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Yes, I was in Manhattan by September the 11th 2001: and this is what I saw...
  • I was having my breakfast at Time Cafe as every morning, when...  Geee!: WTC is burning!. I took my camera from my office at NYU, I wrote an e-mail to my friends (I though nobody else knew about this!) and I came back to the Lafayette-4th street corner... 
Lafayette - 4th street corner in front of Time Cafe. The south tower still untouched. The first stupid thing I thought was: well, the fire is not in the one of the tourists... and it is early, before 9.30,  so no tourist is going to die... (I had been in the top floor with my ex-girlfriend two weeks before).
  • Then I walked down to get closer to the thing: Broadway, Mercer, La Guardia and so on... Amazing! Some people were in the bars looking at the CNN!...
When I was on the run (Broadway-Bleecker corner), the second one hit the second tower on the CNN... of course I couldnt hear anything so I still thought it was a regular fire... 
  • When I arrived to Mercer-Bleecker I could have a clear view again... the second one was also burning at that point... I thought it was normal (they were so close each other...).
Mercer-Bleecker. The light said it clearly: dont walk!
Broadway West, a couple of blocks north of Canal Str. Note that the bottom part of this picture seems quite normal... new yorkers are like that...
  • Xino-xano (catalan idiom, i.e. having a nice walk) I arrived to Broadway West with Canal, about 10 blocks from the buildings... I thought it was close enough: I am so coward, I didnt want to see people jumping from the windows.
Broadway West with Canal
  • Some people were looking at the buildings, some other people were not. At that point many new yorkers were laughing at the event. 
Somewhere in Broadway West, between Canal and Houston. The people at the right were listening to the radio... if we had heard Orson Welles telling us that we should blame the martians, we had believed him...
  • I thought that was all: they will extinguish the fire and tomorrow I will take the picture of the black buildings... 
Still in Broadway West: Green light but Do not enter
  • However, something unexpected happened at that point...
I was so amazed that I couldnt take this picture (I took it from El Pais). The sound was unbelievable.
  • Then, again, I thought everything was over: the north one is not going to fall... however, I thought my friends will be waiting for somebody to tell them that one of the towers had fallen... Therefore, I went back to my office and I sent a new e-mail... As I was sending the e-mail, the north tower fell. When I get back to the streets again, there is only smoke, and, by then, everybody is looking in the right direction...
Washington Square and LaGuardia, between the library and the new NYU building.
  • People is great: once we started to believe the official version from the radio, everybody in the streets started to discuss what was going on... people stopped their cars and opened the doors with the radio on so we could hear...  (I guess something similar happened in Madrid by March the 11th 2004). On the other hand, the military and the politicians are stupid: when everything was really over, they started to fly their useless F18 over the city... we couldnt see them but we could hear them. Definitely the same happened over here in Madrid by March the 11th 2004: they lay us again...
  • Then, I walked down the streets again while listening people's cars radios... when I crossed Houston I saw an ambulance and some jeeps from the military...
Somewhere in Houston Street.
  • Back home to see the TV...
After a big lunch-dinner in a full restaurant somewhere in the Village, by 6.30 PM I decided to get back to home to watch TV (the reality!) for a while. This is a view of Broadway by that time, with the buses by the sidewalk and the diggers waiting to get to work... at the (visible) end of the street there is the Woolworth, which is few blocks away from the rubble.

 
Despite the radio says the underground is not working, by 7.00 PM I enter the Astor Place station. I ask the man in the ticket office and he tells me, no problem: number 6 is running as usual. However, when I arrive to the platform, I am the only one in the station. Quite unusual!
  • The reality: when I arrived home by 7.30 PM I just heard nonsense in TV until 1.30 AM: the muslim threat, war, retaliation, security in high buildings, home land security... by 1.30 AM (16 hours after the attack) somebody said something different: may be we should think about why this happened to us!. Unfortunately, they were the guys of the BBC (Europe!) in the PBS, channel 13...
     
  • The day after, everything was confusion (I): despite Major Giuliani said access to downtown was impossible below 14th street, I took the underground in the 51th and stopped in Astor Place (close to Washington Place), as usual. I arrived to the Time Cafe as the day before, and I had regular coffee: these nice guys gave you coffee for free.
  • There were few cars in Lafayette, but Broadway was completely empty in both directions:
north...

 
and south...
Denis Pelli has a quite similar picture. We took it at the same time...
  • The day after, everything was confusion (II): I went to my office and, as usual, I sent a couple of e-mails. Then I read in www.elmundo.es that the internet wasnt working in Manhattan. That was quite unusual, because since Noam Chomsky said you cannot trust El Mundo, I had never read it again... May be you think I am stupid, but you have to consider it was Sept. the 12th 2001, so yes, I read El Mundo!. You cannot trust somebody so naive to trust noam Chomsky...
  • Then, I got the streets again to see what was going on...
There were no cars in the streets but there were a lot of improvised journalists. For instance, this picture (trucks and diggers in Houston) was taken by four people at the same time...

 
Here a line of firefighters trucks going (wrong way) down the 6th ave... 

In the sidewalk, Univision (su notisiero de televisión) was covering the event for the Spanish community. Somebody was sharing out american flags amongst the people...

... and you already know what happened afterwards...

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