At approximately 8:50 a.m. on Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001, I was pushing a stroller carrying Eli, my 2-year-old son, toward the Borough Hall subway station in downtown Brooklyn. My wife, Jennifer, was already teaching her ethics class at Baruch College in Manhattan, and I was in charge of taking Eli to his daycare center at the City University of New York, which was located on Fifth Avenue, two blocks north of the Empire State Building. The ride on the N train usually took half an hour, and the route passed underneath the World Trade Center at what was then the Cortlandt Street station.

Eli had already begun memorizing the stops along the way between Borough Hall and 34th Street, and liked to ride in the front car so that he could look out the front window from the vantage point of the subway motorman. Another of my son’s quirks was that he tended to anthropomorphize tall buildings. “Hello, Empire State Building,” “Hello, World Trade Center,” he would say whenever we were walking in Manhattan or on the Brooklyn Heights Promenade and he caught sight of the distinctive architectural markers that topped the structures. For that reason, Cortlandt Street held special resonance, which he’d sometimes note when he announced our arrival as though he were the actual conductor: “This is Cortlandt Street station, World Trade Center.”

As Eli and I approached the Borough Hall subway entrance, I was struck by the number of people gathered at a street corner, looking up in the direction of lower Manhattan. When I asked what was going on, a woman told me a plane had hit the twin towers. From her slightly impatient tone — that eye-rolling “what now?” attitude that is so common among New Yorkers — I assumed the crash must have been an accident. There was a faint cloud of smoke in the air, but it was such a warm, sunny day that it was almost impossible to imagine anything might ruin it. The Brooklyn skyline obscured a view of the World Trade Center, and with cellphone technology still limited to phone calls and texts, visuals of what had happened weren’t instantly available.

At approximately 8:50 a.m. on Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001, I was pushing a stroller carrying Eli, my 2-year-old son, toward the Borough Hall subway station in downtown Brooklyn. My wife, Jennifer, was already teaching her ethics class at Baruch College in Manhattan, and I was in charge of taking Eli to his daycare center at the City University of New York, which was located on Fifth Avenue, two blocks north of the Empire State Building. The ride on the N train usually took half an hour, and the route passed underneath the World Trade Center at what was then the Cortlandt Street station.

Eli had already begun memorizing the stops along the way between Borough Hall and 34th Street, and liked to ride in the front car so that he could look out the front window from the vantage point of the subway motorman. Another of my son’s quirks was that he tended to anthropomorphize tall buildings. “Hello, Empire State Building,” “Hello, World Trade Center,” he would say whenever we were walking in Manhattan or on the Brooklyn Heights Promenade and he caught sight of the distinctive architectural markers that topped the structures. For that reason, Cortlandt Street held special resonance, which he’d sometimes note when he announced our arrival as though he were the actual conductor: “This is Cortlandt Street station, World Trade Center.”

As Eli and I approached the Borough Hall subway entrance, I was struck by the number of people gathered at a street corner, looking up in the direction of lower Manhattan. When I asked what was going on, a woman told me a plane had hit the twin towers. From her slightly impatient tone — that eye-rolling “what now?” attitude that is so common among New Yorkers — I assumed the crash must have been an accident. There was a faint cloud of smoke in the air, but it was such a warm, sunny day that it was almost impossible to imagine anything might ruin it. The Brooklyn skyline obscured a view of the World Trade Center, and with cellphone technology still limited to phone calls and texts, visuals of what had happened weren’t instantly available.

At approximately 8:50 a.m. on Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001, I was pushing a stroller carrying Eli, my 2-year-old son, toward the Borough Hall subway station in downtown Brooklyn. My wife, Jennifer, was already teaching her ethics class at Baruch College in Manhattan, and I was in charge of taking Eli to his daycare center at the City University of New York, which was located on Fifth Avenue, two blocks north of the Empire State Building. The ride on the N train usually took half an hour, and the route passed underneath the World Trade Center at what was then the Cortlandt Street station.

Eli had already begun memorizing the stops along the way between Borough Hall and 34th Street, and liked to ride in the front car so that he could look out the front window from the vantage point of the subway motorman. Another of my son’s quirks was that he tended to anthropomorphize tall buildings. “Hello, Empire State Building,” “Hello, World Trade Center,” he would say whenever we were walking in Manhattan or on the Brooklyn Heights Promenade and he caught sight of the distinctive architectural markers that topped the structures. For that reason, Cortlandt Street held special resonance, which he’d sometimes note when he announced our arrival as though he were the actual conductor: “This is Cortlandt Street station, World Trade Center.”

As Eli and I approached the Borough Hall subway entrance, I was struck by the number of people gathered at a street corner, looking up in the direction of lower Manhattan. When I asked what was going on, a woman told me a plane had hit the twin towers. From her slightly impatient tone — that eye-rolling “what now?” attitude that is so common among New Yorkers — I assumed the crash must have been an accident. There was a faint cloud of smoke in the air, but it was such a warm, sunny day that it was almost impossible to imagine anything might ruin it. The Brooklyn skyline obscured a view of the World Trade Center, and with cellphone technology still limited to phone calls and texts, visuals of what had happened weren’t instantly available.