Hello and greetings welcome to American history hit I'm Don Wildman.

Across the globe people are all too familiar with the infamous events of September 11th

2001 when four coordinated plane hijackings struck the twain

towers of the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan and the Pentagon in Arlington County,

Virginia, flight 93 also, in which passengers fought back against their hijackers

and crashed in a Pennsylvania farm field, killing all on board.

But for New Yorkers and everyone else in that city that day and all throughout the greater New York area, 9-11 began as well a Tuesday, a normal Tuesday, exceptional only for its gorgeous blue skies above.

We all have our stories from that strange morning.

Me, I was having a coffee in my car, reading the New York Times,

having secured for my vehicle a plumb parking space on 21st Street two blocks from my Chelsea apartment

It's a New York ritual to moving of the cars for street cleaning purposes

You park and you have to wait in your car and finally you can leave it's preposterous. But for all that whole hour after the first attack, me and my fellow car parkers had all been sitting in our cars listening to the news on the radios. I had assumed that the first

incident was some small private plane, not a jet, and certainly not a terrorist attack. But then

came the second plane. My God, what? And now everyone was on the curb checking in with each other, still concerned absurdly that if we left our cars, we might get ticketed. Everywhere there were sirens, the emergency vehicles

racing downtown, something major was now afoot. I rushed home, jumped on my bike

and rode four blocks to the Hudson to see what I could see.

While I was cutting through traffic, I heard someone in a taxi cab shout that the other tower had just collapsed.

And sure enough, when I arrived at the river where once had stood the towers, there was nothing but a giant sky-high pale gray cloud over the entirety of Lower Manhattan, this swirling, dismal cloud.

All I could do was stare up as stunned people moved north past me, with plaster dust in their

hair.

Tuesday, September 11, 2001,

had become an historic disaster with global repercussions.

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