09/11/2026
This is a personal reflection from Emily, Branch Integrator, on the 25th anniversary of September 11:
Sorry this is a long one.
Before September 11, the Twin Towers were simply part of the city I knew. I grew up seeing them. They were familiar and constant, part of a skyline I never imagined without them.
My connection to them was personal, too. My mom had worked on the trading floor of the American Stock Exchange, just blocks from the World Trade Center. I remember going to work with her on Bring Your Daughter to Work Days and getting lunch in the North Tower. By 2001, she had been gone from that job for a couple of years, something for which I remain deeply grateful.
On September 11, 2001, I was a senior in high school in Manhattan. As the news reached us, confusion spread through the school and across the city. No one knew exactly what was happening, what might happen next, or how we were supposed to get home.
New York is a city built around public transportation. When the trains and buses stopped and vehicle access to and from Manhattan was restricted, walking became the only way many people could get where they needed to go. People filled the streets, heading uptown, crossing bridges, and trying to make their way home. I joined them, walking home from school through a city that had become unrecognizable in a matter of hours. It was like straight out of a movie.
For thousands of people trapped in Lower Manhattan, the only way out was by water. Ferries, tugboats, sightseeing boats, and private vessels came together to carry an estimated 500,000 people to safety in less than nine hours. It became the largest maritime evacuation in history. In the middle of unimaginable fear and devastation, people saw others in need and moved toward them.
But once the immediate chaos passed, the enormity of what had happened began to settle over the city.
In the weeks and months that followed, missing-person posters were everywhere. Faces looked out from storefront windows, walls, and lampposts. Families were still searching, waiting, and hoping. Some of the losses were personal for me, too.
Those faces are what remain with me 25 years later. Each belonged to someone who was loved, someone whose laugh was known, whose call was expected, and who had people waiting for them to come home.
September 11 will always be part of my story, but today, we, at CAS, remember the 2,977 people whose lives were taken, the loved ones who have carry their memories and their absence for 25 years, and the first responders who ran toward danger and continued to bear the consequences long afterward.
I’m sharing the dedication page from my 2002 senior yearbook. Twenty-five years later, it reminds me how suddenly everything changed and why September 11 must never become just another page in history.
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