Towering, infernal

It is on this day in history that I tend to remember October 6, 1997, the day I went up to the 107th floor of the South Tower of the World Trade Center in New York. It was called the Top Of The World Observation Deck and it was indoors. Weird, still, that the first World Trade Center is in past tense, and indeed that there’s now a second one. You were able to stand with your toes touching the floor-to-ceiling glass and look down 1,310 feet to the street below. Not one for those with vertigo, it was a once-in-a-lifetime experience, although at the time I didn’t know the full, finite enormity of that clichéd description.

I remember queuing up on the ground floor – what would become, four years later, Ground Zero, with people queuing to get the fuck out – and pass through the security checks which had been added after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. The one that failed. Looking back, I don’t know if it was the time of year, or the wind speed outside (it was certainly a clear day), but we didn’t take the short escalator ride up to the outdoor viewing platform on the 110th floor. I’ve since read that it incorporated an “anti-suicide fence”, artfully installed so as not to obstruct the panoramic view of the United States of America. (I’d been outside at the Empire State Building on a previous trip to New York, possibly my first, in 1990, when I bought an Oakland A’s baseball cap because it had a white, Gothic “A” against Hunter green on the front.) This was $10.00 well spent.

Oddly, we had planned to return to the top of the World Trade Center, in fact the North Tower, on a subsequent trip to New York in 2000, but we cancelled the trip. We’d promised ourselves a meal at the Windows On The World restaurant. It never happened.

Needless to say, on September 11, 2001, at 08.46 New York time, I felt the time-delayed impact on the South Tower, which was the second impact and the decisive, marrow-chilling one that confirmed premeditated attack and ruled out pilot error, and switched the world’s focus from one disaster movie to another disaster movie. Since we memorialise the date every year – and how wrong I was at the time to resist handed-down orthodoxy that named it “the day everything changed” – I don’t feel it’s too mawkish, or hawkish, to remember where I was.

I was in a windowless BBC recording studio in Western House, where, in 2001, the digital radio station yet to be called 6 Music (and in fact referred to as “Network Y” as if we were working for the Secret Service) was being piloted. I’d been given a stab at the presenter’s job on a show called My Life In CD, a blatant rock’n’roll spin on Desert Island Discs, which eventually went to Tracey MacLeod. I was interviewing the late Linda Smith, Radio 4 humorist, humanist and panel-show guru, about the records that described her life, which included songs by Ian Dury & The Blockheads and Squeeze, I remember that much. Having put the show in the can, we emerged into the corridor and kerfuffle led us into an office opposite, where BBC employees were crowded round a small television turned to rolling news.

I think I’m right in saying that the second plane had hit, so when I watched United Airlines Flight 175 “shark” (to use Martin Amis’s vivid verb) into the same South Tower that I had scaled from within four years before, I must have been watching a replay. The first of probably hundreds of replays on that day in history. Hundreds of thousands now. Feeling exposed and frightened by the idea of being even a couple of floors up in a Government building in a major capital city in the West, I headed home. While I was on the London Underground, heading south, the Towers collapsed. Again, it was old news and replays by the time I got back in front of a telly. Hell of a day. (It’s sad that Linda’s gone.)

The world did change that day. Having this week watched Marcus Robinson’s moving C4 documentary Rebuilding The World Trade Center (which I recommend while it’s up on 4OD for the next 20 days), it’s easy to see the collective human spirit of endeavour that survived the rubble, especially in New York. I find myself something of a 9/11 addict, actually. This, I’m sure, goes back to my morbid boyhood fascination with disaster movies and catastrophe in general. I’m also deeply interested in American politics and foreign policy, and the way they feed into this one day in history is endlessly gripping to me. I’m one of those people who made The 9/11 Commission Report a bestseller in the summer of 2004 – I file it under “fiction”, ha ha. I could open a library of books about 9/11 and its military and political aftermath, including a number of “conspiracy theory” tomes that may infuriate some patriots and lovers of the status quo, but which I find just as relevant; you have to read around a subject, and I have. The world was interesting and scary before 9/11, but it was more interesting and more scary after. I thoroughly recommend Windows On The World, a semi-fictional, philosophical 2005 French novel by Frédéric Beigbeder, which was recommended to me by Brett Anderson, since you ask. I’m still reading the hardback of Jason Burke’s The 9/11 Wars. The wars go on, and so do I.

I’ll leave you with Art Spiegelman’s historic cover for the edition of the New Yorker that followed that horrible day. I didn’t start subscribing to what is now my all-time favourite magazine until March 2005, but I sought this one out on eBay. Lest we forget.

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