By Beth Tancredi Chunn
There are places in our lives that become part of our identity long before we realize it. For me, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the World Trade Center was one of those places.
Two World Trade Center wasn’t just my home away from home for the time I spent there. But because of what it gave back to me: a sense of pride, colleagues who became friends and time with my sister, Heather, who worked in the same tower just eight floors above.
Truth be told, I knew the significance of working in those buildings from the first day that I set foot in the South Tower. I just didn’t know the indelible mark it would leave on me (and the rest of the world) in the long run.
The world we worked in
By the late ’90s, the financial industry was in the middle of a transformation. Technology was rewriting the rules. Digital platforms were emerging. Markets were shifting. I was working in the interactive marketing department at Morgan Stanley on the 64th floor of the WTC’s South Tower. At the time, my department had rolled out an online blanking platform for private clients. It felt like standing at the edge of something new, exciting and full of possibility. And there I was, a young professional not even 30, in the middle of it all.
While we skated right through the much-anticipated Y2K “crisis,” the new century found its own way to throw a wrench into our faith in technology. The dotcom bubble burst, and the optimism of the late ’90s had given way to questions about whether tech was the hero or the villain to the future of business.
Still, despite the uncertainty of the markets, Heather and I would meet for lunch in the plaza or stroll to our favorite pizza place for a slice regularly. Sometimes we would go for a power walk around nearby Battery Park. We would laugh. We would gripe.
When it came time for my wedding in November 2000, Heather and I decided it would be nice for our grandfather, a self-proclaimed “country bumpkin,” to see up close where we worked since he was in town. I remember watching him take it all in, proud to see how far we have come in our professional lives but overwhelmed by the shadow cast on him from the towers above.
When familiar becomes unfamiliar
Nine months later, on Sept. 11, I arrived at my office just after 8:30 a.m. I was thinking about meetings, deadlines, the usual list of things that feel urgent until life reminds you what urgent really means.
At 8:46 a.m., the world shifted. A sudden explosion from the North Tower and a rumbling in ours. Just 20 floors above us in the next building, flames shot out of several windows along with black smoke and debris.
Our more senior colleagues — some of whom were present for the 1993 bombing at the WTC — reacted quickly, calling 911 and corralling us toward the stairs to exit the building.
Even in uncertainty, there was a sense of calm and order in that stairwell. Perhaps if we had known what was happening outside, we would have been more hurried or frantic. My legs, on the other hand, seemed to know that we were in trouble in a way that my brain could not comprehend, because they shook furiously with every step I took.
At 9:03 a.m., as I rounded the 20th floor, the building rocked again — wildly this time, knocking me to the wall. And once again (or still) my shaking legs reminded me that something scary was happening.
Although the pace picked up, level heads prevailed. No matter what was going through the minds of people in the stairwell, we all checked on one another. Strangers offered reassurance. Colleagues made sure no one was left behind. The often-cutthroat world of financial services revealed itself in the most human way possible.
I had the peace of mind of knowing that Heather, then in her second trimester of pregnancy, was away on vacation. To this day, I maintain that her absence is the only reason I am alive today. I would not have left the building without her, and finding her may not have been possible.
Beyond that, there was a complete feeling of disorientation in a place I thought I knew better than almost anywhere. Hallways I had walked a thousand times suddenly felt foreign. Exits I had never noticed became lifelines. The building that had been part of my daily routine no longer made sense. If not for the flow of the foot traffic, I’m not sure I would have known how to get out of the building.
I remember firefighters climbing the stairs as we descended, moving with a calm steadiness I still can’t fully comprehend. I don’t know their names. I don’t know their stories. But you better believe that as soon as I wrote those words, their faces flashed in my mind as clearly as I saw them that day.
We were leaving. They were going in.
The long walk out
When I finally stepped outside, the world was unrecognizable. The plaza I had crossed countless times was covered in debris. The sky was gray.
The eerie calm from the stairwell had gone. The crowds outside panicked. After all, they had just witnessed two planes hit the World Trade Center. Having been on the inside while it was all going on, we were none the wiser.
And yet, people kept moving. “Go north or go home,” one cop directed. And so we walked away from the unimaginable and toward whatever came next.
Communication came in fragments given the overburdened technology of the time. Two-way pager messages, Blackberrys, brief calls. We also relied on rumors and updates shared across crowds.
One car turned up its radio to give everyone a news update and many people gathered to listen. The reporter’s voice hung in the air, a deep and solemn echo off the buildings.
The further we moved uptown, the more silent the streets became. But one thing remained: a shared understanding that we were responsible for one another. Who was safe? Who had made it out? Who still needed help?
That feeling has never left me.
In the hours that followed, I found myself in a small office that was an ad agency used by the Morgan Stanley employee I ended up walking with, on Spring Street with colleagues — some I knew well, some I barely knew at all — listening to the radio, trying to reach loved ones, trying to understand what had happened.
I called my grandfather from that office on Spring Street, the same grandfather who experienced my “home away from home” just once less than a year earlier. I don’t know what I said to his answering machine or if he ever even got the message. We never spoke of it.
What banking meant then — and what it means now
When people talk about financial services, they often talk about systems, markets, platforms and performance. But on Sept. 11, all of that fell away. What remained was the human core of the industry — the people who checked on each other, who stayed until every colleague was accounted for, who walked what felt like miles to get someone home, who opened their doors to coworkers who had nowhere to go.
In the days and weeks that followed, we attended memorials and funerals. We regularly saw first responders in large groups in their dress blues heading off to mourn their own losses. We slowed down. Held doors for one another. The people of New York City and those who commuted there were simultaneously the saddest and friendliest community, continuing the unspoken accountability for one another.
While the early 2000s were already a turning point for banking, the response to the events of Sept. 11 created a different kind of inflection point for New Yorkers, for the country and for society as a whole: one that told the story of the people who refused to let the story end in loss alone.
And for me, I struggled for many years to find peace and closure. But 25 years later, I understand that although Sept. 11, 2001, is a defining moment in my life, it is not a story that defines me.
Beth Tancredi Chunn is a regular contributor to ABA Banking Journal. Morgan Stanley was the largest tenant in the World Trade Center in 2001, with nearly 2,700 employees in the south tower. Another 1,000 Morgan Stanley employees worked at 5 World Trade Center, which was also reduced to rubble. Morgan Stanley notes on its website that 13 employees died on Sept. 11. On her life since, Beth reports: “Within what felt like two weeks, we were back in the city in an office in midtown. Worklife continued, for me in a state of hypervigilance where everything that seemed slightly ‘off’ felt like the next tragedy waiting to happen. I stuck it out through one more move with the office over to Third Avenue less than a year later. I left Morgan Stanley in 2003 after having my first child.” Her career took her back into stops that included a return to financial services at Merrill Lynch, to political writing and now in healthcare.
