I posted this a couple of months ago and the mods deleted it. Not sure why. Maybe they’ll let it stay up this time. I’ve also added a bit at the end.

In 2001, I was living in Stuyvesant Square.

The night before 9/11, I was working late at home, doing some freelance graphic design for Microsoft. I was part of a team that was helping to develop what would become one of the earliest smart watches, known as Microsoft SPOT. The watch was still a couple of years from release and 9/11 was the date of a big pitch to Bill Gates to secure more funding for the project. I was in charge of creating everything from watch faces to watch designs and mocking up advertising. The funding pitch included a long elaborate PowerPoint presentation.

Because I was in NYC and Microsoft was in Seattle, their version of a late night and mine were quite different. After dozens of emails, tweaks, and uploads back-and-forth, we managed to finalize the PowerPoint presentation at around 4:30AM EST.

A few hours later, the first plane would hit the World Trade Center. I slept right through it. I slept through the second plane as well. I slept through the collapses. I’m not even sure why I woke up but it was around 11 AM. My Samsung flip phone was blinking off the hook. I turned on NY1.  The towers were gone.

I didn’t know what to do with myself. I paced my apartment for a while.  I lived pretty near the 13th Precinct and decided that the thing to do was to bring the boys in blue a couple of pizzas.  I don’t know why I thought that would be a good idea. I guess that’s what I’d want someone to do for me. So I threw on some clothes and went down to my local pizzeria. Got the last two pies they were making for the day. They had been inundated with people on foot, walking up from downtown, getting slices as they made their way up 1st Ave, covered in white dust.

I walked the pizzas over to the 13th, along with a six pack of Poland Spring. I didn’t know what else to do. It was practically pointless as two pizzas was enough to feed maybe 3 of the dozens of cops swarming in and out of there that day. As I entered the precinct, it was obvious tensions were high. Two or three cops almost immediately surrounded me asking what I wanted. I pushed the pizzas toward them. I said I’m just a neighbor. They took the boxes. There might’ve been a thanks muttered. I walked out and went back home.

I spent the next couple months feeling like a lot of us did, kind of helpless and lost, and smelling the haunting aroma of Ground Zero.

Sometime in October or November, the NYT started publishing photos and bios of all the victims.

I started downloading the photos.

In my spare time, I started putting them together in an image. This was the result. I was fortunate not to know any of the victims personally. But I knew one through a wristwatch forum. I put him at the very top of the radio tower. His name was David Graifman. He was a VP at Keefe, Bruyette & Woods on the 89th floor of 2 WTC.

Making this collage was cathartic for me, but it was also deeply devastating because almost 3 times the number of people in this image were victims in the World Trade Center that day.

Addendum: After 25 years, it just occurred to me that if it weren’t for 9/11, I wouldn’t have met my now wife, in 2005. 

Michael J. Armstrong was an employee at Cantor Fitzgerald in tower one. I never knew him. But in 2002, his Fordham friends opened a pub in his name, M.J. Armstrong’s, on 19th and 1st in Manhattan. It was the first business to be named after a 9/11 victim. The pub was a block from my apartment. It instantly became my local. Over the next couple of years, I was there for dinner or a pint, or both, most nights. I became friends with the and the regulars.

Not sure when, but I noticed a “new” regular at Armstrong’s, somewhere around 2003-4. She seemed oddly familiar to me. It turned out we went to middle school together in the 1980s. We lived a block apart in Manhattan. We became friends.

One night in 2005, she invited me to a work party. At the party, she introduced me to a coworker of hers, a guy who was also there with a female friend. She and I hit it off and ended up leaving the party together. I took her to Armstrong’s. Everyone there was kind to her and we had a great time. 

We married in September, 2011. Thanks to Mike Armstrong.

The pub closed in 2009 or so. I’m still friends with people who worked there.

A small tribute.