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Millions of Americans woke up on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, turned on their televisions and absorbed the reality that the country was under attack. We spoke with nine Lane County residents who didn’t view that day’s events on a screen; they lived them in New York City and Washington, D.C. Here are their stories.
Laura and Rob Illig
Age on 9/11: Both were 32
Now: Co-founders of a local startup, Sidekick, an app that helps people connect around shared interests
Laura Illig remembers the sky.
“It was a beautiful day,” she said. “Bright blue, absolutely gorgeous.”
She was five months pregnant and working at Citibank on Wall Street. Her ritual every day included a decaf caramel macchiato from the Starbucks across the street from her office.
On her way back to her office, she heard murmurs from strangers on the street that a plane had crashed into one of the twin towers. She brushed them off.
In her office, people’s attention quickly shifted to the televisions in a managing director’s office. News reports were still preliminary when a co-worker suggested they walk to the side of the floor that faced the towers.
From roughly the 25th floor of the Citibank building, Illig and her colleagues watched as the second plane hit.
“There was debris hitting the windows, it was kind of paralyzing,” she said. “Nobody knew what to make of it.”
She remembers thinking, “Do we go? Do we escape?”
Firefighters and police officers came to every floor of the building, instructing people to stay put until told otherwise. She called her husband, Rob Illig, but the call was brief, and she wasn’t able to reach him again.
Finally, Laura Illig and her co-workers were given the go-ahead to leave.
She remembers trekking down nearly 30 flights of stairs and once she was outside, slipping off her kitten-heeled mules and starting the walk in her pantyhose to her home in the Murray Hill neighborhood. The walk would take her five hours.
“It was a little bit like the start of a marathon when you see all those people lining up,” she said.
“Or a zombie movie,” Rob Illig chipped in.
On her way home, Laura Illig remembers stopping at a cannoli shop in Little Italy.
“The guy running the shop was like, ‘Sit down, put your feet up. Here’s a drink. Here’s a cannoli.’ Like, just take a break, because it was like a disaster.”
The Illigs said that typically in New York, if you needed to use the bathroom, shop owners wouldn’t let you.
“But on this day, it was like, ‘Please come in,’” Laura Illig said.
Churches opened their doors to the public. There were hourly services, with people flooding in to pray, take refuge and rest.
Two towers, then one, then none
On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Rob Illig walked to his law firm at 49th and Madison in Manhattan. On the street, someone told him a plane had hit the World Trade Center.
“Being a New Yorker, I thought they were just crazy and tried to avoid them,” he said.
As he got closer, banks and offices had TVs tuned to the news, and screens visible from the sidewalk showed smoke pouring out of the towers. Small crowds collected around them outside.
Still, he made his way to work.
At the office, he was interviewing a candidate for a position when it became clear the situation was serious. He went to his boss’s corner office on Madison Avenue, where you could look downtown and see the tops of the Twin Towers.
He and his wife had their brief phone conversation, and then he noticed one of the towers was gone. He walked back to his office, and then back to his boss’s office.
“I walked back and looked,” he said. “A minute ago there was one tower. Then there were none.”
Rob was able to walk back home to their apartment on First Avenue without trouble, but the next day, he was called back into work to handle a client’s emergency.
Manhattan’s streets were nearly empty so emergency vehicles could move freely. Police officers — some from other states — stood on corners, he said. Soon after, officials urged people to return to work, in part to project a sense of continuity.
In the weeks after, small firehouses across Manhattan suddenly became more visible because of flowers set on the sidewalks in front of them and posters of missing firefighters taped to the street poles outside.
A move west
After the attacks, the Illigs decided to move. They spent a year in Missouri before getting to Eugene in 2004.
Rob Illig became a professor at the University of Oregon law school. Laura Illig shifted from global finance to work in local credit unions, and their daughter grew up in a smaller, greener city.
Twenty-five years later, Rob Illig still avoids documentaries about 9/11, and the couple try not to consume any news on that day each year.
“It’s just too real,” they both say.
Josh and Rachel Burstein
Age on 9/11: Josh was 29, Rachel 28
Now: Josh Burstein is head of human resources for Lane Council of Governments. Rachel Burstein is the executive assistant to the rabbi and the religious school administrator at Temple Beth Israel.
Two months before 9/11, Josh and Rachel Burstein lived in an apartment just blocks from the World Trade Center. The young couple had returned to New York from the West Coast two years earlier, and chose a two-bedroom apartment at 70 Battery Place in Manhattan. Josh Burstein had grown up in Queens, and both had attended law school at New York University.
“Our view from that (apartment) was beautiful … right across the river you could see the Statue of Liberty,” Josh Burstein said.
The twin towers loomed over the Bursteins’ daily commutes. They were the site of frequent errands — to the Duane Reade drugstore and a bookstore that were in the bottom level of the complex. For years, Josh Burstein kept a receipt from that bookstore as a keepsake.
“Even though we didn’t work in the World Trade Center, it was still part of our daily life,” Josh Burstein said.
Near the end of summer 2001, the couple moved to Flushing, Queens. It cut their rent in half, saved them $400 on parking a month and allowed them to be closer to Josh Burstein’s mother.
“It’s a fortunate coincidence that we moved when we did,” Rachel Burstein said. “Because if we had been living in Battery Park City, the subway that Josh took to work went right under the World Trade Center.”
Josh Burstein remembers New Year’s Eve 1999, when he gazed up at the World Trade Center’s dazzling lights to see if they would flicker off for Y2K.
“That memory still sears in my mind because of what happened later,” he said.
A disorienting commute
Josh Burstein was working as a lawyer in an office building a block away from Times Square. He remembers taking the partially elevated 7 train to work that day from their new apartment in Flushing.
On his way out the door, he heard on the news that a small plane had hit one of the World Trade Center’s towers.
“As we got closer to Manhattan, I could see both towers burning,” Burstein said. “I was kind of confused because I had heard one tower, one small plane. Maybe the fire jumped, but fire can’t jump. It just didn’t make sense.”
Minutes after seeing the twin towers smoldering in the Manhattan skyline, he climbed the steps out of the Bryant Park subway station.
On his way up, he overheard a woman frantically talking on the phone.
“She was talking about how another plane hit the second tower and how she’d just been evacuated from the Empire State Building,” he said.
He continued his trek to work. Arriving at Sixth Avenue and 43rd Street, he saw a flock of people around a storefront. They were watching the news on the TVs for sale in the shop’s window. Burstein joined them.
“And at that point, I saw both buildings burning,” Burstein said. “And I (heard) them talking about obviously it’s a terrorist attack.”
Authorities in his office building — he worked on the 50th floor — at first told everyone to stay put. By midmorning, they gave the go-ahead to leave.
Burstein and his secretary, who also lived in Queens, made their way to the subway. The familiarity of a friend from work was the only comfort on a tragic day.
In the months following, Burstein remembers New York City citizens becoming more patient and gentle with one another. He thought back to lines at his favorite local restaurants and on subway rides.
“A lot of times the subway would stop in the middle of a tunnel … and people usually [would] be very annoyed,” Burstein said. “I remember for months after, given what we all had faced, people were much more understanding and patient.”
Like watching ‘Independence Day’
Rachel Burstein woke up that morning in Flushing to the sound of the landline ringing. It was Josh’s mom.
“She said, ‘Oh my God, did you hear that a plane just hit the World Trade Center?’”
Burstein was initially dismissive.
“I was thinking some small private passenger plane grazed it,” she said. “Then she said, ‘No, a big commercial airliner just hit the World Trade Center, and it seems to be possibly a terrorist attack,’ and that’s when I realized how serious it was.”
Quickly she turned on the TV, and witnessed the second plane hit the other tower. Within 90 minutes, both towers had fallen.
Despite living near the towers just months earlier, it felt like she was watching an “Independence Day” type of disaster movie. It didn’t feel real.
“It felt surreal because those were personal places to me,” Rachel Burstein said.
Later that day, she made her way to her mother-in-law’s house, in the Forest Hills neighborhood, in hopes that her husband would connect with her there.
By that point, ash was starting to drift to the outer boroughs.
“We had to wear masks outside in that area for a while afterward because of all the ash from the buildings and dead bodies, frankly, and other debris flowing over to Queens because mileage-wise, it’s not that far,” she said.
Peter DeFazio
Age on 9/11: 54
Now: Retired U.S. congressional representative for Oregon’s 4th Congressional District
When the World Trade Center was struck, Congressman Peter DeFazio, who represented Lane County and Oregon’s 4th District, was giving a speech on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives in Washington, D.C.
He remembers talking about Social Security, budget surpluses and the future of retirement benefits for the average American.
As he concluded his time on the floor and stepped from the podium, a House clerk motioned for him.
“She said, ‘You’re on the aviation committee, right?’” DeFazio said. “I replied, ‘Well, yes, of course,’ and then she said, ‘Well a plane just crashed into the World Trade Center.’”
DeFazio said the skies were perfectly clear in Washington, D.C., that day, and he assumed that it was the same in New York.
He thought, “How could a plane accidentally hit a skyscraper in weather like that?”
He walked across the street to his office in the Longworth House Office Building and when he arrived, his staff was gathered around a television. As he joined them, the second plane slammed into the World Trade Center.
“That was incredibly shocking,” DeFazio said. “Horror — realizing that a lot of people were going to die and just thinking, ‘What’s going on? How could this happen?’”
Soon after, staff from the office of Rep. Darlene Hooley, also part of the Oregon delegation, who were on a higher floor and could see across the Potomac River, called him, saying they saw smoke near the Pentagon.
In 2001, DeFazio said, the Capitol complex had “no real emergency plan.”
Suddenly, Capitol Police were sprinting through the halls, shouting at everyone to get out. DeFazio and his staff were sent to a nearby park, where they awaited further instructions.
Soon after, they walked to an employee’s apartment, far enough, they hoped, to be safe if the Capitol itself was hit.
As the senior Democrat on the House Aviation Subcommittee, DeFazio had been briefed before 9/11 by the Federal Aviation Administration on the weakness of airport screening. He had heard stories about screeners missing test guns carried through checkpoints and about the low pay and high turnover among private security contractors.
Airport security screeners, he said, frequently left their jobs for positions at McDonald’s, he said.
After the attacks, DeFazio worked with colleagues on the Transportation Committee to help create the Transportation Security Administration — a federal workforce for aviation security, meant to set standards for the front line defenses that had failed on 9/11.
DeFazio traveled to New York with other members of Congress shortly after the tragedy. He remembers traveling by train to New Jersey and then taking a boat from Jersey City, as transportation options were limited.
“I remember being on the boat,” he said, “and just still seeing smoke rising and no Trade towers. It was extraordinary.”
Peter Laufer
Age on 9/11: 51
Now: Professor of journalism and James N. Wallace Chair of Journalism at the University of Oregon
Peter Laufer was a San Francisco-based journalist who was in Washington, D.C., on the day of the attacks. He was dressed in a suit and tie and meeting with National Geographic editors about a talk show when news of the attacks in New York City reached the conference room.
The meeting abruptly ended, and he felt the horror of what had happened almost immediately.
“I walked back to my hotel, watching the Pentagon burning across the Potomac, and I just wanted to get home, because the business was over for a while at National Geographic, of course, and all the planes were grounded,” Laufer said.
His instinct, though, was to start reporting.
He picked up a video camera, loaded it with digital cassettes and began interviewing people in D.C. and Arlington, Virginia, asking what they were feeling, how they were processing the attacks, and what it meant to be an American at that moment.
Four days later, planes still weren’t flying. So he rented a car and started driving across the country, interviewing people at truck stops, gas stations and small towns along the way.
“I figured all eyes were appropriately on New York and Washington,” Laufer said. “But what was the rest of the country doing?”
He captured the real-time reactions and emotions of Americans.
“No matter their station in life, the common theme was horror,” Laufer said.
He remembers talking to a woman at a Greyhound Bus depot in Effingham, Illinois, days after the attacks.
“She said she was never getting on an airplane again,” Laufer said. “And then she said, and it was perhaps understandable but also shocking, ‘I just want revenge.’”
Revenge was a common theme.
“I heard that again from a guy who was fixing a trailer at a rest stop in Colorado, and he said something like, ‘Bomb them back into the Stone Age,’” Laufer said.
By the time he reached the West Coast, Laufer had filled his tapes with interviews. At every stop he found people trying to make sense of the images of smoldering wreckage from New York and Washington.
His reporting led him to make the coast-to-coast trip again in 2011, and a third time in 2021, eventually leading to a book commemorating the 25th anniversary of the attacks.
The book, “We Are All Americans: Stories From Three Road Trips Across Our Nation in the Long Wake of 9/11,” focuses on those ordinary people that Laufer interviewed and the changes that occurred in the United States in the decades following Sept. 11, 2001.
“This stuff does continue to today,” Laufer said. “It doesn’t go away.”
Jeffry Hardinger
Age on 9/11: 24
Now: Owner and operator of Lucky Thai food cart in Eugene
Jeffry Hardinger, who graduated from Lane Community College’s culinary program, has been cooking for 30 years, working at Excelsior, Marché, The Davis and other restaurants across Eugene.
He ran restaurants in New York, including Long Tan, a once-beloved and now-shuttered Thai restaurant where he met his wife, Varalux “Luck” Hardinger.
On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Hardinger, like millions of New Yorkers and commuters, was trying to get to work. He hadn’t yet realized a hijacked plane had struck the World Trade Center.
The trains had stopped running, which never happened, so he hailed a cab from Queens. It wasn’t until he was riding toward Long Tan in downtown Brooklyn, that he saw from across the East River that the south tower of the World Trade Center had collapsed.
From the Spanish radio station playing in the cab, he heard the words “avión” and “terroristas.” When the second building buckled and crashed, it felt like an earthquake, he said.
Hardinger made it to the restaurant on foot, watching thousands of people spill out from the Atlantic Terminal commuter station. He found a staff member in the basement rolling spring rolls for the day, listening to Thai music, living in a different world from the people just above.
She’d taken the train in before the first attack. Hardinger sent her home to Queens in a cab, then opened Long Tan’s doors to people escaping downtown Manhattan. Two men walked in, suits coated in ash, and sat at the bar. They couldn’t work and couldn’t get home, so they drank and bought drinks for strangers. Hardinger cooked.
They stayed open until 4 or 5 in the morning, Hardinger said, making spring rolls and pad thai and pouring drinks.
“Everybody was just happy to have a place to go, get some food,” he said.
In the aftermath, he remembers a dark side: Armed police in full gear with big dogs patrolling the subways, people being told to empty their bags out. He recalls the Islamophobia and racial profiling.
“It wasn’t just a day,” he said. “It was weeks of smoke and craziness.”
Tom and Denise McDonnell
Now: Tom is professor emeritus of advertising at the University of Oregon, and Denise is retired from the advertising industry.
Twenty-five years ago, Tom and Denise McDonnell, both originally from Oregon, were living in Ridgewood, New Jersey, a bedroom community about 20 miles from lower Manhattan. Denise McDonnell recalled neighbors who commuted by train to Wall Street, families who lived in the suburbs but oriented their lives around the skyscrapers in the city.
On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Tom McDonnell was driving to northern New Jersey, listening to NPR. The program host broke in, announcing that a plane had struck the World Trade Center.
He had flown a lot for work, and he knew New York’s airports and flight paths pretty well.
“My first thought was that there was no flight pattern that comes that close to the Trade Center,” he said. By the time he reached his office, the second plane had hit.
His office had monitors but no way to get live TV, so he and a co-worker rigged an antenna to one just as the first tower came down.
Meanwhile, Denise McDonnell was at home in Ridgewood. She’d gotten up and taken the kids to school, when she got a phone call from her sister in Oregon.
She remembers thinking, “Wow, she’s up early.”
Then her sister explained what had happened. Denise turned on the TV.
“It was just mind-blowing,” she said.
Tom McDonnell drove home in the middle of the day. The couple remember walking to a bluff near their house where you could see the Manhattan skyline. Smoke obstructed the view.
The McDonnells had daughters in school at the time and estimated that among all the families at the elementary school and middle school their kids attended, about 50 parents had died.
Tom McDonnell still feels anger from that day, but he says he tries not to think about it.
The annual anniversary is “not just a memorial to the people who are lost. It’s a memorial to the people who did it,” he said. “It’s a memorial to the day they brought America to its knees. It still bothers me to this day.”
He remembers the twin towers as aesthetically beautiful; a place where he’d take guests to get a view of the city.
Denise McDonnell said that she still battles with the images she saw in the media, those of people facing the impossible choice.
“People were jumping out windows and stuff,” she said. “I just can’t imagine having to make that decision. Should I burn to death or should I jump?”
The attacks eventually pushed the couple to move. First they went to Warwick, New York, which was surrounded by farmland. Her husband had a two-hour commute — back to Manhattan — each day.
The couple doesn’t watch the 9/11 documentaries, and they haven’t visited the memorial. They lived it, they say. They don’t need a replay.
For Tom McDonnell, the day isn’t solely about what was lost, but what remained. To this day, he admires the “resilience of New York,” the city that shaped a good chunk of their lives.
“New York is an amazing place,” he said. “I’m not sure anywhere else in the world could have come back and come together that quickly the way they did.”
Lookout reporter Taylor Goebel contributed the vignette about Jeffry Hardinger.
