My 9/11 Story — and beyond

I was at work at the Chase Manhattan Bank, when both of the WTC attacks occurred. On the first one in 1993, I was in the lower-level cafeteria at 1 Chase Manhattan Plaza (1CMP) when I felt the bomb blast. I do not recall there being too much short-term or long-term impact for me personally, as I lived in Staten Island at the time and had no physical connection to or through the World Trade Center (WTC). It is amazing how solid the bedrock of Manhattan Island is–and even though these two sites are so close together geographically, they were practically worlds apart for me. Fast forward eight years later, and my family had moved to New Jersey. In that timeframe, Chase merged with Chemical Bank and then was acquired by JP Morgan, becoming JPMorgan Chase. I was taking NJ Transit into Penn Station, and my wife was switching to the PATH train into the WTC. (She worked downtown at another company and was making her way through the WTC and out the escalators that fateful day, just 45 minutes before the first strike.)

On Tuesday, September 11, 2001, I was at Chase’s 345 Park Avenue offices in midtown, proudly showing off to colleagues the photo of me golfing with boxer Gerry Cooney, from a charity outing in New Jersey the day before. That got interrupted with the news that an airplane had crashed into one of the World Trade Center towers. I went into the large conference room we had on the floor and got the big screen projector connected to the television broadcast system, just in time to see the second plane strike. We were then told to close the office curtains and stay…