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A group of underage Irish waitresses working in a Long Island country club describe their experience of traveling to New York City on the morning of September 11, 2001, witnessing the first and second plane crashes and the immediate aftermath from the perspective of tourists, service workers and families of friends.
A tower at the World Trade Center on September 11 th, 2001, after two hijacked planes hit the twin towers in a terrorist attack on New York City.
Photograph: Mario Tama/Getty Images, going about her daily business. When I finally spoke to her on the phone later that day, I asked her if she’d been worried about me.
“Sure, I knew you’d be grand,” she said. I spent the summer of 2001 on the North Shore of Long Island just outside a town called Huntington. I went toon a J1 visa with four friends from secondary school, heavily influenced by the 2000 film Coyote Ugly in which a wannabe musician ends up dancing on a bar in her bra in Manhattan.
If you can believe it, there wasn’t much bra-wearing bar-dancing work in the Big Apple for four underage girls from Naas, so we settled for waitressing jobs at a country club in Huntington, an hour’s train ride from the hustle and bustle of Midtown. All summer long we served cobb salads and clams casino in our waistcoats and dickie bows.
The club was closed on Mondays, so we would often take the Long Island Railroad into the city to sightsee and purchase touristy NYPD and FDNY T-shirts, much to the amusement of our On one of the Mondays in late August or early September, we made our way to Lower Manhattan to shop at Century 21 and gawp at the scale of the Twin Towers. I lay on the ground to take a picture of my friends with the towers looming in the background.
‘All I could think about was getting cocaine’: Mothers share their stories of addictionÓmós review: Faultless cooking already at two-star Michelin level. Get in before prices rise We worked hard that summer – split shifts, weddings, fourth of July, birthday parties. We shared a house provided by our employers with three girls from.
We befriended the local teenagers who worked with us and bonded with a Mexican trio of men who came every summer to wipe down and reset tables and bring a fortune back home. On September 9th, we worked our final shift, planning to leave a couple of days later for a week at the beach in Maryland or North Carolina before flying home to Ireland.
With no mobile phones or access to the internet, our only plan was to travel into Manhattan on the morning of September 11th to catch a 9am train south from Penn Station. Of course, on the night of the 10th we did the dog on it and went out to the one bar that had served us underage all summer. We toasted and cried with our new friends into the wee hours.
We slept in, missing our train into the city. Waking up at around 8.30am, we pottered around, having showers and bickering over who hadn’t done their fair share of the final house cleaning. When my friend Maeve turned on the radio to a station reliable for wall-to-wall tunes, we were met instead with news coverage. Something about an explosion in the city?
Or maybe a plane crash? After turning on CNN, we watched in horror as the second plane hit the South Tower. The rest of the day was eerie and dystopian. As all flights were grounded, fighter jets from a nearby US Air Force base pelted through the sky, shaking us to the core with every overhead pass.
The phones didn’t work. The bridges and tunnels were closed and public transport was halted. The parents of one of our local friends took pity and invited us over to watch the rolling coverage with them. They had a pool, but it felt too exposed to be outside, so we didn’t swim.
Later, when we managed to contact our parents, some of them cried. My mother was confident. She knew I’d be grand. The weekend after 9/11, we went back for one more shift at the country club.
There was a wedding, though they’d dithered over whether to go ahead with it. Some of the members and guests were still missing, presumed dead. Weddings were usually very formal affairs, but this one was different. We were invited to join the party, dancing like lunatics and trying not to feel guilty.
We flew home a few days later, passing through Penn Station which was teeming with filthy firemen and littered with missing-person fliers. Airport security was intense and the racial profiling of some passengers was blatant and extensive. We had to remove our hairclips and there wasn’t a piece of cutlery, plastic or otherwise, to be had.
I watched Moulin Rouge twice on the journey home to distract from imagining what it might be like to know your plane was going to crash. Today, I think about children who don’t know where the next missile is going to come from and I thank my lucky stars that yes, I am grand.
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