There are certainly more important and more tragic stories of the day of 9-11 than mine. But today I was moved to share my story of how I was touched by that event in a rather unusual way.
That crisp, beautiful morning started out in a normal way for me, as it did with many other people. I was still working in north Jersey in the Summit/Short Hills area in an Advertising agency at that time, where I directed a Print Art Dept.
I was running a bit late, and had been listening to a CD in the car rather than having the radio on. When I arrived on my office floor, everyone was huddled around a very small TV, and I was brought up to speed quickly that a plane had hit the Twin tower building. Everyone was shaken up and that intensified as time passed and the second plane hit and the full horror of it set in. Some people were calm, but many of us became panic stricken- especially if they had someone in NYC and they began trying to reach them.
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I admit my own reaction was fear, and I began to pray silently, unable to focus on work. Not knowing what might come next and considering all possibilities open, I knew I had to leave. My children were many miles away in Howell and I needed to get closer to home while I could, to be with them. As I drove through Summit, NJ, at the top of the mountain, there was a crowd gathering- and I stopped for a moment. From there you had a clear, unobstructed view of Manhattan and the Twin towers. It is a sight I will never forget, for even at that distance the heavy, black smoke was pouring out, and you knew it was not going to be a good outcome. As I drove the fifty miles back home, the towers began to come down. I arrived to find my neighbor in great distress, his young sister worked on the 22nd floor of Tower One. He soon left for NYC.
At that time, one of my company’s bigger clients was the NY Waterway, the ferryboats that operated from NJ. They began to play a very big part in getting people home that day and became one of the only ways you could get to work in certain areas during the following weeks and months.
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We had many beautiful, aerial photos we had commissioned to be taken of the skyline and their docks, which we used for their all their ads. The next few weeks were hectic, it was necessary to prepare and run ads with the new ferry schedules. We knew we could not use the photos. After several weeks the client decided they wanted to try to use something to show the locations of the docks, and so the task fell to my staff to amend the existing photos.
Every day we first had to identify all the buildings in each shot which were damaged, since there were others in addition to the towers that had to be worked on too. Then we started the tasks to painstakingly remove the buildings from the skyline, filling it in with cloned sky or shadows, rebuilding buildings where parts had been covered by the larger towers until we had a complete building, and then a skyline. It was a sad, mournful activity, which constantly reminded us of the horror. It took almost a full month and we did not complete that many photos due to the difficulty, and the realization that we could never rebuild what was there, no matter how skilled we were at retouching.
The new tower has risen, the reflecting pools are there and soon a museum and visitors areas, which I hear will be finally open next spring. I have never been able to bring myself to go to the 9-11 site –but perhaps it’s now time to go see the skyline again.
Pat Linde-Neidermeyer, Veltri Realtors
