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As New York prepares to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, the story of O'Hara's Irish pub on Cedar Street stands as a living testament to the neighbourhood that existed in the shadow of the World Trade Center. Co-owner Mike Keane recalls the moment the first plane struck, while the family of Patrick Currivan, an Irish businessman aboard American Airlines Flight 11, shares the haunting premonitions his sister experienced that morning in Dublin. Their story intersects with that of the Naudet brothers, filmmakers who happened to be embedded with a fire crew near the towers.
New York is preparing to commemorate, once more, the devastating tragedy that struck the World Trade Center in 2001. The day fell on a Tuesday then, just as it falls on a Tuesday now.
The weather that fateful morning, with its radiant autumn sunshine and an expansive, pure blue sky, has woven itself into the mythology and the lasting memory of September 11. Mike Keane recalls that beautiful, clear sky as he sits at a table near the door of O'Hara's bar on a recent September Tuesday, twenty-five years later. Outside the window, muggy rain falls steadily as tourists pass along the street.
The establishment, a sturdy redbrick building unassuming in its appearance on the narrow, sloping Cedar Street, has been a fixture of the lower Manhattan landscape since 1917. It is remarkable that it remains standing at all. The bar has passed through several iterations over the decades, once operated by Chinese owners, then Greek proprietors, before a man transformed it into a cosy, floor-level Irish pub in 1983.
It quickly became a favoured refuge for the young professionals working in the World Trade Center, which had opened just a decade earlier. Mike and his fellow bar owner, Paul McEntee, both began working there as young men. Bars lined Greenwich Street in those days, and they all thrived on a steady flow of customers. Office workers and construction crews alike would step out for drinks at lunch, and not just beer, as a daily ritual.
Those who did not partake risked being left behind socially. The area was largely devoid of tourists in that era, so establishments like O'Hara's remained closed on Saturdays and Sundays. Few residents lived downtown at the time. Around 1995, however, older buildings were permitted to be converted into residential apartments, and the neighbourhood gradually began to change.
Today, standing at the corner of the memorial pool that marks the void where the south tower once stood, it takes less than a minute to walk to the entrance of O'Hara's. The bar lived in the literal shadow of those enormous buildings. Mike Keane was on the phone with someone inside the World Trade Center when the first plane struck. As the news spread and debris filled the streets, crowds began pouring into the bar.
Workers from the nearby Commodity Exchange, evacuated from their building, assumed they would be away from their desks for only an hour or two and settled in to watch the small television at the front of the pub. Among the passengers aboard American Airlines Flight 11, hijacked shortly after departing Logan Airport in Boston, was Patrick Currivan, an Irish businessman who specialised in stockbroking and the emerging tech industry.
At the time, he split his residence between Paris and Winchester, outside Boston, and was travelling to Los Angeles that morning. Patrick was fifty-two, successful enough to be contemplating retirement, and known for his love of life. In Dublin, his sister Helen had spent several uneasy hours that morning telling her husband, Martin Redden, that she harboured a dark, unshakable premonition. She repeatedly insisted that something did not feel right.
The family had already endured a harrowing year, during which Helen suffered what was believed to be an extreme reaction to a general anaesthetic following a routine appendicitis operation. She had last seen Patrick when he visited Dublin during the summer. Their other brother, Dan, a marine engineer, was out at sea, his vessel en route from Venezuela to Boston. The siblings were scattered across the globe, with plans to gather in Spain at the end of September.
Meanwhile, on the streets near the World Trade Center as Flight 11 struck was Jules Naudet. The story of the Naudet brothers is one of several extraordinary threads woven through that apocalyptic day. Jules and his brother Gédéon had spent months embedded with the Ladder 1 crew of Engine 7 in Tribeca, working on a cinema vérité documentary about a summer in the life of a probationary firefighter named Tony Benetatos.
The FDNY had not granted film crew access to any firehouse since the 1970s, and the Naudets had gained entry through their friendship with James Hanlon, a firefighter and actor. Even so, it took months of simply being present at the firehouse before the crew grew comfortable with the filmmakers and their equipment
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