I was in Phoenix attending a retail technology conference on September 11, 2001. By the time I turned on the television in my room around 6 am local time, the south tower had collapsed into itself. I saw the second tower implode.
I was stuck in Phoenix for five days. On the plane returning to New York, from 50 miles away I could see black plumes of smoke still billowing out of the pit where thousands suffered an incomprehensible, grotesque death.
I believe I visited the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center more than most New Yorkers who did not work there every day. Of course, I did the usual tourist stuff. I would go to the south tower second floor mezzanine to buy TKTS discount tickets for next day Broadway show matinees.
With Gilda, I sat in a window seat on the 107th floor observation deck of the south tower, a truly outer body experience as you could see almost straight down to street level where ant-like pedestrians scurried about.
While working on Nation’s Restaurant News I accompanied chief editor Charlie Bernstein as he interviewed Joe Baum, the food service industry impresario behind iconic restaurants that included The Four Seasons and the refurbished Rainbow Room and Tavern on the Green. He was the creator of Windows on the World atop the World Trade Center and many of the food service establishments along the concourse connecting the two towers. We lunched in the ground floor Market restaurant Baum designed.
I recall little of the interview except, at the end of the meal when crumbs speckled the tablecloth and a few pieces of bread remained in a basket, Baum chuckled as he reminisced about his first job in the restaurant business. Growing up in Saratoga Springs, NY, where his parents ran a hotel, Joe was tasked with retrieving any uneaten pieces of bread for future use, a job only a child under 10 years old would think was without shame.
I had the pleasure of enjoying several lunches at his Windows on the World as an attendee of Merrill Lynch’s annual Modes of Creative Retailing conference.
I am aware of no one I knew who perished September 11. While I sat stunned in my hotel room, Gilda was preparing to treat casualties arriving at Beth Israel Hospital on 14th Street and First Avenue.
No one came.
