarten at PS 89. I enrolled in a small school in New Jersey. I ran back outside in front of the school, and I looked up at both towers, and I saw everything. It’s like you can’t believe what you’re seeing, but yes, that is what you’re seeing: People jumping out. It was like Raggedy Andy dolls. They were tumbling down over in the sky with their ties flapping. You saw it again and again, and you realize that’s what it was.
I looked down the street and saw the other one burning. I picked up Sophie, we were looking out there, and it collapsed, pancaked down. All the people in the street start crying, screaming. I had my daughter in my arms, and we just walked to the East Village to our friends’. It was 1:30 p.m. by the time I got my parents on the phone. My father had been sitting by the phone for five hours and he was just crying.
I brought Sophia back once after I thought it was a little bit better, and then she started coughing. I was like, that’s it, forget it. The fire also was out my window until February. You looked out there, and there was a pile on fire for months. That perspective, with her running up the West Side Highway and picking me up, meant I was looking downtown and seeing the fire and smoke coming off the buildings and then watching it collapse. It’s crazy that it’s 20 years later, and we still have such intense emotions attached to it.
In recent years, my family would walk past the site out of necessity, and people, to make their own living, would push in front of you photos of the attacks. That was always very triggering, to have moved back downtown and still not be able to get away from the horror of it. We didn’t have any TVs in the school, so we didn’t know what was going on. The only thing we knew was for at least an hour, there was a cacophony of ambulances, emergency vehicles just streaming down West Street. We decided to move the kids away from any windows and glass because we didn’t know what was coming, if there were airplane attacks, if there was going to be fire. We wanted to make sure that when — not if — we had to evacuate, we could gather everyone really fast and get out.
We had close to 75 kindergarteners through fifth graders. We told them there was a big accident and a fire, and we had to leave our building for all of us to be safe. As we left, I made sure that every single child left with us was holding an adult’s hand heading up the highway. I couldn’t lose a kid. I wanted to make sure the kids felt safe. Back then, West Street was under construction so there were mounds of dirt and sand and detours.
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