In Honor of September 11... a Guest Post!

Unless you've been in solitary confinement for the last three months, you're well aware that today marks the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center. In honor of remembrance of that day, I'm turning over this forum to my husband, Matti (or Matt, as those of you in the US know him), who was actually in Manhattan on that fateful day.

Although there are so many devastating memories of that day, there are probably equally many or more stories of survival and hope. As these two words have been key in my life over the last few months, I'm trying to focus on those when recalling that day. So today I'm sharing Matt(i)'s account of 9/11 and being thankful that he was far enough uptown to be out of harm's way, or we might never have met!

From Matti:

"It has been ten years since 9/11. By chance, I was on Manhattan on that day. Much has happened in my life since. But clearly the consequences of those attacks are still everywhere to be seen, and I often think back to that day -- even more so near the anniversary. I wanted to write down the following mostly for myself, having noticed I was starting to forget some details.

In 2001, I was a doctoral candidate at Harvard Business School (HBS). On the morning of September 11, I had a meeting with Noel Capon at Columbia University in New York to discuss my dissertation research on global account management.

I flew in from Boston the previous day and spent the night at the Yale Club, next to Grand Central Station. After breakfast on the 11th, I headed west towards Madison Avenue to catch a cab. I remember being annoyed at having to walk around a group of people blocking the sidewalk. They were watching a TV in a store window. For some reason I thought they were watching a tennis game. Perhaps it was a sports store, or maybe it was because the U.S. Open had just been held.

Getting to Madison Ave, I realized people were looking to the south and saw the plume of smoke rising in the air from lower Manhattan. Light brown in color, it did not look at all ominous to me. I figured it was a fire of some kind and hailed a cab to head towards Columbia University.

The cab driver immediately filled me in that the WTC twin towers had been hit by airplanes. That was big news. I think I may have asked whether it might be “just” an accident. The drive north was slow -- almost everyone seemed headed the same way. We had the radio on, and, during the drive, heard that the first tower collapsed. The news became even bigger.

Once I got to Columbia Business School, it turned out that Noel was not going to be coming in. The bridges into Manhattan had been closed before he got on the island. Luckily, I happened to bump into Sid Balachandran, an old friend from HBS (we used to close down doctoral parties together). He kindly let me take refuge in his office, and we tried to figure out what this all meant. It was hard to understand the magnitude of the events happening nearby.

Calls started coming in to Sid from relatives, making sure he was OK. Sid calmed each caller down by telling them he was miles away from the World Trade Center and that there was no worry at all. Although I had let people at Harvard know that I was ok, I didn't think it was necessary to bother my parents or other relatives to let them know my whereabouts, as they did not even know I was in NYC. Surely they would not worry, thinking that I was two hundred miles away in Boston. This was a mistake, as it turned out later, because an extended-family-wide search network had been set up by the time I contacted my folks a couple of days later...

After a while, I got restless and wandered around the business school a bit. TVs were on everywhere, with everyone following the news. When I was in the main lobby, suddenly there was the sound of jet engines in the sky. Everyone stopped what they were doing and looked at the ceiling or out of windows somewhat fearfully. It turned out that it was a fighter jet, coming to secure the airspace, flying low. Eventually, I left the building (Uris Hall) but then realized I could not get back in anymore. By this point, school IDs were being checked at all doors. They were being checked on the gates to the university campus as well, but I had no other business there anyhow so I left the campus.

I made a couple of attempts to call a friend with whom I had had drinks the night before. She worked for Goldman Sachs and did not pick up. I was worried, but I later learned that they were OK. They had all been evacuated and were still in a basement somewhere when I called. The cell phone network was also overloaded so most of my calls probably never went through in the first place.

My scheduled flight later that day was, of course, grounded. At this point, there was no traffic in or out of Manhattan. I needed to find a place to sleep for the following night. Unfortunately, like me, a lot of people were stuck on Manhattan so I could not find anything at a hotel. The Yale Club and Harvard Club were fully booked, too.

Eventually, I got the Harvard travel agency to look for something, and they found me a spot. This must have been positively the last bed left on Manhattan. It was in a run-down building on the Upper West Side, near Columbia University in fact. The reception booth (not desk) had signs demanding payment in full in advance. Luckily, the call from the travel agency had been sufficiently out of the ordinary for them that they merely demanded to get a credit card imprint from me when I came by to secure the room in the early afternoon. The room had a bed with no sheet and a window open to an alleyway. Pigeons from the alleyway had clearly visited the room before I got there. Surprisingly, though, the shared bathroom in the hallway was modern and absolutely spotless!

Later on that day, bridges were reopened, so there would have been many other hotels available. What ended up in zero supply at that point were rental cars. All of those were snapped up.

I walked south all the way to where lower Manhattan was cordoned off with sawhorses. There was some dust, and, of course, police and emergency vehicles, but I do not remember seeing much else out of the ordinary. For example, I never saw any injured people, people covered in dust, or anything like that. The horrible, massive things happening at the WTC site were contained there. What was obvious was Manhattan becoming a ghost town. All stores were closed, including fast food joints. Perhaps the weirdest sight and experience was Broadway, which had so few cars that one could cross the street without even looking.

Regular restaurants were closed as well, but a fair number of bars were open in the afternoon and evening. In fact, they were PACKED. No one wanted to be alone. Every place had a TV on, and the volume was turned to full whenever there was something new being announced. I was lucky enough to find a bar that served food. When I came back to the hotel in the evening, there were various characters lounging on the steps to the building.

On the 12th, I booked a spot on an Amtrak train to take me back to Boston. The first few trains were full so I needed to kill time for most of the day. I walked around New York. At one point, I walked through Central Park and ended up next to 5th Ave, where Army trucks were just arriving, stopping and lining up before heading to lower Manhattan. Around here I also encountered a conman taking advantage of the attacks: a man asking me for money with the story that they had been at the WTC the day before and escaped but left all their belongings in the building.

As I finally got on the train, who else was in the car but Jerry Zaltman, my dissertation advisor! He was on his way back to Boston from somewhere further south- Annapolis, I think. We managed to talk shop a little bit, but clearly it was not at the top of our minds.

That was my experience on 9/11 as well as I can remember it. I will recount two more things that are somewhat related.

One of the companies I studied for my dissertation was an investment bank that had been located in the WTC. I visited them a few weeks later in their new location in midtown Manhattan. I was very luckily that I did not have a meeting with them on the morning of the 11th.

In the months following 9/11, I ended up flying a lot, both domestically and internationally, because I was on the academic job market and was making my fly-outs to different universities. Although security was tight, flying was easier than ever before or after -- the lines were short and the planes were empty."