Real Estate Players Remember Sept. 11, After 25 Years

What can I say about the rest of that day? The precise details are buried deep in my mind; even decades later they are apparently too painful to relive fully. What I do recall is a series of opaque images, the events blurred like photographs that were never fully developed. My memory has always been one of my prides, and I would often boast about it. But when I try to look back on that grim day, I’m overwhelmed. I can recall only moments, intimations of what I’d lived through.

There I was still in the apartment, Klara and I watching the television in stunned silence when the second plane abruptly turned north and slammed into the South Tower. How can this be happening? my mind screamed.

And what about my children? Both Roger and Lisa worked in the Trade Center complex. And the people who worked for me? We had temporary offices on the eighty-ninth floor; I hoped they hadn’t arrived before nine. When I tried to call their cells, the office—nothing. All the phones were down in Lower Manhattan and it would remain that exasperating way all day. I wanted, I needed to know that my children, my employees, my tenants were alive—and I could not reach anyone.

Then the towers fell. They started to crumble—and just like that they were gone. One moment they were there, and then they weren’t. I was absolutely staggered. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing with my own eyes. Yet in the next instant my bewilderment gave way to prayers. Where were my children? My employees?

Suddenly I realized I needed to get to our office at 521 Fifth Avenue, on Forty-Fourth Street. It became very important, the only thing that mattered. I wanted to get some sort of control over the rushing surge of events and I unreasonably decided that if I was in the office, seated at my desk, order would be restored. The world I once knew would be reinstated.

Throughout the day, our conference room began to fill with people. They were the wives and husbands of our employees. It was a community of strangers suddenly linked by common prayers, by wishful hopes.

My children, thank God, made it to the Fifth Avenue office. Both Roger and Lisa had stories to tell, tales of fortuitous escapes. Their arrivals created a surge of hope in the anxious relatives of the missing who were crowded into the conference room.

Then at around three p.m. Bill Dacunto, the man who was second in command of all our buildings, arrived. He was completely covered in ash, a gray, ghostlike presence. I couldn’t recognize him at first.

I led Bill into the conference room so he could share what he knew, what he had seen with those who had been waiting for hours and hours for some word from their loved ones. It was a mistake. When they saw him—weary, saddened, blanketed in the thick white soot that was all that remained of the buildings where their husbands and wives worked—they started to realize that all would not be set right, that the day would not have a miraculous ending.

You weren’t there on that morning.

So it was my son Kyle’s first day of kindergarten. And then as I walk him upstairs, an administrator grabs me and says, you know, your office is looking for you. A plane has hit the building. So I jumped in the car. And obviously, as I got down there, I saw that huge, black, billowing smoke.

And the guy that was driving my car started crying. I was like, let’s just — we got to get there. We just got to get there. And so I drove right to the building and got to the door of the building and started grabbing people as they came out.

Did you see anyone you knew?

I didn’t. You know, I was grabbing people as they came out. And then I heard this sound. It was the loudest sound I’d ever heard. What it was was Two World Trade Center collapsed. So I just start running. I’m just running.

And I look over my shoulder. And there’s this big, giant, black tornado of smoke chasing me. So I dive under a car. And the black smoke just went “foosh.” You know, I was saying, don’t breathe, don’t breathe, don’t breathe. And then take a deep breath.

And then, you know, all this sort of particles and soot and dust starts filling my lungs. I understood right away that if I was suffocating and I was outside, how could they possibly have survived inside?

Steve Witkoff was in his office at the old Daily News building up on 42nd Street, and could see the smoke coming from the towers through his windows. At 9:59 am, he watched in horror as the South Tower came crashing down, followed 29 minutes later by its twin next door. 

Witkoff rushed up to the Bronx to collect his children from the Riverdale School. Soon after returning home, he got a call from Bo Dietl and Mike Ciravolo, two old friends who were retired NYPD detectives. They suggested heading Downtown to help, which is how Witkoff ended up standing on a piece of mangled steel, on a rope line until 5 a.m. the next morning, holding the end of a long cord tied around the belly of a firefighter with a flesh-sniffing dog digging through the rubble of the massive pile of debris, searching for survivors.

After that exhausting night on the pile, Witkoff walked into the ornate lobby of his $146 million trophy [the Woolworth Building], with its cathedral-like ceilings, bronze fixtures and elaborate glass mosaics, and was surprised to find exhausted firefighters, police officers and other first responders stretched out on virtually every inch of available floor space. Their clothes were covered in ash, and their hands were raw from digging through the rubble, he recalled, which made for a shocking tableau set against the marble floors and rich red carpeting of the tower.  

Witkoff was so moved, he walked an American flag up to the top of the skyscraper — the elevators were out — and raised it. He moved a generator in, vowing to keep the building open no matter what. For the next 30 days, the building served as a staging area, and slept much of the 10th Precinct and first responders from other areas.

Were you at work on 9/11? 

I was there… It was so long ago at this point, but I hadn’t gotten to work just yet. I got off the subway that morning at the World Trade Center exit after the first plane hit, but before the second plane, so I was standing right outside, beneath the South Tower when it was hit. Our building was destroyed. They had a disaster recovery location in New Jersey for a while, and then we had a temporary location in Midtown. 

I believed, from the terrible moment of 9/11 on, that it was a singular moment of opportunity for the city after this immense tragedy. … I ran into [Silverstein] — he was about to go into a place to have dinner, and I ran into him on the street on the Upper East Side. We were standing in front of each other and I began to cry. And he put his arms around me and said, “Sweetheart, we’re gonna rebuild.” This is 6 o’clock on the night of 9/11… I’d like to think so much of my positive response to it has been as a consequence of that moment.

It’s a story I haven’t told much, but Arthur Mirante called me — I was on a conference call, Arthur was our CEO then — and he said, “A plane just hit the Trade Center, call Larry and see if you can help.” … Obviously I can’t get anybody from Larry’s office on the phone. So we then saw what happened and 10 or 12 of us jumped on the subway to go down to help. And you know, we were in that subway thinking like, “Alright so how do we rebuild this?” and all that, and all those conversations are going on. And when we came out the first tower had fallen. 

When I worked on [insurance coverage for the World Trade Center], I was maybe 32. It was a lot of pressure. The reason I wanted that coverage was I contemplated both buildings being destroyed, which everybody thought I was absolutely crazy for. How could both towers be destroyed? But when you’re evaluating risk, you evaluate every potential risk. The Silverstein people wanted to insure the buildings for much less, obviously, because of the premium, and I’ll never forget, they said, “Well, we have an engineering report that was done that will show $600 million worth of damage if the buildings were destroyed.” And I said, “Well, what happens if a plane hits the building?” 

… The morning of 9/11 I was driving to my office. I got a call from someone who told me a plane hit the building. I didn’t actually think terrorism, even though I set the program up so that they had to have terrorism insurance, which was a novel thing. They couldn’t have an exclusion for terrorism. No one did that before. That was never required in an insurance policy closing before.

We took Silverstein’s premium from like $4 million to $15 million, and back then, that was a fortune. It affected the numbers of their transaction, and they were very upset about it. But ultimately, the World Trade Center got rebuilt because of the work that we did. I testified in the trials. I was busy working post-9/11 on this claim, and it really took my business to a whole other level. But it was such a horrible event that made that happen.

Keep in mind, it was the Port Authority who was doing the lease [with Silverstein]. Their offices were in the World Trade Center. So there were people that I dealt with that didn’t make it. It was a tough time.

After 9/11, at the time I was living and working in Lower Manhattan, and I lived on Canal Street, Canal and Broadway, and I started going to a mosque on Warren Street. We have our congregation prayers on Friday, which are the equivalent of a Sabbath for Jews on Saturday or a Christian mass or sermon on Sunday. … Sometimes it felt that God was talking to me directly.

… Some incredible scholars would come into that venue, and it was packed. There were several thousand people during [Friday] prayers, and if you got there late, you were praying down [on] the sidewalk or on the stairs. … We were packed like sardines, and it didn’t feel right that, one, that it’s so crowded. And you know, I was in the real estate business, and I almost made an immediate commitment. I made a promise to God and I made a promise to myself that I was going to help this community with whatever skills I have.

… And at the same time, I felt the brotherhood. You felt this unconditional love, no judgments. You felt a camaraderie, and you saw this is your identity, and that was the thing that you all looked for. We all as human beings are looking for community. We’re pack people. I don’t even know what that’s called, but we need to be together. … I said: “Guys, we need to own a building here.”

The night of September 11, I didn’t really know who was alive and who wasn’t alive. So we had a conference call. It was about 10 o’clock at night. And my employees called in. And I said, look, we have two choices.

We can shut the firm down and go to our friends’ funerals. Remember, that would be 20 funerals a day every day for 35 straight days. And I’ve got to tell you, I’m not really interested in going to work. All I want to do is climb under the covers and hug my family.

But if we are going to go to work, we’re going to do it to take care of our friends’ families. So what do you want to do? You guys want to shut it down? Or do you want to work harder than you’ve ever worked before in your life? And that was the moment where the company survived. 

… So you had a business to run amidst overwhelming grief. How did you begin to put those pieces together?

Well, decisions I made were they needed to have a boss for the business. If I didn’t have a leader, I shut it. And I had a division of 86 people where four people survived. And you can’t really build a business back with four people.

Basically, we went from being a great company that was making a million dollars a day to a company that was losing a million dollars a day. But they all have mortgages to pay, and they need to put food on their table.

So one of the things I did is I would call the leaders of other companies and say, here, this guy’s John. He sells this many products. He’s incredibly successful. You would’ve never been able to hire him. He was never going to come work for you.

But here’s what I need. I need you to match what he made with me. And if not, in one hour, I’m going to call your other competitor. And he’s going to be working there. And I got all my people jobs.

What is it like to be the face of Sept. 11?

If I go out to dinner, someone will come up to me and say they know a widow or a family. It’s really incredible.

Isn’t that hard?

To those who have had loss, memory is the most beautiful of your senses. So memory and time takes out the pain.

Do you have regrets?

Sure. I wish we were never in the World Trade Center. I wish my brother never came to work for me. I wish I never hired all my friends.

Do you get tired of people asking you about 9/11?

Never. Every Sept. 11 … our employees waive their day’s pay and we donate all of the revenue that comes in the door. We try to make the worst day something extraordinary.

The first catalyst was 9/11. People wanted to rebuild the city and make it greater than ever. … When we came in after 9/11, people feared that the city was going to decline the same way it had in the 1970s. We lost 800,000 people in the ’70s. It took us 25 years to get them back. Twenty-five years. … Over time as we got things done, the business community and people from all through the world had confidence in New York.

He went into the police department and then got his law degree. After 9/11, we looked at our life and said we wanted to participate in as meaningful a way possible in raising our children. I had the better gig, so he was willing to give it a whirl. I like to say he couldn’t pack a diaper bag in 2001. Now he’s quite good.

I decided it was beneath me to worry about my business… I remember thinking this can’t be about business. And I was deeply inspired. It was, “What can I do?” Guys who had uniforms on are walking up these staircases to rescue people, and they all died. They didn’t go home to their families. That’s when I remember thinking: “I cannot do enough.”