By wpengine
Tara Ganguly ’03 remembers a calm walk from the subway to work on the morning of Sept. 11. “I remember looking up at the World Trade Center and just kind of marveling. It was a beautiful, crisp day,” she said. Minutes later she witnessed the first hijacked plane crash into one of the twin towers. “I didn’t know what to do, because it was our second day of work,” said Ganguly, who works at the District Attorney’s office four blocks east of the Trade Center. She is one of 28 students participating in Urban Semester this fall, a program where students live and study in the city while working at an internship. Chirag Choksey ’03, an engineering student working this semester through the cooperative (co-op) experience, exited the subway at Wall Street just after the first plane crashed. “[With] the buildings being so tall I really couldn’t see the smoke or anything from the crash when I started to walk toward my work. All I noticed were thousands of pieces of paper floating in the air and on the ground,” Choksey said. He and 14 other students worked in New York this fall to gain experience in their fields of interest. Priyanka Sengupta ’03, also a co-op student, was waiting in New Jersey for a PATH train to New York when she noticed a crowd pointing across the Hudson River to “a tiny hole” in one of the towers. Beneath the World Trade Center, another student, who wished to remain anonymous, exited the PATH train and was told to evacuate the building. Once outside, “I looked up to see people jumping/falling out of the tower. It was the most horrible sight that I had ever seen,” she said. “The streets were filled with people, all walking in the same direction, sometimes stopping to stare in disbelief and fear at the burning towers,” said Hwan-Ting Lee ’03, also a co-op student. “We saw the top of the [second] tower lean a little, then crash down collapsing onto itself…. Several people behind me yelled ‘No!’ in a tone of almost denial.” The students tried desperately to contact their families, but cell phones were out of service and lines of people stretched from every pay-phone. They searched for different ways to get home. The co-op students had apartments in the city or New Jersey, while the Urban Semester students lived together at the Weill Medical College dormitory, Olin Hall. “I just turned around and literally ran all the way to midtown for a train home,” Sengupta said. “There I waited for an eternity, unable to reach my parents or my boss. I just prayed that no more planes would come crashing down on us,” she said. “Finally the train came and everyone packed in and I was home.” “I walked home 20 blocks,” said Ladin Yurteri ’03, an Urban Semester student. “My roommate [Ganguly] walked home 80 blocks.” The cohesive group of Urban Semester students rallied together back at their dorm. “We all waited for the next person to come in and tell their story or whatever,” Yurteri said. “We looked to each other for comfort because our friends were back in Ithaca.” Meanwhile at Cornell, the assistant director of the co-op program, Deborah Worley, tried to locate the 15 engineering students working in New York City. Eleven of the students were in the financial district surrounding the Trade Center. “Within two days, we had everyone accounted for. Most people responded that same day” to phone calls and e-mail messages, Worley said. The co-op office sent word via e-mail to all co-op students saying that their classmates in New York were safe. Sam Beck, director of Urban Semester and a senior lecturer, was riding on a bus from Providence to New York when the attacks occurred. Traffic into the city was blocked, so the bus turned around and headed back to Providence. “I spent that evening and the next day trying to locate everybody,” Beck said. No one from the Cornell undergraduate programs was injured in the attacks. The focus of both the co-op and Urban Semester programs is to learn through experience. Sept. 11 “accelerated that kind of learning, … enriched and deepened it,” Beck said. When he returned to the city, he and the students discussed what had happened. He prompted students to think about how the attacks fit into the framework of American foreign policy, such as the conditions that led up to the attack, Beck said. He added that getting a better sense of what New Yorkers are really like — not “brutish, uncaring [and] highly individualistic … was another sort of learning issue for students.” Beck also mentioned that “No one opted to leave [the program].” Nor has Urban Semester’s enrollment for next semester been negatively affected by the terrorist attacks. “I fully expected not to have too many students in the spring, but I’ve turned students away,” Beck said. Many students did not return to their job sites for a week following the attacks. However, after the initial delay, most were unaffected by the attacks. A few Urban Semester students were displaced, and the co-op student working at the World Financial Center was unable to return to her job because of damage to the building. She was relocated to a branch of the same company, back home in San Diego. Students returning to their previous places of work saw immediate changes upon their return. “My first day back to work Wall Street felt like a war zone,” Lee said. “The air smelled of smoke, and the streets were filled with the National Guard.” Some students were fearful that they were still in danger. “We’re right above Grand Central Station, so I’ve been fearing ever since the attack that something’s going to happen — that there’s going to be a bomb or something,” Yurteri said. “I’ll never be as carefree as I was.” Several students noted increased security checks at their offices since the attacks. However, “daily life is gradually getting back to normal,” said Ray Huang ’03, a co-op student. “The only time I think of the attacks is if I see one of the fliers for people missing,” Choksey said. “The pictures are always of the person with a giant smile on their face and seemingly very happy. It’s hard to believe that they are gone.” Despite their experiences in New York after the attacks, the students who witnessed the attacks remarked at the city’s resilience. “That night, people were at restaurants and at bars,” Yurteri said. “The rest of the country stopped, but New York kept beating, because that’s the way New York is.” — Shalini Saxena and Michael Van Wert contributed to this story.Archived article by Heather Schroeder
By wpengine
“Where were you on the morning of Sept. 11?” These words now join the historical archives containing such questions as “Where were you the day that John F. Kennedy was shot?” and “Where were you when Neil Armstrong was the first man to walk on the moon?” As these words enter the archives of history, they will continue to comprise the daily logs of the present. Those who were fortunate enough to be harbored in the safe refuge of our homes and our schools on Sept. 11 were protected from the immediate physical trauma that ravaged our nation. Yet, for those of us privy to the instantaneous visuals on every television network, the immediacy of the trauma brought the tragedy closer to home. Since the very moment the second American Airlines passenger plane crashed into the South Tower of the World Trade Center, the media rapidly allowed the tragedy to infuse homes across the nation as we watched the attack live. The nation has become immersed in a network of daily news reports, daily speculations, and daily advice on how to function in a nation that has engaged in a need for heightened security. With headlines such as “America Under Attack,” “America at War,” and “The War Against Terror,” mass media news providers, such as CNN and MSNBC (and their updated Web sites), as well as local stations, have proliferated a national lexicon of war, of terror, of fear — a 24-hour lexicon that, according to The New York Times Magazine, has generated a language derivative of conflict. Commemoration in the Cultural Sphere This wartime lexicon, or public jargon, has eminently beseeched an even more prophetic discourse, for it has developed into a discourse of unity, compassion, and partisan sense of spirit that has spanned across the nation from one ocean to another. It has spanned throughout individual stories of strength and morale to the tangible manifestation of this discourse through media and entertainment venues. While headlines sustain a heightened sense of alert, these changing times have begotten a changing perspective of humanity, culture, and pride. From additional section of The New York Times entitled, “A Nation Challenged,” to the commemorative issues of magazines, such as Newsweek, the discourse of “a nation challenged” has become one of intense and imperative national interest. In the weeks following the attacks upon the Twin Towers in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., entertainment magazines, such as Entertainment Weekly, focused on the effect that this historical malice has had upon future endeavors of the entertainment industry. With consideration for a national mood characterized by heightened alert and anxiety, expected movies containing explicitly violent visual material were postponed or altered before their release. The showing of prime-time season premieres on television networks were delayed, and various artists’ recent musical debuts were interpreted in correlation with the emotional consequences of the attacks. With a therapeutic value, music has nonetheless helped to prevent the nation from embracing a paralytic fear. MTV suspended its regularly scheduled programming to feature CBS News information for two days. Subsequently, both MTV and VH1 aired week-long specials that paid homage to the victims and offered solace to the nation through appropriately subdued and empathetic music, both old and new. In various tributes of star-studded magnitude, the icons of the entertainment industry have united as a microcosmic example for all Americans. Many celebrities have patriotically united to raise money for the victims of the attacks and their grieving families. The public can complete the charitable ring begun at the tributes by purchasing CDs documenting the musical repertoire of the concerts. Aside from the rapidly organized public tributes, celebrities have maintained the tone of solemnity and remembrance throughout other, more established areas of the industry. “The show must go on” award shows (namely the Emmys which were cautiously rescheduled) displayed an uncharacteristic, subdued dress code. The Hollywood image of flagrancy and bedazzlement aptly succumbed to the national mood. With reverence and respect, celebrities removed themselves from their star-studded personas and joined the ranks of everyday patriotism that now envelopes covers of even high fashion magazines. Accordingly, on the most recent cover of Vogue, Gisele Bundchen is donning, not the exorbitantly priced couture style of previous months, but the limited-edition nationalist T-shirt by Donna Karan New York, priced at $22.50. The patriotism of our great nation has returned to stores, catalogs, and even public activities, such as the Thanksgiving Day parade. While the attacks plundered the security of our land, they consequently bolstered the hometown feeling upon which America was built. The Celebrity of America’s Spirit While we respect the celebrities that have mobilized national movements to ameliorate the conditions of those most drastically affected, we turned to the heartland of America — the cities, the towns, the farms, etc. — for moral support. Now, thematic pigments of red, white, and blue characterize our neighborhoods; radio station lineups have replaced potentially controversial music with various patriotic tunes; and most importantly, the true heroes of our nation are finally ascending to the public spotlight as they are these men and women who appear on the news, in papers, and in magazines. The NYPD, FDNY, PAPD, EMTs, and other rescue workers have become forefront in the eyes of the American public as the true, and often disregarded, heroes of our nation. Faces of entertainment celebrities have been somewhat replaced with the faces of once everyday men and women