East River

So Howe crosses the Narrows, goes up through Brooklyn, takes the Heights, and then Washington is up there with his troops, and he falls back to Brooklyn Heights, and they get their asses handed to them.

And Washington barely escapes with his army across the East River to Manhattan.

where they're safe for the time being.

But really, things are not looking good right off the bat.

How many people are with you, Jim? I'm with one other person, and I'm told that people are aware of this.

I'm on the 86th floor on the east side of the building facing the East River.

At what time did you get...

If I'm

Well, you should have, Johnny.

Because then you'd know what you're going to look like floating down the dirty East River.

Sorry, Mitzi, but...

Hey, wait a minute.

Okay.

And then planes flying up and down the East River, and the d- they were 150 decibels.

These were fighter jets, and the sound of those was, made your eardrums literally vibrate.

So, very chaotic and, and yeah, very, very clear memories of that day.

So we, we, we get through the, the tunnels, the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel.

So it's a, it's a tunnel that goes un-un-under the East River, Hudson River from Brooklyn to, um, Manhattan.

We, we come out of there onto a turning bank, and it's West Side Highway.

I, I call it West.

It's a horrific scene here.

There's... debris flying through the air over the East River here into Brooklyn.

What appears to be paper, this is obviously a horrible disaster.

It had to have been at least one plane, possibly two.

We're going to be running extensive delays, no doubt, on the inbound Holland Tunnel because, as you know, of course, that's going to bring you right into lower Manhattan.

George Washington Bridge is running about a 30-minute delay.

And, of course, this very clearly visible from any of the bridges, especially up along the lower end of the East River.

That's going to cause delays there, too.

We probably won't.

I read a detail that 100 years ago, 1,000 people died in New York City in a very famous General Slocum fire on the East River, 110 years ago, whatever it was.

Mm-hmm.

Nobody you know.

After a while, a train would depart for Jamaica, Queens, where buses would take us to points east.

And when that train exited the tunnel beneath the East River, a customary look to the right where the Twin Towers stood for decades, there was nothing but a cloud of smoke or dust.

Or what we later learned were the vaporized remnants of people.

In the booth, I didn't see until later on the people who made the horrible choice of jumping to their death as fire enveloped them.