Manhattan

We are the shareholder, the majority shareholder of three Gucci stores here in, um, America.

One is in Dallas, one is in South Beach, Miami, Florida, and the third is in Manhattan on Saks Fifth Avenue.

And the thing is he's showing the cars.

He's in the Maserati and the Lamborghini and-

We know what's happened from a health standpoint for many of the first responders who later lost their lives.

Many of those who were told that the air was clean and they'd be fine, and continued to operate in the heart of Manhattan and throughout the surrounding areas, uh, who have also suffered health issues.

W- we're all well aware of this, and, uh, it's just to varying degrees.

It still has a profound effect on our society, a profound effect on the way we live our lives.

Um, Uncle Fran was somebody that I knew, uh, Captain Frank Callahan, that, um, I knew in passing.

But, you know, people that were very, very close to him, he's an in-law, technically, of my father's, um, those are people that are very near and dear to my heart.

So for example, his favorite sister-in-law, my Aunt Rita, was the person that I walked down the streets of Manhattan from Ladder 35 to, uh, Lincoln Center to Alice Tully Hall, where he was remembered in December of 2001.

Once they obviously could not find him, he was declared to have passed.

So do you have an illness that's on their list? And aside from respiratory conditions and some gastric, virtually every cancer you can think of is now on that list.

And two, do you meet the health program's definition of substantial presence, which is either present on the morning of 9/11 in Lower Manhattan or Brooklyn Heights when the towers collapsed and thus caught in what is colloquially called the dust cloud, but it was a lot more than that.

Mm-hmm.

Or B, do you have a substantial number of hours? And it goes between four and 400 hours that you have to prove.

Yeah.

This was, uh, a commute for me up the New Jersey Turnpike to my office, uh, that was near the Meadowlands.

I had, I had one office in Manhattan, one in New Jersey, and that day I went to the New Jersey office for some reason.

Mm.

Also, penalties up to $1 million per child if found negligent.

The law is the first of its kind in the U.S. And a moving tribute to 9-11 in Midtown Manhattan today.

The city's Bryant Park lined up 2,753 empty chairs representing the total number of people who died at the Twin Towers.

Those chairs were arranged facing south towards Ground Zero.

We're going to find out and, of course, make sure that everybody knows on the air.

These are, of course, the two twin Trade Center buildings that are down at the foot of Manhattan.

They really are the beacons of New York.

It was there that there was the explosion a couple of years ago brought about by terrorists.

Except for six of us on a C-135 and pilots and fighter jets flying all over the country as I listened to them squawk their location, clearing sector by sector.

Now, that is the last you will hear about me for a while, because the hour is not mine, because here's what the country did next.

That same evening, before the dust had even settled in lower Manhattan, members of Congress, both parties, gathered on the steps of the U.S. Capitol, a building that we will later learn was probably very likely spared only by what happened in a Pennsylvania field.

They made statements, and then unplanned, unscripted, somebody started singing.

So after we get back from the C-135 lands at Andrews, Secret Service picks us up.

I think the FEMA director actually stayed there because he immediately got on the flight and went to lower Manhattan.

I went to the White House.

And then when the meetings were finished, I went back to this little dump that I lived in up on Capitol Hill.

I was a college sophomore, just waking up in the dorms.

My then-girlfriend had grown up in Manhattan, and the news devastated her.

In the hours that followed, we clustered around TVs, surreal mixing with real.

Mostly, I remember the confusion and the fear.

First, we want to return to that morning in 2001 in the financial district.

And we're joined by Geraldine Baum, who's a former New York correspondent and bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times.

And she was in lower Manhattan covering the attacks that day for the newspaper.

Welcome to Forum.

And there was this newsflash.

I was living in my Brooklyn apartment on Union Street in Carroll Gardens, just working at a job in Manhattan.

I would commute every day into the city.

And I heard a newsflash that was like a plane has crashed into into the World Trade Center.

And I still, in my mind, I can still see the image of the burning buildings.

In my head, I can still see the burning buildings and just the atmosphere on the Brooklyn Promenade as people are watching.

If anyone has ever been to New York City, been to the Promenade, you know what an incredible view of lower Manhattan you have there, how close you are to lower Manhattan.

Because Brooklyn, that part of Brooklyn is way closer to lower Manhattan than Medtown Manhattan is to lower Manhattan.

In the city.

In the area of the 9-11 on the south end of Manhattan.

That's pretty... remarkable

it is uh i'll try to go back and find the beautiful text from earlier that referenced that same thing sheila texting in and said i remember exactly where i was when news broke of the attack i was teaching at foley elementary and was walking to the office while my class was at pe a teacher passing by asked me if i had heard what happened and told me it was on the news i walked on to the office and some staff members were gathered in front of the tv and As the pictures were being shown of the towers, I stood there in disbelief with such sadness.

So we would monitor NBC 15, happened to be the Today Show, and suddenly they were showing the plane sticking into the building, the jet plane, and it was all speculation at that point.

It was just a crystal clear day.

The skies in Manhattan and I think even in Mobile were as blue as they could be.

So it was like, hmm.