Sept. 11 Attack 20th Anniversary: Live Updates: With Bowed Heads, Americans Reflect on 9/11 and Its Aftermath (Published 2021) (2024)

Mets and Yankees share a moment of silence.

More than a dozen players and coaches from that 2001 Mets team were in attendance, escorting agency representatives who participated in the ground zero rescue and recovery efforts. Among them was the Hall of Fame catcher Mike Piazza, who hit a come-from-behind, game-winning home run for the Mets in the first sporting event in the city after the Sept. 11 attacks. He and others reflected not only on that moment of healing but also on the club-organized efforts in the aftermath of the attacks to collect needed supplies and visit with emergency medical workers.

“Unfortunately, you do have to experience tragedy to see triumph and see courage and bravery,” Piazza said. “And so as much as I’m sad to see and remember the sad events, it’s still uplifting to continue to reflect on the positive stories that did come out of that week.”

Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York and Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president and Democratic nominee for mayor, were in attendance.

Before the game, Mets first baseman Pete Alonso spoke to media members on Zoom while wearing a shirt with the logo and nickname of F.D.N.Y. Engine 319, “The Lone Wolf.” Alonso visited the ground zero site earlier in the day and announced that he was donating the proceeds of a new NFT — a nonfungible token, commemorating his 100th career home run — to the 9/11 Memorial and Museum.

“It’s not just today that people are suffering,” Alonso said. “People go through those pains and scars every single day of the year.”

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Scenes at ground zero as a disaster-weary nation marked 20 years since 9/11.

In groups big and small, they filed quietly in by the thousands to the memorial fountain at the National Sept. 11 Memorial & Museum and gathered at the spot where the World Trade Center’s twin towers once stood.

They honored the departed in a ceremony marked by singing, silence and the traditional reading of the names that lasted four hours into early afternoon.

Many people inserted flowers into the engraved names of the dead.

After the national anthem, there were moments of silence marking the minute each plane hit and each tower collapsed.

Three presidents — President Biden and former Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton — attended. They wore blue ribbons and held their hands over their hearts as a procession marched a flag through the memorial, and they stood somberly side by side as the names of the dead were read off by family members and stories and remembrances were shared.

Those who could not enter the memorial event gathered on the perimeter of ground zero and gazed up at the Freedom Tower, which now stands at the location.

Some brought American flags. Others brought handwritten signs and photos in tribute to lost loved ones. Thousands of white ribbons were tied by mourners to the iron fence surrounding St. Paul’s chapel nearby.

There were children, like Ariana and Briana Mendoza, 13, twins from the Bronx whose sister, Dephaney, 22, brought them to the memorial to educate them about the attacks.

“I was only 2 when it happened, but I have learned a lot about it, and now I am teaching them,” Dephaney said. “We take pride in being New Yorkers, and this was an attack on our home.”

There were also older visitors like John Fackre, 76, a U.S. Army veteran from Long Island who served in the 1960s and said: “The horror here in 2001 was worse than anything I saw in Vietnam.”

She survived 9/11 and Covid: ‘You just keep going.’

Ms. Lanski was a project manager for Empire Blue Cross Blue Shield on Sept. 11, 2001, and was preparing for a 9 a.m. meeting in her office on the 29th floor of the World Trade Center’s North Tower, when American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into her building. She felt the impact and fled down the stairs.

When she got to the lobby, she heard people shouting at her to run, cover her head and not look up. She saw people jumping and ran through the rubble of the collapsed tower before losing her shoes along the way. She reached the Hudson River and escaped via the New York Waterway Ferry to New Jersey.

On Saturday, she met Armand Pohan, the ferry’s chairman and C.E.O., before a remembrance ceremony that featured Gov. Philip Murphy and Senators Robert Menendez and Cory Booker of New Jersey. Ms. Lanski, who has “9/11/01” and “survivor” tattooed above her right ankle, credited the ferry with saving her life two decades ago.

“I burst into tears,” she said of her meeting with Mr. Pohan. “It was full circle.”

Ms. Lanski, who lives in West Orange, N.J., is a secretary on the board of directors for the New Jersey 9/11 Memorial Foundation and works for Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield. In March 2020, she was diagnosed with Covid-19, and she had to breathe through an oxygen mask while hospitalized.

When she beat the virus, Mr. Murphy called her, and before he took the stage on Saturday, she reintroduced herself and shook his hand.

“It just keeps coming,” she said. “If Osama bin Laden didn’t kill me, I’m not dying from a virus. You just keep going. Just because you had a tragedy, it doesn’t stop you from having others.”

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A conspiracy film energized the ‘9/11 truther’ movement and fueled the current age of disinformation.

I recently went back and watched several versions of “Loose Change.” (There are at least five English-language versions in total.) I also spoke to Korey Rowe and Jason Bermas, a producer and editor on the film, along with several experts on the 9/11 truther movement. (The film’s director, Dylan Avery, declined my interview request after concluding that I was writing a “clickbait article that blames a movie that came out 15 years ago for everything wrong with the internet today.”)

What I found, in short, was that 16 years after its release, “Loose Change” is still bizarrely relevant. Its DNA is all over the internet — from TikTok videos about child sex trafficking to Facebook threads about Covid-19 miracle cures — and many of its false claims still get a surprising amount of airtime. (Just last month, the director Spike Lee drew criticism for indulging Sept. 11 conspiracy theories in a new HBO documentary series.) The film’s message that people could discover the truth about the attacks for themselves also became a core tactic for groups like QAnon and the anti-vaccine crowd, which urge their followers to ignore the experts and “do their own research” online.

At a beach memorial on Long Island, law enforcement officers say a collective prayer.

Roughly 50 members of the Long Island chapter of the Sworn Guns Law Enforcement Motorcycle Club came to the memorial Saturday to say a collective prayer. Some bikers stared at the wall, while others turned toward the bay and stared up at the sky, as blue as it had been on Sept. 11, 2001.

The bikers then moved to the tiki bar at Surf Shack Flip Flop Coastal Kitchen, about 200 feet from the memorial, and raised beer cans and shot glasses to, in the words of the club’s founder, Chris Bottcher, “the collective memory.”

Mr. Bottcher, 47, of Manorville, N.Y., who retired from the Police Department in 2018, was at the South Tower when it fell. Every year he and his fellow bikers ride on the anniversary to a 9/11 memorial, and this year, the club decided to return to Tobay Beach.

He said he was determined to teach his children about the events of 9/11 through his own recollection, as well as the stories of his fellow law enforcement officers who were at ground zero that day.

“I would like people to remember how police officers, firefighters and first responders were treated with dignity and respect thereafter, and I think a lot of that has gone away,” Mr. Bottcher said.

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Windows on the World employees are remembered amid calls for better pay for service workers.

“On 9/11 I lost three precious things,” said Fekkak Mamdouh, who worked at Windows on the World and is now senior director for One Fair Wage, the advocacy group that hosted the event.

“I lost my brothers and sisters that work with me. I lost my sense of security and safety as an Arab Muslim,” he said, “and I lost a good paying job.”

He and others criticized the $2.13 federal minimum wage for tipped workers — the same rate that existed in 2001 — calling it “subminimum.” (Federal law requires that tipped workers receive at least $7.25 an hour, but up to $5.12 of it can come from tips, leaving the employer to pay as little as $2.13.)

“We’ve heard the phrase ‘essential worker’ so often in the last year and a half, and we are truly going to recognize that this work is essential,” said Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, Democrat of New York. “We must do much more than words.”

Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, echoed that sentiment.

“Coming here gives me strength to keep pushing one fair wage until we get it done in the United States Congress,” Mr. Schumer said. “When we make your lives better, we make New York better, we make America better.”

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton thanked the service workers and advocates for “taking your grief and your loss and turning it into this movement,” and urged them to “keep going.”

Mr. Mamdouh and other former Windows on the World employees lit 20 candles and read aloud the names of the colleagues they lost.

Tez Termulo Boiz said she started working at Windows on the World as a college junior and essentially grew up there.

“When you hit something like the 20th, it really becomes a much bigger event, and reminding you what you lost,” said Ms. Boiz, who now works in finance and lives in New Jersey.

She had an even more basic request than a living wage: kindness.

“Don’t deny a tip. Don’t berate your server,” she said. “Be a decent human. That’s all we ask.”

Scenes from 9/11 ceremonies at the Pentagon and Arlington National Cemetery.

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In California, amid 9/11 remembrance, five young men join the military.

Mr. Franks recalled his fourth birthday in 2001. His planned celebration at Disneyland was canceled as news of the terrorist attacks spread and the park closed, so his mother organized a small party with friends in her backyard. The children laughed and played, unaware of the tragedy, while the adults tried to process the events of the day.

Twenty years later, Mr. Franks and his peers were the stars of Saturday’s memorial ceremony, receiving a huge ovation after they were sworn in. Mr. Franks’ father, also named Patrick, described his son as “a natural warrior.” He trains in mixed martial arts, works part-time at a gun range, and grew up hearing World War II stories from his grandfather, who was in the Marines.

Still, Mr. Franks acknowledged being scared of heights, airplanes and the whole idea of boot camp.

“Oh, I’m terrified,” he said with a smile. “But you’ve got to do it.”

The ceremony began with a procession of cars, trucks, motorcycles, helicopters and a flatbed truck carrying 23 tons of World Trade Center wreckage.

Don Barnes, the sheriff of Orange County, noted the bravery of emergency workers and soldiers in the days and years after Sept. 11. He reminded the crowd of the promise to never forget.

“As your sheriff, I am worried we are reverting to a Sept. 10, 2001, mentality,” he said. “We’ve forgotten the lessons of that day.”

Hochul, in first 9/11 as governor, emphasizes the human cost of the attacks.

“We all have to remember that behind every number, there’s a person who is loved, who was loved,” said Ms. Hochul, who took office less than a month ago.

The governor announced on Saturday that she had signed bills intended to help provide emergency workers with better access to state benefits after they took part in rescue, recovery and cleanup efforts at the World Trade Center in 2001.

Earlier, she attended the ceremony in Lower Manhattan, along with a number of other current and former elected officials, including Gov. Philip D. Murphy of New Jersey. The two of them had lunch nearby and discussed “shared priorities” including the coronavirus pandemic, infrastructure and the economy, Ms. Hochul said on Twitter.

Ms. Hochul then went to St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Midtown Manhattan, joining firefighters and top officials for a memorial Mass to honor the 343 members of the Fire Department who were killed in the Sept. 11 attacks.

She will later travel to Citi Field in Queens to attend a memorial ceremony being held there before the Mets and Yankees face off in a game on Saturday night.

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The Sept. 11 attack fundamentally transformed New York’s police department.

The department’s Intelligence Division, redesigned in 2002 to confront Al Qaeda operatives, now uses antiterror tactics to fight gang violence and street crime.

Policing technology has always advanced along with the world at large. And the police have long used surveillance cameras to find suspects caught on video, publicizing images of people and asking the public for help identifying them.

But both supporters and critics of the shift say it is almost impossible to overstate how profoundly the attacks changed American policing — perhaps most acutely in New York, which lost 23 of its own officers that day, and hundreds more from 9/11-related illnesses in the years since.

Current and former police officials say the tools have been effective in thwarting dozens of would-be attacks. And the department has an obligation, they say, to repurpose its counterterrorism tools for everyday crime fighting.

But others say the prevalence of the Police Department’s technological arsenal subjects ordinary New Yorkers to near-constant surveillance — a burden that falls more heavily on people of color.

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The emotional scars of Sept. 11 are still there, but so is the memory of a simple act of kindness.

On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, I was at my desk in The Wall Street Journal’s office building, across the street from the World Trade Center. After the planes hit, our building was evacuated, and the small staff that had come to work early gathered outside. We were dazed and devastated by what was happening around us, but it helped to focus on our jobs, reporting the events of the day.

My assignment was to walk toward the towers to interview people on the ground. I spoke to a woman who worked in the North Tower, who told a harrowing story of feeling the floor buckle when the plane hit her building. She said it felt like she was on a roller coaster as the entire floor rippled in waves, up and down. As she told me of her escape down more than 70 flights of stairs, I heard a strange, guttural rumble.

We were standing about a block or two from the North Tower, and we both turned around slowly toward the noise and saw the tower begin to collapse. Crowds of terrified people were running toward us. It was hard to process what was happening, but it reminded me of a scene from a Godzilla movie. The woman I’d been talking to figured it out before I did. “It’s falling!” she screamed and grabbed my hand. “Run!”

I started to run, but I was wearing heels and could only shuffle. So I kicked off my shoes and ran barefoot.

The massive debris cloud consumed us, and people started scattering, trying to get indoors at nearby buildings. A doorman at one apartment building was waving his arms, beckoning us to seek cover. Once inside, the residents welcomed us into their homes, giving us water to drink and wet towels to wipe away the ash. A woman named Phyllis noticed my bare feet and gave me a pair of Birkenstock sandals that happened to be just the right size. She was visiting from Atlanta, and told me to keep them.

It turned out I needed those shoes. Over the course of the day, as I tried to make my way home, I ended up walking nearly 10 miles.

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A reporter recalls a day that reshaped the world, including hers.

He needed a lead story for an old-fashioned print extra, published that afternoon. I still remember watching the collapses live on the TV above my desk, deleting the lede “The twin towers of the World Trade Center were hit by planes” and typing in, “The twin towers were destroyed.”

From the moment this event started happening in my home city, I was channeling it into journalism: calling my friends who worked nearby to see if they were all right, calling doctor friends who were scrubbed in and waiting for casualties. (Of course none came: People were mostly just scratched up, or dead.)

Within days, I was reporting in New York. Within weeks, in Pakistan. By then I knew my next posting as an international correspondent might not be the one I’d learned Russian for.

But I didn’t know then, at 30, that I would spend most of the next two decades reporting on the reverberations, and that I would spend 10 of them in the Middle East, covering conflicts connected one way or another, if not to the attacks themselves, then to the United States’ response.

That Elizabeth Neuffer, the first Globe reporter on scene at the World Trade Center (and later one of few to report correctly before the Iraq invasion that U.S. troops would not be widely welcomed) would die in Iraq, the first of many friends lost in the wars.

That much of my life would become intertwined with the effort to document these events: My marriage to a fellow war correspondent. My network of colleagues across the region who became beloved and indispensable friends. My children growing from babies to big kids in Beirut. The ripples still changing our whole society — our city, our politics, and especially the other countries that bore by far the brunt of the ensuing deaths. Our world.

In Shanksville, Biden says the future of democracy is on the line.

Mr. Biden praised Mr. Bush’s speech, a call to unity for Americans divided by their political differences. And as he prepared to leave Shanksville for his last stop at the Pentagon, the president addressed a topic that takes up great deal of his attention: the existential battle he feels is happening in America, and the choice he believes must be made between democracy and the rising influence of authoritarianism.

“Are we going to — in the next four, five, six, 10 years — demonstrate that democracies can work, or not?” he asked.

As president, Mr. Biden is struggling to move on from the far-reaching aftermath of the attacks. The end of the war in Afghanistan has been politically costly for him and has made it difficult for him to pivot to a foreign policy doctrine that positions the country to fight what he sees as more pressing challenges: combating climate change, preparing for future pandemics and keeping pace with China.

Before he left Shanksville, Mr. Biden said that he was appalled at how coarse the political dialogue between Republicans and Democrats had become.

“They think this makes sense for us to be in this kind of thing where you ride down the street and someone has a sign saying ‘F so and so,’” Mr. Biden said, referring to the expletive-laden signs that are often spotted along presidential motorcade routes.

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An astronaut marks the 20th anniversary of 9/11 from space.

Mr. Kimbrough remembered that period of time as one where “we saw the strength and resilience of our nation and the incredible support from people all around the world.”

He said the International Space Station is an example of what can be accomplished through global partnership. Mr. Kimbrough spoke from the station's Japanese Kibo laboratory with an American flag floating in the background.

“Over the last 20 years, we’ve been continuously living together in space while operating among many nations to improve lives for all of us back on Earth,” he said. “People from all over the world and from all walks of life joined together to accomplish the incredible engineering feat of building an International Space Station in low Earth orbit.”

NASA has marked Sept. 11 over the years with ceremonies on Earth, in space and memorials on other planets.

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Painful memory for Muslims: Outrage over a proposed Islamic center in Manhattan.

Opponents even suggested that the project was intended as a victory marker for Islamic extremists, although Muslims had long been part of the fabric of Lower Manhattan and lacked sufficient space for prayer in the area. The ensuing media melee eventually scuttled the plans.

Last week, the head of the Anti-Defamation League, Jonathan Greenblatt, apologized in an essay on CNN.com. The group, founded to fight religious bias, had pushed for a different location for the mosque.

Cordoba House, an organization founded by the imam, Feisal Abdul Rauf, welcomed the apology. The developer, Sharif El Gamal, declined to comment. But his sister, Jasmine M. El Gamal, who was a Middle East adviser at the Defense Department during the controversy, had a mixed response on Saturday.

“It takes guts to admit a mistake,” she said. “But the apology has an important missing piece: why the A.D.L. opposed Park51. It was Islamophobia and fear of standing up to it. After 9/11, Muslims were bad for politics.”

Ms. El Gamal, who has written about her experiences as a translator at Guantánamo Bay, said 9/11 was doubly painful since “Muslims were both targeted by extremists and blamed for extremists.”

“We were, and remain, caught between a rock and a hard place,” she said, “used as pawns and proxies to make a greater point or start a larger conflict.”