{"id":2658259,"date":"2026-09-11T09:11:23","date_gmt":"2026-09-11T13:11:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/utm_sourcerssutm_mediumrssutm_campaigni-lived-through-9-11-as-a-new-yorker-heres-what-i-saw\/"},"modified":"2026-09-11T09:18:27","modified_gmt":"2026-09-11T13:18:27","slug":"utm_sourcerssutm_mediumrssutm_campaigni-lived-through-9-11-as-a-new-yorker-heres-what-i-saw","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/utm_sourcerssutm_mediumrssutm_campaigni-lived-through-9-11-as-a-new-yorker-heres-what-i-saw\/","title":{"rendered":"I Lived Through 9\/11 As A New Yorker. Here&#8217;s What I Saw"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">24<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Futm_sourcerssutm_mediumrssutm_campaigni-lived-through-9-11-as-a-new-yorker-heres-what-i-saw%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=2658259&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><p>On September 11, 2001, the author was waking up in New York city, unaware that the first plane had already hit the North Tower. Witnessing the second plane strike live, they realized the attack was purposeful. As the Towers fell, the author watched from nearby, feeling the loss deeply due to their familiarity with the area and their routine of commuting through the World trade Center. The city responded in shock, with silent streets, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/il-released-illegal-alien-accused-of-abusing-my-daughters-body\/\" title=\"IL Released Illegal Alien Accused Of Abusing My Daughter&#039;s Body\">missing persons posters<\/a>, and limited emergency response.<\/p>\n<p>Having left New York days before to start graduate school in Paris, the author reflects on their five pivotal years in the city, during which new York underwent meaningful change under Rudy Giuliani, marked by crime reduction and urban revitalization.The political landscape in the U.S. also shifted from a post-Cold War optimism to increased polarization following the contentious 2000 election and 9\/11.<\/p>\n<p>The narrative highlights how New York\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/california-invests-in-visas-legal-immigration\/\" title=\"California invests in visas, legal immigration\">diverse immigrant communities<\/a>, especially Muslims, have grown over the decades, significantly impacting the city\u2019s character and politics. Today, in 2026, New York elected its first Muslim mayor, Zohran Mamdani, whose views and associations provoke controversy, particularly regarding the anniversary of 9\/11. Many families oppose Mamdani\u2019s participation in official memorials, reflecting tensions over the city\u2019s evolving identity. The author admits surprise at the city\u2019s current trajectory, noting that in 2001, no one could have foreseen such changes over 25 years. The article emphasizes that New York continues to surprise, sometimes for the worse.  <\/p>\n<p class=\"readmore\">\n    <button onclick=\"showReadMore()\" id=\"readmorebtn\">Read more&#8230;<\/button>\n<\/p>\n<hr id=\"line\">\n<span id=\"more\"><\/p>\n<div>\n<p>On Sept. 11, 2001, I woke up late. It was minutes before nine in the morning, and the first plane had already hit the North Tower. I was sleeping on my friend\u2019s couch in his apartment on the corner of West 11th Street and 7th Avenue South, in the Village. A few days earlier I had given up my own apartment. I was moving to Paris on the 18th to start graduate school, and I was spending those last days in the city saying goodbye to friends and wrapping up five years of my life in New York.<\/p>\n<p>I turned on the television. While I was still trying to make sense of what I was seeing, the second plane hit the South Tower live on air. There wasn\u2019t any doubt: This was not an accident.<\/p>\n<p>I went outside. From 7th Avenue you could see the Twin Towers smoking in the distance. I watched from the sidewalk as they fell, unable to fully take it in. My friend\u2019s building was diagonally across from St. Vincent\u2019s Hospital, the <a href=\"https:\/\/jamanetwork.com\/journals\/jamasurgery\/fullarticle\/509087\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">nearest<\/a> level I trauma center to the World Trade Center. The avenue had been closed to give ambulances a clear path. But one of the most haunting memories of that day is this: Almost no ambulances came. I figured it out later. There were almost no injured because the people who couldn\u2019t get out didn\u2019t get out.<\/p>\n<p>I knew that place. For two of my five years in New York, my daily routine was to get off at the World Trade Center subway station and walk to the office at One World Financial Center, right across from the Towers. I hadn\u2019t worked there in months, but when they came down, something familiar came down with them.<\/p>\n<p>In Manhattan we couldn\u2019t get Fox News \u2014 Time Warner Cable deliberately kept it off the air back then so it wouldn\u2019t compete with CNN \u2014 so it was Aaron Brown, Wolf Blitzer and Judy Woodruff, all day, all week.<\/p>\n<p>The subway was down and the city moved on foot. Thousands of people walking in silence, almost like sleepwalkers. On bus stops, posters with photos of missing people kept going up. The ones I saw every day were outside St. Vincent\u2019s, where the Wall of Hope and Remembrance had started taking shape \u2014 photos, candles, flowers, handwritten notes. I slept across from that wall the entire first week.<\/p>\n<p>On Sept. 18 I took a cab to Newark. Four hours to get out of Manhattan. At the Lincoln Tunnel, authorities were checking the trunk of every car. I flew to Paris and started school. New York stayed behind, though never entirely.<\/p>\n<p>Those five years had been something else. I came to New York straight out of college, found my first jobs, and had a front-row seat to one of the most remarkable stretches the city had seen in decades. The New York of the late \u201990s was unrecognizable from the one of just 10 years earlier: Rudy Giuliani had transformed not just Times Square but much of the city, crime was in free fall, the tech boom was filling offices and restaurants. <\/p>\n<p>In Washington, Bill Clinton had built his presidency on an explicit break from the left that had driven the Democrat Party to its worst defeats in the \u201970s \u2014 the Third Way, welfare reform, a balanced budget hammered out with Newt Gingrich\u2019s Republican majority in Congress. It felt like the optimism of the post-Cold War moment had finally become actual policy. Like the West had won and better days were ahead.<\/p>\n<p>Something broke after the November 2000 election. The country ended up split down the middle, a constitutional crisis settled by the Supreme Court. Less than a year later came 9\/11, and with it the end of that whole era. Polarization moved in and never left. Bush divided the country over Iraq. Obama arrived promising to heal the country and instead presided over its most bitter cultural fracturing in decades. The party that had governed from the center drifted away from it, eventually leading a cultural turn that pulled all of American politics toward political correctness, open borders, and spending without limits.<\/p>\n<p>The city that Muslim fanatics attacked in 2001 was open and plural \u2014 the most successful in the Western world at turning wave after wave of immigrants into New Yorkers. That\u2019s what they hated. They didn\u2019t pull it off. But today\u2019s city is a different place. In 25 years, the Muslim population has grown enormously. There are <a href=\"https:\/\/danielgreenfield.substack.com\/p\/muslims-outnumber-italians-and-irish\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">now more<\/a> Muslims in New York than Italians or Irish \u2014 two communities that for generations shaped the character of its neighborhoods and its politics. That\u2019s what you get from decades of mass immigration with no thought given to who\u2019s coming or why.<\/p>\n<p>A city like that produces politics like that. In January 2026, New York elected its first Muslim mayor. Zohran Mamdani, a 34-year-old socialist, comes straight out of that shift \u2014 someone whose worldview has little in common with the entrepreneurial, no-nonsense city I knew. During his campaign he refused to condemn the phrase \u201cGlobalize the intifada\u201d when pressed directly \u2014 multiple times, on multiple occasions. He <a href=\"https:\/\/www.foxnews.com\/politics\/muslim-mamdani-backed-socialist-primary-winner-suggested-america-deserved-911-unearthed-video\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">endorsed<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/nypost.com\/2026\/07\/25\/us-news\/families-of-9-11-want-to-ban-mamdani-from-25th-anniversary\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">associated <\/a>with figures who have minimized the Sept. 11 attacks. And on Friday, Sept. 5, while signing an executive order to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the attacks, he <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wsj.com\/opinion\/free-expression\/mamdanis-pen-is-a-message-of-contempt-a0a3e9b0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">handed<\/a> the ceremonial pen to his chief counsel, Ramzi Kassem \u2014 a lawyer who once represented an al-Qaida operative with connections to the Pentagon attack and who has reportedly <a href=\"https:\/\/www.dailysignal.com\/2026\/09\/08\/zohran-mamdani-911-terrorist\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">said<\/a> that Sept. 11 \u201cinspired\u201d him, not to fight terrorism, but to defend terrorists.<\/p>\n<p>Today marks 25 years. More than 100,000 people <a href=\"https:\/\/abc6onyourside.com\/news\/nation-world\/911-victim-families-100000-other-petitioners-dont-want-mamdani-at-memorial-ceremonies\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">have signed a petition<\/a> to keep Mamdani out of the official commemoration ceremonies. It speaks for itself.<\/p>\n<p>That September morning, standing on 7th Avenue watching the Towers burn in the distance, nobody could have told me that 25 years later the city would elect someone like that to run it. New York always had the ability to surprise me. Not always for the better.<\/p>\n<p><em>This <a href=\"https:\/\/www.elespanol.com\/opinion\/tribunas\/20260911\/nueva-york-parece-hoy-autores-victimas\/1003744379649_12.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">article<\/a> was first published in Spanish on ElEspa\u00f1ol.com.<\/em><\/p>\n<hr>\n<p>      Pablo Kleinman is a media entrepreneur and the president of the Hispanic Jewish Endowment in Miami.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<p><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>On Sept. 11, 2001, I woke late as the first plane hit<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4289,"featured_media":2658260,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Copy-of-Untitled-2026-09-09T144349.489.png","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[33651],"tags":[56199,85500,32120,36697],"class_list":["post-2658259","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-western-journal","tag-9-11-2","tag-9-11-experience","tag-new-york","tag-personal-story"],"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Copy-of-Untitled-2026-09-09T144349.489.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2658259","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4289"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2658259"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2658259\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2658263,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2658259\/revisions\/2658263"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2658260"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2658259"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2658259"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2658259"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}