Battery Park City

It's going to be a heck of a cleanup effort.

How far down Battery Park City was that affected?

Well, the power is out in the lower part of Manhattan on the west side.

So there is no power at this point.

So that's why we had to bring in the lights to light up the area so that they can do the rescue effort.

And the people that live at Battery Park City have been evacuated.

They were taken to New Jersey.

So I don't know when that will be back.

What do you mean they left your mom?

Meaning they couldn't get to Battery Park City, where she lives.

Okay.

But at this point they weren't going to get her yet.

What can they do? Other people wondering about those blood centers that Larry Cantor was just speaking about.

Others live downtown, down by Battery Park City.

They want to know, will they be able to go home? Of course, this is a much calmer scene than it was about six hours ago.

I was three blocks from the World Trade Centers when they came down.

Cars look like they have this gray snow on top of them.

And this is pretty far east.

Further west when I was on top of the building on the 17th floor, all of Battery Park City had this white film over it.

And I was near City Hall a little while ago, and that is all, again, filled with soot.

The artist Agnes Dennis... planted two acres of wheat on this landfill.

But the space here that was completed would be a partial foundation for Battery Park City, which wouldn't really be fully developed, you know, until the 1980s, 1990s.

But, you know, so here in the 1970s, there was this big, flat, barren area of land right across from the Trade Center.

It's extraordinary putting all that debris to good use.

Covered in ash, the battered firefighter refused to give up his search for his wife and went back to their apartment.

Dan pounded on the door of their Battery Park City apartment, but no one answered.

It was then he thought that he had lost Gene.

The overwhelmed firefighter left the building and sat on this bench and prayed.

Good morning.

Um, so I was I moved into Battery Park City on September 1, 2001, along with my daughter who was in entering starting third grade at the public elementary school on Chamber Street.

And on the day of the event, I was actually at the school, and when we were told, obviously, leave as soon as possible, we were lucky enough to get out of the area before any towers fell, even though my daughter did see people dropping from the buildings as we walked across Chambers Street to the subway, which was still running.

And then we were obviously out of the area for a month, and then our lease was not canceled, so we were back in Battery Park City, for another 11 months until the end of our lease, the end of August, the following year.

And I'm in good health.

I'm 83.

So I was very familiar with the building and I just could not comprehend that the buildings were gone.

But it became a reality when we evacuated from our building at 52 Broadway and myself and my manager at the time, we went looking for his wife who he could not get in touch with, who lived in Battery Park City, which is right by Ground Zero.

um and we started up towards the world trade center and we crossed one of the normal intersections we would walk and we looked up northbound and we could not believe our eyes what would normally be the twin towers towering over everything in the lower manhattan skyline was gone and in its place was a smoldering mound of metal and and debris and and we looked down at the ground and it was almost like a couple of inches of snow on the ground.

There was debris, paper, the infamous ground zero dust was everywhere, covering us, covering the ground.