Aftermath
Like everyone else, I follow further developments on TV and the internet. A few days later, I return to work, temporarily relocated to offices in Jersey City. Our work site receives almost daily bomb threats for a few weeks. There are also the anthrax attacks to add to the threat board in one’s head. Our teams congregate at a nearby bar while the bomb threats are being cleared. It helps to take the edge off a world that has seemingly gone off the deep end.
Three days after the attack, our firm, Merrill Lynch, is the first firm to transact in the US debt markets since 9/11. Only two months later, our development team rolls out the globalized version of Merrill’s new debt derivatives trading platform, on schedule and a great success (still in use at Bank of America today). These are heady times marked by camaraderie and mutual support in the workplace. Each milestone achieved is a small victory against the Day.
In mid-December, the firm moves back to our lower Manhattan location next to the WTC site. The area is like a war zone. The Winter Garden adjoining our building is heavily damaged, the giant palm trees dead of exposure, the atrium glass shattered, the Italian marble floors cracked and broken. There is nowhere to go outside the office. Everything in the vicinity is destroyed or closed. Residential buildings nearby stand empty. For years, commuters to lower Manhattan pay a daily emotional toll walking past the reminders of that day: the “Pile”, then the “Hole”. It takes years for the site to transition just to the semblance of an urban renewal zone. Now, it is again a thriving commercial center, anchored by the Freedom Tower and the 9/11 Memorial Park. I worked in the area for almost 20 more years, until Covid, but that is a tale for another telling.