Downtown Pittsburgh, Sept. 11, 2001 -- A city in shock
On the afternoon of Sept. 11, 2001, as the country was going into shock from the horrible events in New York, Washington and Shanksville, Pa., my job at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review was to go out into the abandoned and strangely silent city of Pittsburgh and report what I saw. Here's what I wrote:
Empty Downtown offers day of silence for victims
Pittsburgh, as seen from atop Mt. Washington, was eerily quiet on the afternoon of Sept. 11, 2001.
As the sun finally sets on a day America will never forget, downtown Pittsburgh – its skyline intact and unbloodied by terror – is quieter than a Sunday.
From Grandview Avenue on Mt. Washington, the city’s usual loud evening hum of noise and traffic is glaringly absent.
Far below in the shadows, a few cars cross the Fort Duquesne and Fort Pitt bridges. The fountain at the tip of Point State Park is off. PNC Park is dark. The sky – usually buzzing with the nonstop traffic of airplanes gliding toward Pittsburgh International Airport – is eerily empty.
It’s a gorgeous night, the end of a perfect blue day, but no pleasure boats cut the placid waters of the Three Rivers. It’s so quiet, you can hear distant crows cawing and the sound of a towboat pushing a pair of empty coal barges up the Ohio toward the Point.
On Sept. 11, 2001, downtown Pittsburgh was emptied of life, its office workers and shoppers chased home early by horrible events in New York and Washington, D.C.
Except for a few straggling commuters waiting at bus stops and the pigeons and street people of Market Square, Downtown’s streets and sidewalks were already virtually abandoned at 4 p.m.
Evening rush hour started at noon, when Downtown was thrown into severe gridlock by the voluntary evacuations of its buildings. Kaufmann’s closed. So did Lord & Taylor. So did all of the city’s McDonald’s restaurants.
At 4:15, nothing seemed open. The T had shut down. So had Amtrak. The only traffic of note on Smithfield Street was a train of empty Port Authority buses like the 63A to Edgewood that Michele McEvoy was waiting for.
Normally, there’d be hordes of bus patrons at her stop, the 29-year-old accountant said as she stood by herself in front of Barnes & Noble. ‘I’ve never seen it like this, except maybe at 9 at night.’
Grant Street was equally vacant. But outside the Omni William Penn Hotel’s bustling Tap Room bar, where most everyone was staring intently at CNN news reports, Betsy Bernhardy, 30, and her husband Don, 34, were taking full advantage of the unpeopled sidewalks.
Residents of the Washington Plaza apartments, they each were in their wheelchairs. Betsy, with 6-month-old Cameron sleeping on her lap, said they had come ‘to see what the city’s like when it’s empty. It’s like Sunday. It’s really a strange sight.’
Across the street stood the rusty USX Tower, the city’s tallest building and, therefore, the presumed target of any suicidal terrorists in control of a hijacked airliner.
At 4:45, the fountains in the plaza at its base were still spurting and its escalators were still running. But its only inhabitants were a few security guards like Jim Perez of Castle Shannon.
The only place open for business on Grant Street was First Lutheran Church. Normally, it closed at 4 p.m., said building operator John Lanyon, 71, of Lincoln Place. But today at 4:30 p.m., as the handmade sign on the side door said, the church was being kept ‘open for prayer.’ No one was inside.
Hotel bartenders were busy at the Tap Room and at the Pub in the Pittsburgh Hilton & Towers. But the only shopkeeper working late yesterday seemed to be Gabriel Fontana, the cigar-chewing owner of Gabriel Shoe Repair on Forbes Avenue.
At about 5:30, his door was locked, but his lights were on and he was still putting soles on the heels of men’s shoes.
Seven days later I went out to the ghostly Pittsburgh International Airport.
A great day to fly out of Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh, Sept. 18, 2001
It's a great day to fly out of Pittsburgh International Airport.
There are no plastic knives at the food court.
But that's the only major inconvenience I've experienced during my three-hour visit at this former small city unto itself that is now an exceptionally well-policed ghost town.
It's early Tuesday afternoon, exactly one week after terrorists bloodied America's nose, scared its masses from the skies and crippled it airline industry.
The airport's ticket counters, flight gates and baggage carousels are deserted. Its nationally heralded Air Mall, usually crawling with US Airways passengers making their connecting flights, has more store employees than customers.
It's true you can no longer check your bags at curbside and must haul them from the long-term parking lot by the Hyatt hotel. And without airplane tickets of their own your friends and loved ones can no longer escort you all the way to your gate. You have to exchange your final goodbye kisses and hugs before you go through the metal detectors.
But at the airport today there are no traffic jams. Plenty of parking. Plenty of skycaps ready to help. Everyone is extra polite and friendly.
As for the new and improved steps to tighten airport security, they are easy to spot but suitably subtle for a democratic republic headed for war.
No surly submachine gun-toting soldiers, just a pair of Allegheny County cops watching the luggage drop-off area.
The metal detectors are manned by the same low-paid, under-trained folks they always are – just lots more of them. If they are tense and testy because they are looking for terrorists with box cutters or cork-screws, they don't show it.
Here too, there is nothing sinister or vaguely totalitarian.
Just more trays for the things in your pockets that go beep.
Just more chance of your carry-on stuff being re-sent through the scanner or opened and inspected by hand at a cafeteria table.
If this is what the coming maximum security state is going to look like in post-Sept. 11 America, we won't have much to worry about.
It's a great day to fly out of Pittsburgh International Airport.
I walk up to the empty US Airways counter at 12:40 p.m. and buy a roundtrip flight to New York at 2 p.m. for $406. Nothing is different. Window seat as usual. No extra hoops to go through regarding ID. No suspicious looks or alarms going off because I have no baggage to check.
If I had paid with cash, bought a one-way ticket or looked less Germanic, maybe it'd have been different.
What few lines there are move quickly. A feeble old couple on their way home to India has to wait in a long line at the United Airlines ticket counter. But they make it from baggage drop-off to metal-detector portal in less than an hour – and they are in wheelchairs.
It takes a little longer for a trio of Kuwaitis to get to their US Airways gate. It's not because they are receiving special scrutiny because they are Arabs.
It's because they are packing enough luggage for a Navy Seal underwater demolition team – four large U-haul boxes and at least eight suitcases, all of which are run through the fat CTX 5500 InVision scanner.
The trio – father, mother and daughter (who are wearing black scarves) – is returning to Kuwait after one of their periodic trips to Pittsburgh for medical care. They are being shepherded by a fourth Kuwaiti, a young man with a cell phone and a pager and a handful of ticket vouchers.
After the homeward-bound Kuwaitis disappear into the doors of the almost empty transit train to the lonely gates, I talk to the fourth Kuwaiti. For understandable reasons, he will not divulge his name and his address. Let's say he looks in his mid-30s and isn't a gas-station attendant.
He says he's a Muslim. He's married to an American woman – a Muslim. 'I love this country,' he says. 'The flag, the way we are treated, the freedom. You feel free and you walk around and no one bothers you. It feels like home to me.'
As for the evil the terrorists did, he is outraged. Islam is not about killing innocents, it's about peace.
He wants to see the individual responsible captured and brought to justice. 'I'd like for the government to catch the son of a bitch,' he says as he leaves, proving that after 12 years as a U.S. citizen he is getting the hang of being an American.
In Concourse D, except for the Romeo family of Sacramento, Ca., the long, wide corridor is empty as far as the eye can see.
At 3:30 Steve and Debra Romeo are slowly walking behind Jeffrey, their antic 21-month-old, who is throwing a yellow ball far ahead of him, chasing it down and throwing it ahead again.
The Romeos were on the subway near the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., when the suicide plane hit. After skipping their planned tour of Washington, renting a car and visiting relatives in West Virginia, they can't wait to get back home. Their American Airlines flight leaves at 4.
It's a great day to fly out of Pittsburgh International Airport.