Twenty five years ago Dan Nicholls, a London based trader, printed out a page of headlines from the Bloomberg terminal. He put it in his desk as a reminder.
Faded and rumpled, it’s incredibly evocative.
Three quarters of the way down the page, at precisely 3 p.m. London time, there is a headline that marks the event that prompted Dan to print it out:
*WORLD TRADE CENTER TOWER COLLAPSES
That news is preceded and followed by related stories covering everything from stocks and the dollar plunging to the Sears Tower in Chicago being evacuated.
Everyone who lived through 9/11 remembers where they were.
I was the New York Bureau Chief for Bloomberg News. It was a Tuesday. The sky was blue. The air was crisp. I was at the office, which at the time was located at 499 Park Avenue.
The first plane hit the North Tower at 8:46 a.m.
We saw it on CNN. Stock market editor Phil Serafino sent the first headlines. Reporter Josh Hamilton filed the first article.
The initial story made it clear we didn’t understand the scope of what was happening.
When the second plane hit, Tom Cahill raised his hand and volunteered to head to the site. Michael McKee was already downtown at a conference.
When the towers collapsed, everyone’s cell phone blacked out.
We couldn’t reach Mike or Tom for hours.
The subways and buses stopped running. People fled the city and by the afternoon there were virtually no cars or taxis in the streets.
Everyone who worked downtown had to walk home.
Looking out the window onto Park Avenue you could see thousands of people streaming north. The mass of people marching uptown covered the entire avenue and sidewalks. Most walked silently.
Mike made his way back to the office on foot. He was covered in dust, but otherwise unscathed. I was relieved when Tom showed up later.
That day changed the world and everyone who experienced it.
A quarter of a century later it’s getting harder to remember the small details, like how we had to shut our apartment windows from the dust that blanketed the city.
Bloomberg removes headlines after a few days so the uppercase announcement of the tower collapsing is no longer online.
It probably exists only on the piece of paper Dan Nicholls stuffed in a drawer.
In many ways the tragedy seems like a long time ago.
But once a year it seems like yesterday.
And it's a day that if you were there you will never forget.