Retracing My Steps
This year, for the first time since that morning, I walked the route I took on September 11, 2001 — from my old office to the Brooklyn Bridge. I wanted to see whether the streets still held what I remembered.
I've written before about my morning in Lower Manhattan and about the kindness of the strangers who took me in that afternoon. For years, those two accounts were as close as I wanted to get. I remembered the geography of that day precisely — the intersection, the bridge, the direction of the crowd — but I had never gone back and physically stood in it.
This year I did. I found myself in New York with an afternoon free, and instead of avoiding the neighborhood the way I usually do, I decided to retrace my steps. Literally. I started where my office had been, at One Seaport Plaza off John Street, and I walked toward the water the way I'd walked away from it sixteen years earlier.
The first thing that struck me was how ordinary it all was. People on their phones. Delivery carts. Tourists looking for coffee. The same streets that had once been ankle-deep in ash and paper were just streets again — busy, indifferent, alive. There's something both comforting and disorienting about that. The city absorbed the worst day of its modern history and kept moving, because that's what cities do, because that's what people do.
The city absorbed the worst day of its modern history and kept moving — because that's what cities do, because that's what people do.
I walked past the memorial. I hadn't planned to spend much time there, but I did. The two pools sit in the footprints of the towers, water falling endlessly into the dark, and the names are cut into the bronze all the way around. I looked for a few I knew. I found them. I ran my fingers over the letters the way everyone does, and I stood there longer than I meant to.
What I noticed most was the quiet. Even with crowds moving through, there's a hush around those pools that people seem to fall into without being asked. Sixteen years on, the reverence is still automatic. Children who weren't alive in 2001 lowered their voices. That mattered to me more than I expected.
Then I kept walking, toward the Brooklyn Bridge, the same direction I'd gone that day. The last time I made this walk, I was covered in dust, angry, frightened, and completely unsure of what waited on the other side. This time the bridge was full of tourists taking photos of the skyline — a skyline that now includes One World Trade, standing where the towers once stood. I stopped at roughly the point where, all those years ago, I'd asked myself the three questions I've never forgotten: what if I'd walked instead of taking the taxi; how many people were gone; and what on earth I would do once I reached Brooklyn.
Standing there again, I didn't have new answers. But I had sixteen years of distance, and that changes what the questions feel like. The fear has softened into something closer to gratitude — for the choices that put me where I was that morning, for the strangers who carried me through the afternoon, and for all the ordinary days I've been lucky enough to have since.
I finished the walk, crossed into Brooklyn, and this time I knew exactly where I was going. That, in its own small way, felt like the whole point. What was once terrifying and unknown is now familiar. The route that once led me into the arms of strangers now leads me home.
I don't know if I'll retrace these steps every year. But I'm glad I did this once. Some things you have to stand inside again to understand how far you've come. However you remember this day — remember, and then keep walking.
