Six Things I Wrote About 9/11

I can’t believe this week is the 25th anniversary of 9/11. I was in New York and remember every detail like it was yesterday. It had such an effect on me that for years afterward, I had recurring nightmares about buildings collapsing in New York. They felt so realistic and terrifying that sometimes it made me reflect on how good the brain is at special effects.

I’m sure there will be a lot of memorial and historical content written about 9/11 this week. But I thought I’d commemorate the 25th anniversary by looking at some of the 9/11-inspired things I’ve written over the years. These aren’t somber reflections as much as they are the sort of weird things that my particular brain came up with when dealing with such tragedy.

9/11 in 3D

Maybe you’ve followed me long enough to know that I’m really into all things 3D. I once heard a neurologist call himself “intensely stereoscopic” and I instantly understood what he meant. That’s totally me, too.

So when I saw a camera helicopter circling Ground Zero on the afternoon of 9/11 on CNN, I couldn’t help but think about how consecutive frames from their flyover could simulate left and right eye perspectives of the scene and be used to document this event in 3D. I thought this was interesting and potentially even important.

I found the footage on CNN’s website. They weren’t shooting in High Definition at the time, and they definitely weren’t posting high resolution video on the internet back then, so the footage wasn’t very crisp. But it worked. I was able to make several 3D images of Ground Zero from their footage.

Here are just a few examples as both anaglyph red/blue images (for those of you like me who have a cup full of cardboard 3D glasses sitting on your desk by your computer). And I’m also posting some as cross-eye pairs. You can cross your eyes to make the images converge into a single 3D scene.

Anaglyph examples:

Cross-eyed examples:

For the full collection of 16 images, you can see my original post with all of them from twenty years ago.

My Memorial

After 9/11, there was so much discussion of what to do at Ground Zero. What should the memorial look like? What should be built? Should we recreate the buildings exactly as they were? Design some new buildings? It seemed like everyone weighed in with ideas. Architecture firms submitted plans and I seem to recall there was even a website where people could submit their own ideas.

I had an idea, too. My idea was to recreate the towers in a way that from one angle, they resembled the old towers, but from another angle, they outlined the space where the towers once stood. The solid sides would be inscribed with the names of the victims.

It wouldn’t be very practical for a lot of reasons. But one thing about the design that bothered me the most is that the names at the top would be less visible than the names at the bottom, giving the lower names more prominence, which didn’t seem right.

Pelé the Garbage Man

On the fifth anniversary of 9/11, I posted a photo of this sanitation worker I met named Pelé wearing a homemade replica of the twin towers on his helmet.

I wonder where Pelé is now.

Animated Manhattan

For a few years, I wrote an intermittent series of posts on my blog about how Manhattan is depicted in animation. I documented twenty or so animated movies, shorts, and TV shows that took place in Manhattan. It turns out that several of them had scenes featuring the World Trade Center.

I only have tiny versions of most of those images because my blog was designed for much smaller resolution screens than we use now. So please forgive the postage-stamp-sized images. I didn’t save the high-res versions.

Anyway, here is a selection of some WTC images in animation. You can view the original posts for more information about each one.

The Simpsons:

Family Guy:

The Critic:

MTV’s Downtown:

Oliver & Company:

Antz:

Sundae in New York:

Spider-Man and the Other Twin Towers

I just wrote this four months ago, so you may have seen it if you’re a regular reader. The original trailer for the first Sam Raimi Spider-Man movie famously depicted the twin towers shortly before they were destroyed, and the trailer was pulled after 9/11.

But I think I’m the only person who noticed that there’s a second set of twin towers in the trailer that was also destroyed within days of the trailer coming out.

Read the original post for the full story.

Li’l Bill & Hill

But maybe it all started with Li’l Bill & Hill. This wasn’t about 9/11 in a direct and obvious way to outsiders, but was definitely related in my mind. It was a whole website I made dedicated to a Saturday Morning Cartoon that didn’t really exist about all the members of the Clinton administration as little kids.

What does this have to do with 9/11? Well, it was the winter, about five months after the attacks. I was home a lot, not going out that much. And I was really unhappy with the Bush administration’s handling of pretty much everything. And I guess I just missed the relative calm of the Clinton years and wanted to revisit it.

I also was very online, and had seen this incredible website someone made that obsessively detailed one of my favorite cartoons, Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends.

I guess all that soup in my head inspired me to make this site. So while it’s not about 9/11, I think of it as of the time and part of how I dealt with things.

It wasn’t my first standalone website to get some attention, but one of several single-serving sites I made over a period of a few years. Registering domains and setting up individual websites was getting to be an expensive hobby right around the time that blogs were starting to become popular. So a few years later I started Ironic Sans as a singular place for my various ideas and musings.

It blows me away that people born right after 9/11 are now almost as old as I was on 9/11 and they lived their whole lives with the events of that day being history before their time. Meanwhile, any time I look at pictures from the day, I understand what it means to “feel triggered,” as my emotions from then come flooding back to me now.

One thing I will always remember is that right after the attacks, everyone in New York wanted to help but it wasn’t always clear how. Not everyone had the knowledge or equipment to search for survivors. But word spread that rescue workers needed socks, boots, underwear, and food, and people lined up to donate what they had to the people who were doing the work.

I learned about a volunteer opportunity a couple blocks from Ground Zero at a food tent for rescue workers, and immediately signed up. I spent several days working shifts making meals and feeding dust-covered workers as they came to take food breaks. I remember one small incident clearly: I had never made a giant urn of coffee before and I had no idea if I was making it too weak or too strong until one of the workers took a sip and said, “Wow, that’ll put hair on your chest.” I guess it was too strong.

But I don’t mean to turn this space into a memory dump. There were many people in New York who were affected more deeply and directly than I was. My thoughts are with them this week.

Thanks as always for reading. See you next time.

David