MIKE LUPICA: 9/11 showed how the worst day in the history of NYC would bring out the best in everyone

Pete Hamill, who was downtown the morning the planes hit the buildings, whose immediate terror on Sept. 11, 2001, was being unable to find his wife Fukiko, always said that the true greatness of the city really began to show itself on Sept. 12, and the 13th, and all the days that followed.

“It was,” Pete said, “like watching a fighter who’d just gotten knocked down get to one knee, and then slowly gather himself until he was standing again.”

Somehow it is now 22 years since that day, and still we don’t think in terms of anniversaries. We just remember what it was like in those first days and nights after they’d come for us out of the sky.

“Anniversary?” a friend of mine who lived a few miles from Sandy Hook Elementary said the year after all those innocent children were massacred. “We remember every day.”

So now it is another Sept. 11, and all of the memories will again come flooding back. We will once again mourn the ones we lost that day, but also celebrate the heroes who, in all the big and most important ways, were not ever going to let the terrorists win.

We will once again do all that as the names of the dead are read and the day is once again filled with the sound of bagpipes, and people will look up and see the reimagined skyline of downtown Manhattan, and try to remember what it looked like before the devastation of that morning, when it seemed as if the sky really was falling.

On the 10th anniversary of that morning, I stood with Warren Allen of Iron Workers Local 40, across the street from St. Paul’s Chapel and he recalled heading downtown on that first night after making sure his family was safe, and then staying at Ground Zero for weeks. He was one who came out of Local 40 and the best of the city and did what everyone else in the city did in those days, however they could. It means he fought.

“I still see smoke,” Warren Allen said 10 years later.

Allen, who’d grown up in Washington Heights, had his tool belt with him the night of Sept. 11, and his hardhat, and his by-God ID card from Local 40. He made it as far as W. 14th St. before the cops made him stop. But when he told them he was an ironworker they put him in an ambulance and drove him all the day downtown, which is where he basically stayed until the end of the year.

“You know what I remember?” he told me. “I remember the sun coming up on the morning of the 12th and thinking, ‘Okay, you bastards. We’re still here.’”

He was now part of the strongest army in history, the army of the city of New York, an army of cops and firemen and doctors and nurses and emergency workers and everyone else who felt as if they were volunteering to fight a war. Allen was an ironworker. He cut steel.

You remember his service today, and the service of everybody else. And if you were in the city in the shadow of Sept. 11, you remember so much more than that. You still remember the flyers posted up and down the streets, to Park and Lexington, reaching out from the victims’ information center at the old 69th Regiment Army, where family members of the missing kept showing up with DNA samples, hoping for miracles that they had to know in their hearts would not come.

There would be a name on the flyers, a smiling face, a phone number. I remember one for a lovely young woman that had this written underneath her picture: “Opal ring. Beauty mark on left cheek.”

There was another one, a young guy ready to cut a birthday cake with a big knife. The cake had “30” written on top of it. There was one photograph after another, part of what felt like a makeshift, hand-drawn Vietnam memorial, all these faces, so many of them young and frozen in time forever, and the names that will once again be read on Monday. This was the city of Sept. 12 and 13 and all the days to come, when first it was a week since the attack, then a month, and now 22 years.

Here is something Pete Hamill, a child and poet of his city and my dear friend, wrote later about those days:

“They drove all night from New Orleans to open soup kitchens for the workers at the smoldering site of carnage. They came in from upstate New York and from the surrounding states; during those weeks, I met volunteers from Indiana and Alabama and Colorado. They offered help, and solace, and gumbo too. For the first time in many years, New York began to feel like an American city, instead of a separate place. The flag you saw everywhere was the flag of New York too.”

That flag still flies high today. The worst day in the history of the city would produce the best of everyone. Ten years after the planes hit, Warren Allen of Local 40 looked around him from St. Paul’s as the bagpipes did begin to play in the distance.

“I had to come that day,” he said. “This is where the job was.”