FALLING ASHES, ANALOG RADIOS: MEMORY AFTER SEPTEMBER 11.
September 11, 2001. Brooklyn. The sun was out. The city felt normal. Then, suddenly, ash began to drift from the sky—slow at first, then heavier, as if the city itself was shedding pieces of its memory. I remember pausing, wondering how something so light could carry so much weight.
By Sixten Rebel, Edited by Trudy Giordano
A side note before we begin
This is a story based on true events, real emotions, and memories that have had twenty-five years to become slightly unreliable, as memories do.
It is also two stories.
A brother and a sister.
We were both in Brooklyn on September 11, 2001, although we experienced that morning from very different places.
So this isn’t an attempt to retell Nine Eleven. You already know what happened.
This is something more personal.
A look back at what it was like when you were young, when New York was still something you were discovering, and when one morning suddenly divided your life into before and after.
There is, admittedly, a little Nine Eleven romanticism in the telling.
Not the conspiracy kind.
The memory kind.
And certainly no room here for the people who think the world is flat, aliens live behind a giant ice wall, and the Twin Towers were brought down by whatever YouTube rabbit hole they crawled into last night.
Those people can crawl back into a corner, wiggle-waggle like a troll doll, and shut up for a while.
This is about memory.
And how strange it is that the things you remember most clearly are often the things that seemed completely insignificant at the time.
Before—What We Remember Most
Maybe that’s what memory is too.
Something old.
Something you don’t use very often.
Something has probably stopped working.
Until one day, you turn it on.
My sister moved to NYC in 1998.
This was my first time in Brooklyn.
That’s where I discovered that Brooklyn felt like home.
I loved the people, the places, the music, the pizza, the nightlife.
New York never sleeps.
Brooklyn doesn’t care about your feelings.
And the language—the razor-sharp dialect—could keep you smiling long after someone had insulted you.
A band from Brooklyn called Type O Negative.
Of course they became one of my favorite bands.
In 1999, their new album, World Coming Down, came out, and we went to a meet-and-greet.
Pictures were taken.
Autographs were signed.
Small talk was short but fun.
That's what we did.
And over the next few years, I kept coming back to the States, and to my beloved Brooklyn.
The plans we made for 2001 were just as ordinary.
Cinema.
Music.
Bars.
Jam sessions.
Drag queens.
Hogs & Heifers.
Cheap Trick at Virgin Records.
The sort of things you remember because they were fun.
Because they didn’t matter.
Because you had no idea that one day you would look back and realize you were remembering the last version of the city before everything changed.
My Sister's Morning
My sister had been living in New York for three years.
On the morning of September 11, she got off the F train on her way to her work in the city, a commercial photo studio on 19th Street.
She came up from the subway onto 6th Avenue.
Hundreds of people were standing there.
Everyone was looking south.
Her first thought was that it must be a parade.
Some New York thing she hadn’t learned about yet.
Her flip phone was useless.
Everyone around her already had their phones out, pressed to their ears.
Faces changing.
She felt uneasy.
But she didn’t know why.
Then the police cars started.
Not one or two.
An endless line of them.
Sirens overlapping.
Then fire trucks.
More fire trucks than she had ever seen move through a city street at once.
And that’s when she turned around.
That’s when she saw the first tower.
On fire.
Something happened to her in that moment that she still can’t completely explain.
She had no information.
No television.
No internet.
No explanation.
But she knew this wasn’t an accident.
Two days earlier, my sister and I had been up there.
It was on my New York to-do list.
The observation deck.
The view.
The tourist errand.
We took a photograph.
Two days earlier.
That was all.
Two days between an ordinary tourist photograph and one of those memories that never becomes ordinary again.
My Morning
Meanwhile, in Brooklyn, I was still living in the ordinary world.
I turned on the dial-up internet.
My sister went to work.
My brother-in-law went to work.
Nothing about the morning initially suggested that the world was about to change.
Then he came home.
He was yelling.
“Hang up the goddamn internet! The world is coming down!”
And there it was.
Right there.
It just ended.
The city I loved, was about to crumble away, minute after minute.
Time stopped for a day.
What the fuck had just happened?
Back In Manhattan
My sister continued to her walk to work anyway.
She doesn’t remember much of what anyone said when she walked in.
There wasn’t much to say.
People’s faces spoke for them.
The office stayed mostly quiet.
Everyone was speechless.
In shock.
Her boss disappeared and came back with an old, small television he’d found in storage.
He carried it up to the roof to get reception.
He was up there when the second tower came down.
She wasn’t.
She only heard about it afterward.
She couldn’t reach me.
She couldn’t reach Frank.
The only person she reached was her mother-in-law on Long Island, which everyone seemed to be able to reach
For a while she thought she might be walking home.
Then she found out the trains were running again.
She took one.
She remembers telling herself:
If something were going to happen on the subway, it would have happened by now.
She said it deliberately.
Not because she believed it.
Because she needed to believe it enough to get on the train.
Back In Brooklyn
My brother-in-law got home by bus around 1pm.
The bus was full of dust-covered people.
He told me what had happened.
And then there was the roommate.
The roommate had somehow slept through the entire national emergency.
He liked to remind us that he was living the “rock-and-roll life.”
For him, that meant blackout curtains and enough earplugs to drown out the apocalypse.
He played in a band called Cracker.
But let’s be honest, not even Keith Richards could have slept through that day.
We knocked on his door.
“Get up, man!”
After much groaning and protest, he finally stumbled out, blinking like a vampire seeing sunlight for the first time.
He did not react well to the news.
Afterward, something he threw got stuck in the wall. (It stayed stuck until he moved out)
My sister wasn’t there when it happened, she did not find out until he moved out.
Neither was I.
I didn’t need to be.
The Rooftop
Eventually, my sister came home.
And we went up to the roof of our four-story walk-up in Carroll Gardens.
That’s where our two versions of the day become one.
Dust.
Paper.
Ash.
Still moving through the air.
Blocks away from where it had started.
Even in Brooklyn, fragments arrived—remnants that should never have traveled so far. A piece of tin-foil insulation, probably from the towers, drifted into our neighborhood. My brother-in-law keeps it in a plastic bag, as a tangible reminder of just how far the tragedy reached, and how it touched even those blocks away.
We all carried the day differently. While my brother-in-law held onto a piece of the past, my sister carried her own memories—some shared, some entirely her own.
The city was strangely quiet.
I remember one particular piece of paper.
It was lying there on the floor.
Untouched.
Unwritten.
Not burned.
Not even a single wrinkle.
Just an ordinary sheet of printer paper that had somehow fallen from the sky.
Maybe someone had been about to put it into a printer.
Maybe someone had just sat down to start their working day.
And then, in an instant, everything changed.
Hundreds of lives were lost.
Countless people were suddenly faced with things no one should ever have to face.
And somehow, among all the enormous images of that day, I remember that piece of paper.
That’s how memory works.
History gives you the numbers.
Memory gives you the paper.
The Radio
Thousands of miles away, in Europe, our parents couldn’t reach us.
We couldn’t reach them.
They were cleaning out the attic that day.
And they found an old analog radio.
They weren’t looking for news.
They weren’t trying to find out what had happened.
They wanted to know whether it still worked.
They put batteries in it.
It turned on.
And the first thing that came through was the news of the towers.
The radio still worked.
For years afterward, every September 11, we could see the two blue lights rise into the sky from our couch.
We watched them every year.
Until we moved in 2018.
But the day never really moved.
What Came After
Years later, my sister was working alongside Michael Sorkin.
And that gave her another perspective on what happened after the attacks.
Sorkin wasn’t particularly interested in the inspirational version of recovery that was being sold to the public.
He wanted to know who was making the decisions.
Who controlled the site.
Who owned the land.
Who got to decide what downtown New York would become.
In Starting from Zero: Reconstructing Downtown New York, he wrote a chronological account of the battle over the site and challenged the idea that business and political interests should determine Ground Zero's future. At the same time, the public was largely left to react to decisions already made.
He argued for a more genuine public process.
A rebuilding that answered to the people who lived in the city, rather than simply to the people who controlled the property.
He returned to those questions in After the World Trade Center: Rethinking New York City, looking beyond buildings toward public space, civic life, and the kind of city New York might become.
Looking back, my sister realized how effortlessly Sorkin could turn the city’s most paralyzing questions into blueprints for public debate.
His vision was always several steps ahead.
The rest of us were still arguing over which version of “Never Forget” looked best on a mug.
There was also an uncomfortable personal connection.
Sorkin’s studio at 145 Hudson Street, near Canal Street in TriBeCa, was close enough that he developed asthma from the conditions after 9/11.
That connection was later medically confirmed.
He became part of a settlement.
He was found eligible for compensation.
He died before they paid the money.
My brother-in-law's brother, a New York City firefighter, also worked at the site afterward.
He retired years ago; he passed away last year.
He had arthritis that his doctors believed may have been connected to that.
He never wanted to participate in the studies that might establish the connection.
He thought it would take years of back-and-forth.
He wanted to spend his time differently.
And maybe that’s part of the story too.
A fund that takes years to reach the people it owes.
A commitment that outlives the people it was made for.
Bureaucracy, it turns out, is the one thing that never sleeps in New York.
Twenty-Five Years Later
But this isn’t really a story about bureaucracy.
Or Ground Zero.
Or even September 11 itself.
It’s about what happens to a memory when enough time passes.
Today, my kids are attending a wedding.
I hope the day will be a blessing.
The couple that’s getting married today don’t remember Nine Eleven.
They were not even born then.
And that’s when the new Nine Eleven hit me.
Twenty-five years later.
Twenty-five bloody years.
It’s a lifetime.
A quarter of a century.
The static noise and eerie silence have disappeared.
People’s lives have carried on.
And I can’t blame anyone for that.
Hell, I carried on too.
It’s not as if we lived the last twenty-five years in silence and static noise.
I enjoyed life.
And I still do.
I went to shows.
I listened to music.
I went to bars.
I laughed.
I made memories that had nothing to do with September 11.
That’s what we’re supposed to do.
Life goes on.
The shows eventually came back.
The canceled concerts became old newspaper clippings.
The albums eventually came out.
People got married.
Children were born.
And now adults are walking around who weren’t even alive when it happened.
They don’t remember the static.
They don’t remember the silence.
They don’t remember looking up at the sky and wondering what the fuck had just happened.
I still do.
I remember standing on that rooftop.
I remember the smoke.
The debris.
The ashes.
The silence.
I remember that one piece of paper.
And I remember that somewhere, thousands of miles away, our parents were in an attic in Europe, putting batteries into an old radio to see if it still worked.
It did.
And the first thing we told them was that the world had changed and that we're ok.
Twenty-five years later, we still remember that.
Maybe that’s why the radio matters to us. In a world where so much is lost or forgotten, sometimes the most ordinary things become vessels for our history. Memory persists in the most unexpected ways.
Because it wasn’t supposed to be important.
It was just an old radio.
It wasn’t a monument.
It wasn’t history.
It wasn’t a memorial.
It was just something sitting in an attic that someone decided, for no particular reason, to turn on.
And it still worked.
And suddenly, the whole world comes rushing back.
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