On Sept. 11, 2001, Catherine Underhill Fitzpatrick was a feature writer and fashion columnist at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, on assignment in New York to cover Fashion Week runway shows. Instead, she rushed toward the unfolding attacks on the World Trade Center and filed real-time, award-winning reports for publication that day and all that week. Below is an excerpt from her memoir, “Recorder of Deeds .(2022, Bedazzled Ink Publishing).

Chapter 6

Cataclysm

Tuesday night

September 11, 2001

 Bryant Park is lovely this evening. In a perfect world, models would be gliding like swans in the tents here, staring into a barrage of camera strobes. But the lovers of fashion have deserted the tents, and the park is quiet as a cemetery.

Up the way, 2,500 men and women pack the pews of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Cardinal Edward M. Egan, a priest of 57 years, a bishop of 29 years, a cardinal of 17 years, a prince of the Roman Catholic Church, is gowned in silk vestments and a scarlet skullcap. His stentorian voice rings through the soaring edifice and out to the sidewalk. When he refers to Ground Zero as Ground Hero, applause rises and swells. At each of the great bronze doors, armed officers stand sentinel, shoulder radios crackling, boot soles shuffling on sanctified ground. I make a note of it.

The crowd files out. Behind them, an organist plays an unusual recessional, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” 

The shadows are lengthening. Dusk is settling on dust, layering unease over heartache.

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 Across the street, the flags ringing Rockefeller Center droop in the still evening air. Meant to be a beacon of global unity, they represent every member country of the United Nations. I jot a line in my notebook, something about the flags wishing themselves halfway down the poles. Spotlights bathe the golden sculpture of Prometheus in illumination, befitting a hero of ancient Greek mythology. I make a note of that, too.

By now, most of the wailing sirens have gone silent. I assume crews of would-be rescuers will work through the night at Ground Zero, but many firefighters and paramedics probably have gone home or returned to their stations, seeking what solace they can. I’m sure that shell-shocked tourists are hunkering in hotels, punching telephone buttons for nonexistent room service, too terrified to set out on foot for a restaurant meal which, by the way, is nowhere to be found. I envision bewildered parents throughout The City That Never Sleeps crawling into bed with their bewildered children, promising to keep the lights on all night.

The last of the day’s sunlight slices through slender voids between buildings, gilding the upper city in gorgeousness, as if in recompense for the human misery at the foot of the island. 

Another few blocks and I am back in Times Square, where this eternal day began. It should be impossible to stand in the middle of Broadway minute after minute without a single car, truck, bus, or taxi swerving around me, but I do. The fevered Crossroads of the World is eerily calm and all but deserted.

Wait. Is that music?

No. Birdsong.

The gigantic, kinetic kaleidoscope that on any other night is Broadway at 46th Street is so quiet tonight that I hear a bird chirping. A sparrow, maybe. Or a warbler from Central Park.  I write a few phrases.

     A choir of birds 

     Dulcet elegies 

     For a city in lament

It’s nearly midnight. Although I’m bone-tired, my mind keeps returning to the moment the North Tower blasted floury remains by the tonnage into the air, across the land, onto everything on the land. Time and again, I replay the collapse. Each time my thoughts skitter off to earlier eras, as if to avoid reliving my trauma on a day of catastrophic horror. I make a few notes on a pad of hotel paper. While the idea is fresh, I want to get it down. I start with phrases, knit them into sentences, and then into a long, rambling paragraph. I’ll fix it later.

  Granulated clouds boil up avenues paved over land, land right here where Lenape tribes once set up summer encampments, waded the  salt marshes with spears in hand, probing the banks for oysters to roast over open fires.

  Bankers and merchants from Holland arrived by sea, fleshy men in waistcoats and breeches and buckled shoes, men lured by the aroma of money. Soon, they raised a settlement here, right here on land they assumed was theirs. They named the place New Amsterdam, and quickly, for this was important to them, they erected a fort to defend their lucrative fur trade. Here. Right here.

“Recorder of Deeds”

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  They brought over their pale wives and children, for the Dutchmen were wealthy and they were lonely, and they assumed now is forever, which it is not, ever.

  In time, the British Royal Navy sailed into view, warships and transports laden with disciplined troops and mighty guns. Shots rang out. Fires raged. Blood spilled. The British fought the Dutch to the death, here, right here, and prevailed.

  And stayed, the British, for they, too, made assumptions. Unlike the Lenape but quite like the Dutch, the British figured this land was their land, a fact disproved when General Washington rallied what was left of his troops and fought the British to the death. Here. 

  In victory, the general was inaugurated the first president of the United States of America, and took the oath of office at Federal Hall, which is a matter of blocks from the glorious towers with ice-white ribs burned to flinders this very day. So close, I could walk from there to here. In fact, I did.

So much history under the dust this night. Not dust. Not debris, either. Remnants of what was and is no more. Remains of those who lived and died on a sunny September morning.

I lay down my pen, lost in visions of downtown Manhattan. In my mind, I see a vast cloud swirling from the Battery over open water to a torch held aloft, one that has welcomed armadas of immigrants — craftsmen, clockmakers and cooks, shoemakers and stonemasons, pig farmers and such. Released from quarters below the waterline, they stood in families — fathers in caps and grandmothers in shawls, boys in knee pants and girls in pinafores leaning out over deck railings, cheering even as they wept for joy at the sight of a copper torch and, beyond it, the great, teeming, vertical city, doorway to a land fertile with promise. 

In my hotel room, I stand at the single window and gaze out, mesmerized. Flecks of grit swirl like dry snowflakes on currents of night air as the remains of the day rise and fall by the billions.

Remember, I tell myself.

Remember every bit and piece of September 11, 2001, when the world tilted off true, when time stretched like clocks in a Dali painting, minutes dragged like the snail-crawl of eternity and hours sped like comets.

From morning coffee and a sidewalk stroll to midnight melancholy at a hotel window, remember it all.

I look up to a wedge of night sky. Above a burnt and blistered city, a city in mourning at the edge of a nation bereaved, stars spatter the heavens. 

Catherine Underhill Fitzpatrick is a retired metro daily newspaper feature writer and columnist, and the author of four published books. Two years ago, she and her husband moved from Florida to Castle Pines, exchanging sandy beach views for Rocky Mountain vistas. It was, she says, a most satisfactory trade.