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I wasn't in Lower Manhattan but the large conference room window in my midtown office made the twin towers look like they were across the street. One minute the buildings were there and next it was just smoke and air. There was the realization that anyone left in that building was dead and then there was the realization that this was a terrorist attack and then, working in the same building as CNN and across the street from Madison Square Garden and three or so blocks from the Empire State Building, there was the realization that it could happen in midtown next (as the radio reports were sounding crazy with things like there's a plane heading to a Washington Strip Mall and there's a plane to who knows where and there are various numbers of planes missing).
After all of that there was the dawning that not only will we not get out of Manhattan but we may not see tomorrow. It was as scary as hell to think that by the day's end everything could be leveled. To add salt to the wound, two days after 9-11 (because no one went to work on the following day, especially not me as I had walked from midtown Manhattan to my home in Brooklyn, which actually borders Queens), when I did return to work along with most everyone else, at approximately 10:00 on the 13th, there were bomb threats all over the city. People were running hap-hazardly all over the place. They were running and screaming and crying, a group of people came pouring out of Penn Station at the 7th Avenue Station one woman came out crying and vomiting at the same time. Talk about scary.
It was when I moved to an all hispanic neighborhood and realized I was the only white person. I felt so scared and out of place and didn't realize what they meant by culture shock here....doesn't even feel like you're in the USA phew...
That sounds like the only USA I've ever known, and frankly it's the USA that would be familiar to a large percentage of the actual people who live in this country. In most major cities and now many suburban areas a latin neighborhood is not such a shock.
My scariest moment in NY was realizing that I was the minority. Since I am a white american-born citizen.
where did you move from? and seeing as that one of new york city's nicknames is "the melting pot", meaning people of many different ethnicities live here, what did you expect?
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"The man who sleeps on the floor, can never fall out of bed." -Martin Lawrence
It's not even like white people are the "native" people of this country... they came over from Europe, just like all the other immigrants and other children of immigrants in the US. Maybe I could understand Native Americans feeling like their country was "taken" from them, but white descendents of European immigrants resenting newer immigrants? I don't know about that.
I was 14....and I was just walking through. Guys in the corner tried to size me up and they proceded to jump me for my I860 (nextel). The cops came but heard a report that a group of kids robbed and beat someone in Morris Heights, so they locked me up because the guys who did it ran away in time.
Hmmm the first time I took the subway.. I have this idea of the 80 and 90 crime in NYC... but after that I like the subway...
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Yvette
