The videos are playing again, the horrors renewed. I wasn’t there that day, but I often passed through the World Trade Center during my years working in New York. The PATH station underneath. Those massive escalators—you couldn’t see the top from where you stepped on—emptying you onto the streets. I saw my first portable Osborne computer there, sitting beside a man waiting for a limo at the foot of the South Tower. For a year and a half, the towers were part of my daily commute to 1 New York Plaza.

This blog served as a sort of hand-built feed for that first generation of bloggers before RSS was widely used. During this crisis the site received thousands of visits a day.

These are contemporaneous records of what was being reported, feared and understood as events unfolded. Some early reports later proved wrong. I have not altered them retrospectively.

Read each day from bottom to top:

9/11, 9/12, 9/13, 9/14, 9/15, 9/16, 9/17, 9/18.*, **

A note before reading: If you lived through the attacks in New York, these posts may bring those days back with force. Please read only if you feel ready.

Coincidences, in a life of odd coincidences: investigators concluded that the anthrax-laced letters were mailed from a collection box less than two blocks from the home where I grew up. Not just that — I used to play in the fountain adjacent to what is now called ‘Robertson Hall’ on the Princeton University campus … designed by Minoru Yamasaki, the architect who designed the towers. The curves in the facade of the WTC echo the curves of the columns and the repeated window patterns of that Princeton edifice. My generation of Princetonians knew it only as “The Yamasaki Building."