“Everything went black”

People who were inside and outside the World Trade Center at the time of the terrorist attack describe what they experienced.

By Roman Milisic

It’s Tuesday, Sept. 11, 10:29 a.m. The second building just collapsed. In the sky to the south is a billowing cloud of whitish-gray. I’m on my way to its source. Ten blocks north of the World Trade Center, on Center Street, I meet the stream of people heading north. It’s like a war scene. Sirens are going everywhere. People are wearing paper masks. People are weeping. Many people are covered in soot and ash. I stop a tall, dazed man in what was a business suit. He identifies himself as Bo Liljegren, a vice president at Handelsbanken Finans in Sweden. Here’s what he tells me:

I was on Chase Plaza. I heard a bang. It started to rain paper from the sky. I saw the [second] plane hit the building, but I thought it was quite safe. I stayed to watch. Suddenly the building was collapsing. Everybody rushed away in panic. I hid behind a power block and everything went black. The air was thick with ash. It was like night. I thought I was going to die. It took half an hour before you could start breathing again. It was horrible. I’m going to try to get back up to midtown and get a flight back to Sweden today, as soon as I can.

Next to Liljegren is a big guy in his 40s in a New York Yankees T-shirt dousing himself with water, also covered in cement. He is shaking. His name is Dennis Trotter. He says:

When the second building collapsed, I was in the center of it. Daylight turned to night. There were two women with me — they didn’t make it. They just couldn’t breathe. I tried to help one, but then I started to pass out. I put my head between two parking signs so that I could breathe. It was horrible. Jesus, I peed myself. I don’t believe it. At some point, a police officer came in a car and dragged me in. But the two women, they didn’t make it.”
At Chatham Square, police are trying to stop people getting any nearer the scene. There’s still a steady stream of evacuees on foot, and ambulances everywhere. “What was your experience?” I ask two men. “I was watching outside of 120 Broadway. I saw the south tower go down,” says Ken Chodock. “The best way I can describe it is it looked like it imploded. I don’t know how long it was, it was pitch black. Literally, you could not see. Everybody started running. People were dropping their bags, their phones. People were screaming that they couldn’t breathe, from the dust. I went around the corner of 120 Broadway, but it didn’t really matter where you were, it was all black. You couldn’t open your eyes anyway.”
“I was just a block away from the first tower,” Father Jim Nieckarz, a Catholic priest, tells me. “We were on our way to the No. 7 tower because people told us that there was a triage center there. We were walking toward the area. All of a sudden the police said, ‘Get Out! Get Out! Go north!’ We heard the explosion. We couldn’t see up, because we were right in front of it. We saw debris literally flying down the two streets on either side of us. We walked right in the middle it.”
I pass through the cordon line and approach a huddle of stretchers placed on the ground next to City Hall. A young woman waits nervously: “I’m a volunteer,” says Erin Burya. “I ran down from Gramercy Street, up by 20th. I ran and hitchhiked here to help out; because the first wave of bodies will be coming through soon. We’ve seen a lot of bad people — people from the 82nd and 84th floors. But the scary part is, we haven’t seen enough. Where are the people? Are they dead?” She paused. “Please don’t tell me they’re all dead.”
I make it two blocks farther down Center Street, to Chambers. Here are men in FBI jackets, police squads with heavy firearms. The dust is thick. Out of it walks a man with his daughter on his shoulders, both wearing masks. Others have rags across their mouths. One man is brown and gray from head to toe. This is Lou Lesce:

I was on the 86th floor. The place came down around me. It just filled with smoke, and the whole ceiling fell down. This was No. 1, World Trade Center. There were six of us. We went into an office and sat on the floor. As the smoke increased, we decided to break a window. One of two things could have happened: that the air would rush in, which was fine; or that this would let the smoke in. We broke four windows with a hammer. Fortunately, it gave us air, but it also brought in debris, and flying glass and hot stuff. Then we waited, and were picked up by the Port Authority people, and went down 86 floors. I have to hand it to those people: They stuck by their posts. They were there when everything else was crashing down, personnel comforting one another. And then you’d see the firemen coming up with packs on their backs, weighing 20 or 30 pounds. And they’re going up 86 flights! I got separated from the others, because we kept changing stairwells. As one got crowded we’d move on. When I finally got to the mall, I thought it was fine. And all of a sudden, badoom! An explosion, a windstorm of soot. Concrete. I threw myself to the ground, it all went right over my head. Everything went black. And then half an hour later, another explosion. All black. You had to just bear it out, and keep talking and talking, covered in ash. You couldn’t even see a flashlight. As for the others, I have no idea. One had my jacket. It was difficult, we couldn’t see our way out. I’m going to Bellevue now. I’m just glad to be walking away.
Another man, Edgar Urban, says: “I was standing on Liberty Street. All of a sudden, a plane — a passenger line — came out of nowhere right into the building. It looked like slow motion. The plane was coming. It hit the building, and all you see was smoke. I lost it. I ran. Debris was coming down. I ran for cover.”
Outside the courthouse at Federal Plaza, an emergency crew was taking a head count. A big man in a gray-blue uniform shook his head:

People were jumping out of the building. Body parts. Mass destruction. Debris all over. It was surreal. Unbelievable. We got 2,000 out of the building before it blew.
This is Bill Faulkner, 53, a senior court officer from Green Park in Brooklyn. He continues:

I was standing right here when the first plane went over. I heard it, some of the guys saw it. Major McBain took about 15 of us down. We got in our jury bus and went. Academy instructors went, too. The second plane had already hit when we got there. Everybody was there. Every ambulance you could think of, every agency. We were placed downstairs at the World Trade, getting the people out, moving them toward Broadway as fast as we could, right to the ambulances. And then the building just blew. I don’t know what happened. It just blew. I was close, very close. But I jumped behind a pillar. There was debris, glass, windows, everywhere. Then all smoke. We started to walk along holding on to a window. Me, Eddie, one of my officers, a female police officer, a civilian; there were five or six of us walking along that window, holding on to each other. I couldn’t see a thing when I got out. I called on my radio. I said, “I don’t know where I am.” Someone handed me a bottle of water. I washed my eyes and saw that I was on Broadway, where it splits. Thank God for those windows. Thank God for the pillar. Otherwise I’d have never gotten out. Not all of us made it out. Some of us are still missing.
A policeman is washing himself in a burst standpipe. He’s NYPD officer Moses Cruz: “I was on Broadway and Lester. I heard a rumbling, looked up, and the first tower came down. I saw this big cloud of smoke, I pulled out people as best I could. The cloud came on us and then I just started to run. I got my mask a lot later, 10 minutes ago. The goal now? Avoid that area.”
By 1 p.m., they’re stopping people as high up as Canal Street. I’m on my way back in. The cloud has changed color from white to a thick black. I find a way down Church Street, and then Broadway. I reach an emergency triage center set up in a fire station on Reade at Broadway; there are eight or 10 such stations, says Ray, 30, from Manhattan, a volunteer. “Duane Reade has supplied us with masks and water. Now we’re waiting for people. Very few people are getting out right now.” He tells this story:

The first group of firemen that went in got trapped. Only two made it out. They were here. A whole battalion was lost. I didn’t ask which one — the two guys I treated, I was paying attention to their wounds. One of the two refused to get medical attention. He almost passed out trying to tell us who was in there, who was missing. They’d run, looked back, and the others were only a few yards behind them. We were explaining: “Yeah, but the building is down. They’re under there.” Only he and his buddy made it out. I sent him to the hospital, his buddy was OK.
At Church and Reade there’s nowhere else to go. It’s all cordoned off. Dust is welling up into the eyes. It’s hard to breath. Ahead, the blinking of fire engines within a dust cloud, white ash, a hot sun. It could almost be the West Bank. The engines are enveloped by the dust cloud. A bus pulls out of the cloud — it’s empty. No casualties on it. Then, a straggling procession of people, maybe 25. I turn to see a woman crouching down by a trash can, clutching her bag to her breast. Her name is Marion Mishkin. She’s an attorney. She has this to say:

I’m still in shock from what I saw when I got out [of the subway station]: Everyone looked like statues. They were covered with plaster. Dust, and gray. There were eyeglasses in the street, shoes in the street, papers. There was stationery from the offices blowing in the wind. I saw windows of blown-out buildings. I was walking down blocks that I knew I could look down to see the twin towers. And all I saw was a ghost made of black smoke. Then the sky filled with darkness that I never saw before. It was a wall of dark and wind and acrid debris. Smoke was descending and everyone was shuttled into the building. I was evacuated into a building down there. At that point the second tower blew. We’ve just been let out. I’m in shock right now. It’s a heartbreak. It’s almost not real now.
On West Broadway, I’m walking on a bed of ash. Posters for the abandoned Democratic primaries flap in the wind. Flowers, covered in white ash, look as though they were carved from stone. A policeman in a mask stops me. “The gas main might blow. We don’t know if there was poisonous gas in those bombs. Get the hell back.” I heed his warning and make my way back home.
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Hint magazine's dish artists are loudmouths on tap with bitchy wits, but who's listening?

By Roman Milisic

The glee in watching people who live by the sword is the sense that they’re about to die by it. For gossip columnists, that means some grand humiliation. As we chat, I can’t help hoping that comeuppance will choose today to visit itself on Australians Horacio Silva and Ben Widdicombe, whose weekly gossip column, “Chic Happens,” appears in Hint Fashion Magazine. Certainly, the two are being far from discreet:

“Liz Smith wouldn’t recognize good writing if it was dressed like Erin Brockovich!” snips Widdicombe, 30.

“Cindy Adams! I can actually hear Cindy dictating her copy over the phone,” snorts Silva, 35. “She’s got that old school tone: ‘The governor’s wife brought her dog and it was playing with my dogs.’”

Liz Smith and Cindy Adams have gossip columns in the New York Post. Smith may be the country’s highest-paid print journalist. They are both long-established figures in the trade. The “Chic Happens” column had its third birthday last month. Still, bitchy wit and a regular supply of toilet-wall gossip have given Silva and Widdicombe some notoriety in New York’s fashion media.

“There’s a willingness to undermine each other in fashion which is unique to that industry,” says Widdicombe, notwithstanding the slating he just gave Liz and Cindy. I throw out some more names.

Model Sophie Dahl? “Plus-size hangover.”

Gossip columnist Ted Casablancas? “Fashion fossil.”

Calvin Klein? “On his knees.” (He’s a regular target. “If there’s an opening in men’s underwear, then Calvin Klein will find it” runs one line from a recent “Chic Happens” column.)

Tina Brown? “Talk needs some help. Tina, if you’re listening,” Silva says, leaning into the tape recorder for dramatic effect, “the thing with Talk is, there’s nothing you want to talk about. When you go to bed with Disney, you put on Mickey Mouse ears.”

The Mickey Mouse line is one they’ve worked before. It’s not the only time they trawl up an old joke in the course of our conversation. Ack. When you talk in sound bites, you’re cursed to recall your slights verbatim.

We are lunching outside at the Park in fashionable Chelsea. Widdicombe and Silva’s oft-repeated opinions on fashion (Widdicombe hates it; Silva loves it) are clear from their outfits: Widdicombe is fitting all wrongly into his WK designer shirt; Silva’s washed-out sleeveless tee looks lovingly chosen. Meanwhile, the two Australians are telling me what they were struck with when they first arrived in the United States. “We were very struck with the sycophancy of Americans in journalism,” says Widdicombe. “There’s a willingness not to take people at face value in Australia, which there wasn’t here. We brought that, and it was really well received. I’m not saying that we did it, but in the three years since we started the column, we’ve noticed a real change in mainstream reporting of ridiculous celebrity coverage.”

“Look at [Vanity Fair editor] Graydon Carter!” says Silva. “He was the shredder at Spy, and now he’s just a shrouder.”

Remember that scene in “Crocodile Dundee” when the Aussie bushman pulls his foot-long bowie on a penknife-wielding New York mugger and says: “This is a knife?” That’s Silva and Widdicombe. At least, in their eyes.

They’ll crap anywhere, but the guys particularly relish dumping on the staff at the Condi Nast group (of which Vanity Fair is a part). They claim to have broken the story of Vogue editor Anna Wintour’s divorce, and they’ve certainly fed off it for months. Fashion media on fashion media. Is it cannibalism? No, according to them, it’s satire.

Have they ever worked for Condi Nast? No. And do they find that knives sticking out of backs makes a good career ladder?

“I don’t expect anyone to do me any favors,” says Widdicombe, signaling for another bottle of wine. “I’m not doing this for the goodie bags.”

Two waiters deliver the wine. Earlier in the week, “Chic Happens” ran a report on the shoddy service at the Park restaurant, and today, the maitre d’ is ready to fawn. Our pair of waiters is joined by a third, with extra napkins.

For two people who are trying not to build a career in fashion journalism, Widdicombe and Silva are building one remarkably well. Their column runs in Gotham magazine, and the Australian. Silva filled in during August as an editor at Fashions of the Times, the New York Times Sunday fashion supplement. (A kissy interview with the Times’ fashion editor Amy Spindler in the “Lunchvox” section of Hint led to a “Chic Happens” page in the Fashions of the Times spring issue.) Silva is a contributing editor at Jalouse magazine (a downtown competitor to Vogue). Widdicombe also works for Jalouse. Silva occasionally freelances for the New York Post’s Page Six. Widdicombe, ever two short footsteps behind him, has also done a spot of work for Page Six. Silva also writes for Time magazine. Widdicombe also writes for Citysearch. Now, do you know that these two men used to be lovers?

Silva’s family moved to Australia from Uruguay when he was 6. His mother was a machinist turned upholsterer, his father a builder’s laborer. He has a poor-boy-made-good shtick. By 28, Silva had founded Media Baby, a fashion photo archive, and was working for Sydney magazines such as Studio and Supermodel. In 1996, Silva took up Microsoft’s first editorial post in Australia: executive producer at Sidewalk.

Widdicombe had the more privileged childhood: boarding school in England, college at UCLA and the University of California at Irvine. He returned to Australia to pursue fiction writing, and after a stint on a local newspaper, he was hired by Silva as a restaurant reviewer at Sidewalk. They became an item. Silva was in a 14-year relationship; Widdicombe was “the homewrecker.”

With Silva’s Microsoft savings, they moved to New York in January 1998, taking the odd freelance writing assignment and partying in Silva’s fashion milieu every night. At the launch party of the fashion Web site, Silva met Hint founder Lee Carter, who offered him a gossip column.

That was three years ago. Hint still has just one full-timer: Lee Carter, publisher, art director and designer. It still operates on a shoestring (a “labor of love”). But, says Carter, “We’re doing very, very well. We get well over a million page views per month.”

That, Carter claims, translates to some 250,000 readers. In July, Hint won a Webby award, and the site was nominated for general excellence online at the ASME magazine awards in May (the only site of the five ASME nominations that doesn’t actually lose money). Given the demise of other content-driven Web sites such as Suck and Feed, the folks at Hint must be doing something right. What?

“The key to building a sustainable content company is to control costs,” says Jason Calacanis, editor at the Silicon Alley Reporter. “The boutique magazine, with a dozen or so staff, has proved to have the staying power.”

Certainly, Hint has done that. But is there any more to it? The “Chic Happens” team think so. For starters, says Silva, “We have no sacred cows. We go for advertisers. That’s a basic point of principle.”

“We scare people,” says Widdicombe. “If we were hit by a bus tomorrow, people would be dancing on our graves.”

So, in an industry where sponsors clearly have an impact on editorial content, “Chic Happens” gives advertisers no special treatment. That there is not one negative item directed at advertisers Diesel, Vivienne Westwood, Luxlook or Ford Motors in the archives must be simply coincidence.

Widdicombe’s point: They have enemies. Well, such is the gossip columnist’s lot. But how hated, or even known, are they?

“No one misses [the column],” says Amy Spindler, New York Times fashion editor.

“Everyone here [at Condi Nast] knows about Hint,” says Lucky magazine fashion editor Andrea Linett.

Yet, when Graydon Carter was contacted for this story, he’d never heard of Widdicombe and Silva. Liz Smith was also in the dark about the dish artists. “I don’t know who they are,” laughed Smith, delighting at the Erin Brockovich line, “but they’re entitled to their opinion.” She added: “I’ve never said that I’m a great writer. Generally, gossip writers aren’t.”

Even Richard Johnson at Page Six allowed that he didn’t really know the guys. “It was [substitute editor] Jared [Paul Stern]‘s idea to hire Horacio.”

On the other hand, there are some suspicious silences. Anna Wintour, via a Condi Nast publicist, issued a “no comment” when I contacted her office for this story. Rob Haskell, who writes “The Eye” for Women’s Wear Daily, and who has previously called “Chic Happens” “dangerous” and “not very credible,” also chose, under advice, to give “no comment.”

“Chic Happens” might indeed bring a modicum of fear to the lower echelons of fashion magazines (Condi Nast, Hearst and Fairchild represent the top three servers that log on to Hint), but the fashion press is a small pond, and one that Widdicombe and Silva haven’t yet crawled out of. Silva offers another reason for Hint’s, and their own, success. That they’ve “raised the bar” on fashion writers’ commitment to journalism.

Cut to a Tuesday night in June. Silva and Widdicombe are on duty. I’m here to see this “commitment” at work. We’re at the Globe Restaurant on Park Avenue South where IMG models are throwing a party. The guys recline on a long leather sofa by the window, buttressed behind a table of champagne flutes and a clutch of other gossip columnists from the New York Post and the New York Observer. But no one’s much interested in gossip. The dancing 18-year-old models might as well be projected on a screen for all the interaction these people want.

“We’re basically out all the time, one of us is,” shouts Widdicombe, above the ’80s disco.

“You can’t manufacture the gossip side of it,” yells Silva. “We usually write our column in about half an hour. But we obviously search a lot.”

How? They have a hoary line about hanging around the toilets at Condi Nast, or going through Calvin Klein’s trash. The vision is very hands-on: I imagine them working parties, cozying up to P.R. people and keeping a network of snitches (stylists, assistants, shoeshines) in their pockets. Not a bit, they admit. They go out, stand at a bar and hope it comes to them. Luckily, gossip has its own momentum. You don’t need to give it a push to find it rolling toward you. Even allegations without a leg to stand on find ways to propel themselves.

“It’s not getting the gossip, it’s getting people to bloody well shut up, that’s the problem,” says Widdicombe. “People want to talk.”

In a timely illustration of the point, a frizzy-haired young lady tumbles into the group. For a moment it’s all mwa-mwas and “Darling, how have you beens?” This is Pia. Silva and Widdicombe met her once before, at a party during fashion week. They have stayed in touch by e-mail.

“Did you use the story I sent you?” she squeals.

They did.

The boys get a lot of e-mails. Often from mysterious Hotmail accounts. It’s a convenient way for a tattletale to hide his or her identity, but it also makes it hard to know that a story is bona fide. Anonymity can often mean ulterior motives. (One self-described “deep throat,” had boasted the previous week, “I manipulate [Widdicombe and Silva]. It’s totally strategic.”

“I do normally try to tread quite carefully,” says Silva. “For example, there’s something that Ben won’t let me run, because it’s unsubstantiated: A superannuated supermodel allegedly selling her butt for $100K a night.”

Widdicombe cuts in: “First, there’s no way to check. That’s one reason. Second, it just doesn’t ring true. My spider sense tells me it’s not true. [The model] was recently part of a charity auction in Cannes, offering to do some public act that would amuse the crowd. To me, knowing how people think, and how gossip works, I can just see that fact morphing into this item.”

Well, they must have found the proof, for this blind item ran the following week: “Which celebrity supermodel is rumored to have worked through her fortune and is discreetly letting it be known in the circles of Europe’s super rich that she can be, ahem, accompanied for $100,000 an evening?”

And what of times when such investigative journalism runs dry?

“We have no problem summarizing what the Daily Mirror has run,” notes Widdicombe, whose role it is to scour news sources on the Internet and abroad. But, “We always add our own joke. We never just run what they run.”

Raising the bar? Well, it’s not Watergate. It’s not even Fashiongate. Even Amy Spindler admits, “The column is as much about angles and spin as news. They can take the same item everyone has, and just give it that Lampoon line that makes it snide enough to call a scoop.”

Consider Silva and Widdicombe as intrepid balloonists. Their M.O.: Stitch a life-size silk replica of any ego in the fashion world and get bitchy hairdressers to talk into it for an hour. Presto! It’s an air balloon carrying our duo skyward. (Look! They’re waving at us!) Exactly how high do the guys hope to soar?

Says Silva: “It’s no secret that we’ve auditioned for E! and Style and that we’re interested in expanding the brand” to accommodate areas like Hollywood, movie culture, sports. “I guess we could have fun with pretty much any industry.”

During New York fashion week in February they had a slot on “Full Frontal Fashion,” delivering snarky comments about unsuspecting victims. It was not a happy experience. (“We had no fucking idea whether to look at the camera,” admits Widdicombe). No one at the Metro channel wished to comment. They weren’t invited back. Still, in June, Silva appeared on a new cable TV show “Big Spenders,” discussing another type of celebrity: Lil’ Kim, Courtney Love and Madonna. And the day after the IMG party, the two of them are filming a slot for a BBC retrospective on the fashion spoof comedy “Absolutely Fabulous.”

“We’re becoming known as loudmouths on tap. TV wants a little 20-second grab, and we can deliver that,” says Silva.

But whether they can continue to deliver their brand of anti-industry dish on television as they have on the Net remains to be seen. There’ll be a small army of executives and lawyers climbing into their hot-air balloon. If they are expecting the same sort of hegemony that they have enjoyed at Hint, Silva isn’t saying: “It will be interesting to see if we do fall prey to the same Graydon Carter syndrome. Going from biting the hand that feeds, to kissing the ring finger.”

It’s getting late. Silva drains a final complimentary champagne and looks around. The Globe Restaurant is almost totally empty. The models have left, the gossip columnists have left, even Widdicombe has slipped off with a friend. Silva doesn’t want to go home. Luckily, he knows of a birthday party for the model May Andersen at Suite 16. It’s a short cab ride. Of course, he can go right in, but oddly, Silva spends some time outside the 8th Avenue nightclub, using his sway to get less connected strangers through the door. Maybe the laborer’s son still knows what it’s like to stand on the wrong side of the velvet rope. Maybe he just has a lot of karma to burn off.