September 11, 2001: The World Trade Center Is Destroyed and the Pentagon Is Attacked

 

September 11 has been a bad day many times.

Particularly in Chile: Santiago, always its largest city and its capital, was destroyed by a neighboring tribe on September 11, 1541. And a CIA-backed coup overthrew President Salvador Allende and installed the fascist Augusto Pinochet on September 11, 1973.

September 11, AD 9: The Battle of the Teutoburg Forest ends, in what is now Bramsche, Lower Saxony, in northwestern Germany. The Roman Empire suffers the greatest defeat of its history, and the Rhine River is established as the border between the Empire and the so-called barbarians for the next 400 years.

Each side brought about 22,000 men to the battle. The Romans, under Publius Quinctilius Varus, lost nearly all of theirs. The Germanic tribes, under Arminius (known to some modern people as "Herman the German"), lost about 5,000. Legend has it that, until he died 5 years later, a distraught Emperor Caesar Augustus would wander the halls of his palace, crying out, "Quinctilius Varus, give me back my legions!" Arminius died in AD 21, at around 37 years old, possibly poisoned by an internal competitor.

September 11, 1275: An earthquake occurs in the south of England, causing multiple fatalities and destroying St Michael's Church on Glastonbury Tor.

September 11, 1297: This was another bad day for England, but a good day for Scotland, as William Wallace and Andrew Moray win the Battle of Stirling Bridge, outside Stirling, Scotland.

September 11, 1609: This was a good day in what would become New York: English explorer Henry Hudson and his Dutch crew of the Half Moon land on Manhattan Island, and meet the people living there.

September 11, 1649: Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of England, carries out the Siege of Drogheda, killing over 2,000 people, including the opposing commander, Sir Arthur Aston, who had been loyal to the executed King Charles I. To this day, Cromwell's name is considered a profanity in Ireland.

September 11, 1697: The Battle of Zenta occurs in what is now Senta, Serbia. The Holy League, led by Hungarian troops and Serbia militia, decisively defeat the Ottoman Empire, killing 30,000 troops and losing only 400. The Great Turkish War ended 2 years later, and was the first time the Ottomans ever lost territory.

September 11, 1708: King Charles XII of Sweden realizes he is not going to conquer Moscow, and turns back. This is the turning point in the Great Northern War, and the beginning of the end for Sweden as a first-rate military and diplomatic power.

Marching on Moscow is never a good idea, especially so late in the year. Charles XII was the first national leader to realize this. He would not be the last.

September 11, 1709: The Battle of Malplaquet is fought at Taisnières-sur-Hon in northern France. John Churchill, the Duke of Marlborough and an ancestor of Winston Churchill, led an alliance of Britain, the Dutch Republic and the Holy Roman Empire to a costly victory over France.

The War of the Spanish Succession ended in 1714. Although France achieved its goal of the House of Bourbon holding the Spanish throne, neither France nor Spain would ever be so strong a country again.

September 11, 1714: Barcelona surrenders in the War of the Spanish Succession.

September 11, 1776: General George Washington had just lost the Battle of Long Island in what is now Brooklyn Heights, and was about to lose the Battle of Harlem Heights. A peace conference is held in Staten Island, with the main participants being the British Army commander, General William Howe, and established American diplomat Benjamin Franklin. No progress is made. The independence that Franklin had helped declare 2 months earlier is very precarious.

September 11, 1777: The Battle of Brandywine is one of the worst losses in the history of the U.S. Army, and assures the conquest of the nation's capital at the time, Philadelphia, by Howe, who had previously kicked Washington and his Continental Army out of New York City, Washington and his men have to retreat to nearby Valley Forge, Pennsylvania.

September 11, 1780: The Sugarloaf Massacre is carried out by Loyalists and Natives outside present-day Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.

September 11, 1814: It is America's darkest hour -- darker than on the same day in 2001, because, then, we knew that we had what it took to fight back. We had no such confidence on this day, because our capital of Washington had been burned by the British Army just 18 days before.

On this day, with the British advancing on Baltimore, another British force tries to take Lake Champlain, between the States of New York and Vermont. But an American force led by General Alexander Macomb -- a graduate of New Jersey's Newark Academy (now located in Livingston) -- fights back. The British naval commander, Captain George Downie, is killed.

As a result of this, and knowing that he couldn't supply his forces even if he took the City of Plattsburgh, General George Prevost decides to retreat. It was little more than New York and Vermont militiamen and a few regulars in the U.S. Army, but they won -- and, as their forebears had at nearby Saratoga in 1777, they saved the Hudson Valley, and prevented the British from effectively cutting the young nation in half.

The Battle of Plattsburgh is a prelude to the coming defense of Baltimore. The following day, Major General Robert Ross, the British commander, was killed outside Baltimore at the Battle of North Point. The day after that, the Royal Navy shells Fort McHenry in Baltimore Harbor. The day after that, they give up, and a "Star-Spangled Banner" is raised over the fort. Three months after that, the Treaty of Ghent was signed, ending the War of 1812, and saving America.

Today, a mountain in the nearby Adirondacks is named for Macomb, as are a city in Illinois, and a town and a county in Michigan, near his birthplace of Detroit. He is remembered as The Hero of Plattsburgh.

September 11, 1857: Mormons carry out the Mountain Meadows Massacre, killing 120 people in Mountain Meadows, Utah.

September 11, 1862: The Confederate Army of Northern Virginia has made its 1st invasion of the Union, leading to the Battle of Antietam near Sharpsburg, Maryland. It becomes the deadliest battle ever fought on American soil. The Union win, but General Robert E. Lee and his ANV get away.

September 11, 1881: A rockslide buries parts of the village of Elm, Switzerland, destroying 83 buildings and killing 115 people.

September 11, 1901: President William McKinley is dying from an assassin's bullet in Buffalo, New York, sustained 5 days earlier. He dies in another 5 days, 58 years old. Theodore Roosevelt becomes President.

September 11, 1916: The Quebec Bridge collapses in Quebec City, killing 11.

September 11, 1941: Charles Lindbergh gives an anti-Semitic speech in Des Moines, ruining his reputation.

September 11, 1944: Britain's Royal Air Force bombs Darmstadt, Germany, killing 11,500 people.

September 11, 1948: Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founding father of Pakistan just a year earlier, dies of lungs weakened by cancer and long-term tuberculosis. He was 71.

September 11, 1950: Jan Smuts dies of a heart attack at age 80. Twice Prime Minister of South Africa, he negotiated the Treaty of Vereeniging, and was the only man present at the surrenders of Germany in both World Wars. but in 1948, his party was defeated in a national election, because it wasn't sufficiently committed to apartheid for the voters.

September 11, 1954: Hurricane Edna kills 29 in New England.

September 11, 1961: Hurricane Carla kills 46 in Texas.

September 11, 1968: An Air France crash kills 89 off the coast of Nice.

September 11, 1971: Nikita Khrushchev, ousted as Premier of the Soviet Union 7 years earlier, dies of a heart attack at age 77.

September 11, 1972: A good day in the San Francisco Bay Area: Bay Area Rapid Transit, or BART, goes into service.

September 11, 1974: An Eastern Air Lines crash kills 71 in Charlotte, North Carolina.

September 11, 1985: The Moimenta-Alcafache train crash kills 150 people in Mangualde, making it the worst rail disaster ever in Portugal. On the same day, in America, the Cincinnati Reds beat the San Diego Padres, 2-0 at Riverfront Stadium in Cincinnati. Pete Rose, The Reds' 1st baseman and manager singles in the 1st inning, officially breaking Ty Cobb's career record of 4,191 hits.

A later check of the records would find that Cobb actually had 4,189, meaning Rose had broken the record 2 days earlier, in Chicago.

September 11, 1987: Peter Tosh is robbed, tortured and murdered in his home in Kingston, Jamaica. The reggae singer, who came out of Bob Marley’s Wailers to make his own name, was 42. His killer remains in prison.

Actor Lorne Greene also dies on this day. And CBS Evening News anchor Dan Rather walks off the set in anger just before a remote broadcast from Miami, where Pope John Paul II had begun a rare U.S. tour, when a U.S. Open tennis match was being broadcast into the time scheduled for the newscast. He was upset that the news was being cut into to make room for sports, and discussed it with the sports department.

The match, between Steffi Graf and Lori McNeil, ended at 6:32 PM, earlier than expected, but Rather had disappeared. So over 100 affiliates were forced to broadcast 6 minutes of dead air. The next day, Rather apologized for leaving the anchor desk.

September 11, 1990: A Faucett Boeing 727 disappears in the Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of Cape Race, Newfoundland, Canada, while being flown from Malta to Peru. The plane had 16 people aboard, and has never been found.

September 11, 1991: Continental Express Flight 2574 crashes near Eagle Lake, Texas, killing 14 people.

September 11, 1992: Hurricane Inika strikes Kaua'i, Hawai'i, killing 7 people and causing $3.1 billion in economic damages.

September 11, 1994: Actress Jessica Tandy dies at age 85. Her husband of 53 years, actor Hume Cronyn, lived on until 2003, at 91.

September 11, 1997: Fourteen Estonian soldiers of the Baltic Battalion are drowned or die of hypothermia during a training exercise in the Kurkse Strait.

The date has been bad since 2001 as well:

September 11, 2002: Johnny Unitas, the Baltimore Colts star once considered the greatest quarterback in football history, died of a heart attack at age 69.

September 11, 2003: Anna Lindh, Sweden's Minister for Foreign Affairs, dies a day after being stabbed in the national capital of Stockholm. She was 46. Her assassin remains in prison. And actor John Ritter, famed for his role on Three's Company, dies of an aortic dissection suffered on the set of his new TV show, 8 Simple Rules. He was just short of turning 55.

September 11, 2004: Fred Ebb dies of a heart attack at age 76. With John Kander, he had written the songs for the musicals Cabaret and Chicago, and the 1977 film New York, New York, whose theme song was sung by the film's star, Liza Minnellli, but became better known for its 1979 recording by Frank Sinatra.

September 11, 2009: M*A*S*H creator Larry Gelbart dies of cancer. He was 81.

September 11, 2012: A total of 315 people are killed in two garment factory fires in Pakistan. And the U.S. Embassy is Benghazi, Libya is attacked, resulting in 4 deaths.

September 11, 2014: Bob Crewe dies at age 83, after years of ill health following a fall. He had been a successful songwriter before working with The Four Seasons, wrote most of their early hits with keyboard player Bob Gaudio, and produced most of their hits.

September 11, 2015: A crane collapses onto the Masjid al-Haram mosque in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, killing 111 people and injuring nearly 400 more.

September 11, 2016: Actress and transgender activist Alexis Arquette, of one of America's leading acting families, dies from the effects of AIDS, at age 47.

September 11, 2023: Derna, Libya experiences catastrophic floods after Storm Daniel causes 2 dams to collapse, killing about 6,000 people.

And 2001 wasn't even the first time September 11 was a bad day in New York City. In 1905, the Ninth Avenue Derailment killed 13 people. In 1976, a bomb planted by Croatian terrorist Zvonko Bušić was found at Grand Central Terminal, and an NYPD officer is killed trying to defuse it.

*

September 11, 2001: I woke up that warm, sunny Tuesday morning, unemployed and with no reason to get up early, and, as was always the case at the time, the first thing I did was turn on the radio. It was after 10:30, so it had already all happened.

And the announcer -- a woman whose name I never learned -- on WCBS, 880 on the AM dial, said, "The World Trade Center is gone."

What? What do you mean, "gone"? The World Trade Center is gone? A pair of 110-story skyscrapers -- actually, a seven-building complex -- doesn't just disappear. Gone? What, did aliens come along and beam it up, like on Star Trek?

If it had, there would still, theoretically, have been a chance to get it back. But, no, that was not the case.

Did I hear it right? I had just gotten up. I was still half-asleep. Maybe I misunderstood. So I went to the TV, turned it on, and... nothing. Of course. Every station had its transmitter on 1 World Trade Center. Except one, WCBS, Channel 2. Theirs was, and remains, at the Empire State Building. If you didn't have cable TV, then they were the only ones broadcasting. And all that was left of the World Trade Center was a cloud of black smoke.

The planes:

* American Airlines Flight 11, a Boeing 767, with 92 people on board, took off from Logan International Airport in Boston at 7:59 AM, meant for Los Angeles International Airport, and hit 1 World Trade Center, the North Tower, between the 93rd and 99th floors, at 8:46.

* United Airlines Flight 175, also a Boeing 767, with 65 people on board, took off from Logan at 8:14, also meant for Los Angeles, and hit 2 World Trade Center, the South Tower, between the 77th and 85th floors, at 9:03. That's when it became clear that the first one wasn't just a freak accident, like the B-25 that crashed into the 79th floor of the Empire State Building in 1945, a much smaller plane that did far less damage and killed far fewer people.

* American Airlines Flight 77, a Boeing 757, with 58 people on board, took off from Dulles International Airport in Loudoun County, Virginia, outside Washington, D.C., at 8:20, also meant for Los Angeles, was turned back toward Washington, and hit the west wall of the Pentagon, headquarters of the U.S. Department of Defense, also across the Potomac River from Washington, in Arlington, at 9:37. Victims: 184.

* And United Airlines Flight 93, another Boeing 757, with 44 people on board, took off from Newark International Airport in New Jersey at 8:42, meant for San Francisco International Airport. The passengers, having heard on their cell phones about the other planes, decided to fight back, and stopped the hijackers from reaching their target, which U.S. intelligence later decided was the U.S. Capitol Building in Washington. Instead, at 10:03, the plane crashed into a field in rural Stonycreek Township, Pennsylvania, usually identified by its mailing address of Shanksville, about 65 miles southeast of Pittsburgh, and 130 miles northwest of Washington.

The South Tower collapsed at 9:59 AM. In 2003, in commemoration of the magazine's 50th Anniversary, TV Guide listed "South Tower Falls" as the most memorable televised moment ever, topping the 1st manned Moon landing in 1969. The North Tower followed at 10:29 -- mere seconds before I woke up, and the WCBS announcer said, "The World Trade Center is gone."

There's an overpass about a mile from where I was living at the time, where State Route 18 goes over the New Jersey Turnpike. It's next to the Tower Center complex, the 23-story "minor league twin towers," as I called them, where the bus takes me into Manhattan. From that overpass, on a clear day, you could see the World Trade Center. On 9/11/01, all you could see was a plume of black smoke, going south, seemingly forever.

Three days later, I stood on that overpass again, and it was a plume of white smoke. No, it didn't mean there was a new Pope, or that the Towers would be back.

My father worked at the World Trade Center, as an engineering consultant for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the complex's operator, for six months, before he decided that the commute was too long, and he quit. That was two years before the attack. It was a week before he found out that everyone he worked with got out all right.

Not so lucky were, depending whose figures you believe, and whether you count people who got sick from working the rescue and salvage jobs afterward, about 2,750 people. Eight of them were from my hometown of East Brunswick, New Jersey. As far as I know, I never met any of them.

East Brunswick's memorial

There were 1,747 who, at the time, were living in the State of New York. Of those, 1,147 lived in New York City. There were 694 from New Jersey, including 3 from my parents' hometown of Newark, and 3 from next-door Bloomfield, where they lived when I was born.

There were 92 from Massachusetts, 81 from Virginia, 65 from Connecticut, 50 from Maryland, 49 from California, 30 from Pennsylvania, 11 from the District of Columbia, 10 from New Hampshire, 9 from Illinois, 6 from Texas; 5 each from Florida and Rhode Island; 4 each from Alabama, Georgia and Maine; 3 each from Louisiana, North Carolina and Ohio; 2 each from Colorado, Delaware, Hawaii, Kansas, Michigan, Missouri and Oklahoma; and 1 each from Arizona, Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, Mississippi, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, Tennessee, Utah, Wisconsin, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

There were 13 from Britain, 6 from Germany, 5 from Canada, 3 from Australia, 3 from Japan, 2 from China, and 1 each from Bermuda, El Salvador, Grenada, Ireland, Israel and Sweden.

At first, we didn't know how bad it would be. The front page of the New York Daily News on September 13 suggested 10,000 people had died. It was quickly revised to 5,000, and then, when records were checked to see who was in the Twin Towers and hadn't been found alive, and checking against duplicate entries, down to 3,000, still the worst one-day loss of life on American soil since the American Civil War.

Among the notable people who died as a result of the 9/11 attacks were television producer David Angell, conservative TV legal analyst Barbara Olson, and hockey player-turned-scout Garnet "Ace" Bailey, each of them on board one of the planes intended for Los Angeles. (Bailey was no relation to the old-time hockey star Irvine "Ace" Bailey.) Alice Trillin, a teacher and film producer, and wife of author Calvin Trillin, also died that day, but her death was separate from the attacks.

In 2001, smartphones were few and far between, a lot of us still hadn't really figured out the Internet, and for those of us in the New York Tri-State Area who still didn't have cable TV, Channel 2 was the only station we had left. So we had one channel, and the same damn thing on, for an entire week.

And that's all we watched: Images of the carnage, updates from police and fire department leaders, politicians making statements, pundits speculating about America's response to al-Qaeda and its allies. The parallel was made to the 4 days after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. In my lifetime to that point, the only comparable event had been the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1986.

But distractions were few. No regular TV programming. Certainly, no sports, for an entire week, before the various leagues started up again.

Rudy Giuliani, Mayor of New York, put his municipal counter-terrorism center in 7 World Trade Center. They had to evacuate it. He and the others inside nearly died when the North Tower collapsed. He bounced back from this blunder to represent the City and its recovery before the public, and the editors of Time magazine named him their Person of the Year, a distinction (not an award) it gives to the person they think most affected the news during the calendar year, ahead of President George W. Bush -- and also ahead of Osama bin Laden, who approved and ordered the attacks.

For reasons that aren't worth getting into here, it took until May 1, 2011 for the victims to be avenged. The official memorial at the site was opened on September 11, 2011, the 10th Anniversary of the attacks. And the new One World Trade Center opened on November 3, 2014, with a height purposely set to match the year of America's independence: 1,776 feet.

A temporary memorial at the Pentagon, for the lives lost there, was dedicated on September 12, 2002. A permanent memorial was dedicated on September 11, 2008. The Flight 93 National Memorial was dedicated at the Pennsylvania field on September 10, 2011, the day before the 10th Anniversary. The names of the victims at these sites are also inscribed at the main memorial in Manhattan.

For those of us too young to remember the JFK assassination -- and maybe for those of us who are old enough -- 9/11 remains the most shocking event of our lifetimes. It shouldn't be.

After all, a foreign foe killed 3,000 of us, and our government said it would do whatever it took. And it lied. But the next government did what it took.

*

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 happened in the morning, so there was time to decide to take what was, then as now, the obvious step of postponing most professional sports indefinitely.

Minor League Baseball was already in its Playoffs, and canceled the rest of them. This enabled the Brooklyn Cyclones, a 1st-year farm team of the Mets, to be declared Co-Champions of the Class A New York-Penn League, along with the other team in the Final, the Pennsylvania-based Williamsport Crosscutters. They won their 1st full Pennant in 2019.

Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig announced that games would resume the following week, on Monday, September 17.

The games that were scheduled for Tuesday, September 11 through Sunday, September 16 were moved to the week after the end of the regular season, thus pushing the postseason back a week, resulting in the 1st-ever November games that counted in MLB.

These are the games that were supposed to be played on September 11, and got pushed back to Monday, October 1:

* The New York Yankees beat the Chicago White Sox, 8-1 at the old Yankee Stadium in The Bronx.

* The New York Mets lost to the Pittsburgh Pirates, 5-1 at Shea Stadium in Queens.

* The Toronto Blue Jays beat the Baltimore Orioles, 1-0 at Oriole Park at Camden Yards in Baltimore.

* The Tampa Bay Devil Rays beat the Boston Red Sox, 10-3 at Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg. (The Tampa Bay team is now named simply the Rays.

These are the games that were supposed to be played on September 11 that got pushed back to Tuesday, October 2:

* The Philadelphia Phillies beat the Atlanta Braves, 3-1 at Turner Field in Atlanta.

* The Florida Marlins beat the Montreal Expos, 4-3 at what was then named Pro Player Stadium in Miami Gardens. (The Expos are now the Washington Nationals, the Marlins are the Miami Marlins, they play in Marlins Park, and Pro Player Stadium is now named Hard Rock Stadium.)

* The Minnesota Twins beat the Detroit Tigers, 5-4 at Comerica Park in Detroit.

* The Cincinnati Reds beat the Chicago Cubs, 5-4 at Wrigley Field in Chicago.

* The St. Louis Cardinals beat the Milwaukee Brewers, 5-1 at Miller Park in Milwaukee.

* The Kansas City Royals beat the Cleveland Indians, 5-1 at Kauffman Stadium in Kansas City.

* The San Francisco Giants beat the Houston Astros, 4-1 at Minute Maid Park (now Daikin Park) in Houston.

* The Arizona Diamondbacks beat the Colorado Rockies, 10-1 at Bank One Ballpark in Phoenix. (Now named Chase Field.)

* The Los Angeles Dodgers beat the San Diego Padres, 5-2 at what was then named Qualcomm Stadium in San Diego. (It's now SDCCU Stadium, and the Padres now play at Petco Park.)

* The Seattle Mariners beat the team then known as the Anaheim Angels, 14-5 at Edison International Field. (The team is now known as the Los Angeles Angels, and their ballpark as Angel Stadium.)

* And the Oakland Athletics beat the Texas Rangers, 9-4 at the Oakland Coliseum.

Not in the country affected by the attacks, UEFA, the Union of European Football Associations, decided that the day's Champions League matches would go ahead as scheduled, in spite of some of the teams objecting:

* Arsenal lost to Real Mallorca, 1-0 at Estadio Son Moix on Mallorca, one of the Balearic Islands off the coast of Spain.

* Liverpool and Boavista of Portugal played to a draw, 1-1 at Anfield in Liverpool.

* FC Nantes beat PSV Eindhoven of the Netherlands, 4-1 at Stade de la Beaujoire in Nantes, France.

* Panathinaikos of Athens, Greece beat Schalke 04, 2-0 at Parkstadion in Gelsenkirchen, Germany.

* Real Madrid beat AS Roma, 2-1 at the Stadio Olimpico in Rome.

* Dynamo Kyiv and Borussia Dortmund of Germany played to a draw, 2-2 at Olimpiyskiy Natsionalnyi Sportovyi Kompleks in Kyiv, Ukraine.

* Lokomotiv Moscow and Anderlecht of Belgium played to a draw, 1-1 at the Central Dynamo Stadium of Moscow.

* And Galatasaray beat SS Lazio of Rome, 1-0 at Al Sami Yen Stadium in Istanbul, Turkey.

By September 11, 2022, we can determine that there are already two famous people who were born on September 11, 2001: Nicholas Robertson, a left wing for the NHL's Toronto Maple Leafs; and actress Mackenzie Aladjem.