Remembering 9/11: From Upper West Side Dad to Daily News Deadline

By Dave Saltonstall

It was many hours after the first plane hit when the recently closed George Washington Bridge would re-open its lanes to a special kind of traffic: a convoy of New York Daily News delivery trucks, sirens clearing their path, carrying the day’s paper into a city that still got its news from newspapers.

But my 9/11 started hours earlier, first at our Upper West Side home, and then on a school bench.

On that crisp morning, I was a reporter at The Daily News whose job at daybreak was to cover the day’s mayoral primaries — featuring a crowded field of veteran Democrats and an insurgent Republican named Michael Bloomberg who still seemed like a longshot for November. It would be a long election night, so I wasn’t due to start work until the afternoon.

I had another job that morning that seemed much more important: dad to Gus Saltonstall. It was his first day of kindergarten in a new school, which meant sitting on the bench outside his classroom, a rite of parental passage that became a form of salvation for many who worked at the Trade Center, as they’d be late to work that day.

I remember: Out of the corner of my eye, a television in the school office. A plane had hit one of the towers. Like so many others, my first thought was that it was a horrific accident that would keep colleagues at The News very busy, but nothing more momentous; I went back to the bench.

Then 17 minutes later, the second plane hit and, in that instant, we all understood this was something else.

Democracy was dreadfully placed on hold that morning; the New York City primary election was postponed. I found my friend and colleague Heidi Evans and we set off for the newsroom in her car in a city without subways. We reached the sidewalk outside our office on West 33rd Street and 10th Avenue, and Heidi – thinking that the Daily News could reasonably be considered a target at a time when planes still seemed unaccounted for – asked if we really needed to go inside. “Of course we do,” she recalls me saying. “It’s our job.”

I remember: Ed Kosner, our editor-in-chief, greeted me with outsized relief and said I would be writing the main bar — the lead story meant to summarize the day. I had never had an office before, but they gave me one that day and told me to start pulling in feeds from some 120 colleagues scattered across the city.

One of those colleagues was David Handschuh, an award-winning Daily News photographer who had followed FDNY Rescue Company 1 down to the Trade Center that morning. He was making pictures of firefighters pulling out their gear when the South Tower collapsed at 9:59 a.m. — burying him in rubble. He survived, barely, and has said since that whenever he returns to the Trade Center site now, the changing light there, no matter the season, reminds him to keep living, keep working, keep watching out for other New Yorkers.

Another colleague was Corky Siemaszko, who for days after filed short, aching vignettes for the paper that our newsroom came to call his “violins.” The first note of his first violin: “The morning coffee was still cooling when our grandest illusion was shattered. Within minutes, one of New York’s mightiest symbols was a smoldering mess and the nation’s image of invincibility was made a lie.”

That was the wound underneath everything that week — not just what had happened, but the fact that it could happen at all. To us, to our invincible city.

It’s hard to describe to younger people today – in this age of social media and instant smartphone reels from all over – the challenge of piecing together an accurate chronology of that day based solely on eyewitness accounts. First the North Tower is hit, then the South. Then the South Tower collapses, followed by the North. Meanwhile, the Pentagon is ablaze, a plane crashed in Pennsylvania … and on and on it went. Meanwhile, we spent hours chasing down tips that turned out to be nonsense, like rumors of a bomb on the George Washington Bridge.

It would be days before we knew how many had perished, but it was obvious to us in the newsroom by mid-afternoon that hundreds of FDNY firefighters were likely dead. These guys accounted for each other, and too many were missing and not responding to calls. In a city where a single line-of-duty death was mourned for days, with immense honor guards that the Daily News took great pride in covering, this scale of loss was unfathomable.

“The number of casualties will be far more than any of us can bear, ultimately,” Mayor Rudy Giuliani said that morning, an early sign of compassion from a man who previously seemed bereft of such instincts.

We had reporters at almost every hospital in the city, waiting for the injured to arrive in droves. They never arrived, because that was the thing about 9/11 – either you survived and staggered home, or you perished. For a group of people deeply expert in covering disaster, this was profoundly disorienting.

Every news story is full of calculated decisions, and I remember one from that night that we labored over: Could we call this day “the deadliest assault on the U.S. in its history?” The attack on Pearl Harbor, with 2,403 dead, was the prior benchmark. We had no real casualty count yet. But in the wee hours of that night we made the call that yes, the day’s losses would sadly be greater, and we ran with it (correctly, we would later come to know).

And then there were those trucks. Our printing plant was in New Jersey, which meant getting our papers to New York City would be impossible since all bridges and tunnels were closed to regular traffic. This was a logistical nightmare that, if not solved, would render all our work moot. But calls were made, as they say, and soon we learned that Gov. George Pataki had ordered the GWB opened and a police escort provided to the Daily News trucks.

I think about that image sometimes — sirens clearing a path so that The News’ distinctive, tank-like trucks could roll in formation across a river, like a conquering army, to reach a wounded city yearning for facts. It seems almost quaint now in a world where “the media” and the people they cover are so often divided, and every word in every paper is treated with such suspicion.

I remember: Pete Hamill, arguably the greatest New York City columnist of his generation, was asked not long after whether he was surprised at how quickly the city seemed to return to normal. He said he was not, using an apt Golden Gloves metaphor — “We were knocked down on Tuesday, we were on one knee on Wednesday, we were looking at the referee and holding on to the ropes on Thursday, and on Friday we were up. It’s an amazing, resilient city.”

We are still an amazing, resilient city, but of course time has marched on. Gus is 30 today and at the West Side Rag. He says that 9/11 is his earliest memory, but mostly what he remembers is the strange cadence of the day and the newness that was all around him. His younger sister Julia — who was blessedly kept safe that day and many days after by their mom, Elise, while I toiled at work — remembers even less.

On this 9/11, and every 9/11, I choose to remember the people we lost. Because no matter what else any of us did that day, there were others who never got to sit on that bench, who never got to see their sons and daughters grow up. And that is life’s true blessing.

Saltonstall is a former Senior Correspondent and City Hall Bureau Chief for the New York Daily News.

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