(2 Sep 2011) HEADLINE: First Person: Giuliani on his worst day ever
CAPTION: Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani describes what it was like on September 11, 2001, calling it the worst day of his life. (Aug. 30)
(SOT: Rudy Giuliani/R-New York Mayor-1994-2001)
(partially covered with AP photos of 9/11)
My most vivid memory of that day is first seeing a person throw himself off the 100, 101st, 102nd floor, because when I arrived at the scene my Deputy Mayor Joe Loda told me that this is terrible, that there are people throwing themselves out the window. I was about 2 and a half blocks away and I looked up and I saw debris coming down. And I thought he was exaggerating cause it just didn''t seem possible to me that people would be throwing themselves out the window. We then walked to the fire department command post, which was right below the north tower and as we were walking there, particularly along West Street, the police that were with us were telling us to look up because debris was coming down, it was hitting people and they were afraid it was going to hit us and they wanted us to be alert to the fact that there might be some debris falling. So I kept looking up and all of a sudden I saw a man put himself right in the window. Look like he stepped up or something, then he just flung himself right out. And I could see fire right behind him. And I just froze and watched it because it was so incomprehensible There''s no possible way I could describe the reaction. I''m sure the reaction was kind of a shock. And that changed my whole emotion about the situation, because up until that point I thought of it as an emergency, not too dissimilar from emergencies we had faced many times in New York City, for which we had 22 different plans and a very established way of handling just every piece of it that we had gone over 100 times and practiced with the office of emergency management. When I saw that, I said to the police commissioner, deputy mayor, communications director, this off the charts This is the worst we''ve every faced. We don''t have a plan for this. We''re just going to have to go with our best instincts.
That''s the worst worst experience of my life. It was the most devastating experience for my city that I was responsible for. I lost a lot of very close friends, people that I knew, love knew very very well, knew their families very well. It was months and months of anxiety about other attacks.
I did not agree that commercial buildings should be put there. So I''m not happy about that. I thought it should be devoted solely to a memorial. Here''s what you have to know about the World Trade Center, it was never a good site for tenants. The building was always subsidized. So the building had a subsidy of about $100,000,000 so rents were unnaturally low at the World Trade Center and even with that it was very hard to keep that building at 100-percent.
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