The worst room in America on September 11, 2001 was the 78th floor sky lobby of the South Tower. A woman named Donna Spera walked out of it alive and called it a gore floor, and the name stuck. Understand first why that room existed at all. The Twin Towers were too tall to be served by one bank of elevators. You cannot run a single shaft 110 floors and move 25,000 people a day through it. So the design used sky lobbies. Express elevators ran from the ground floor straight up to a transfer floor, where you got off, walked across a large open lobby, and boarded a local elevator to your office. In the South Tower the sky lobbies were on 44 and 78. That meant the 78th floor was permanently full of people standing around waiting. It was the busiest room in the building and nobody thought about it any more than you think about a bus stop. At 8:46 a.m., Flight 11 hit the North Tower. People in the South Tower watched burning debris and worse go past their windows and began evacuating on their own. Then the building's public address system told them the incident was in the other building, that this building was secure, and that they could return to their offices. Some believed it. Some did not. It did not matter much, because either way the route ran through 78. People coming down from the upper floors had to transfer there. People who had been told to go back up had to transfer there. People who had ridden up from the street because they were told the building was safe were arriving there. And the express cars were jammed, so a crowd built. There were more than 200 people standing in that sky lobby when the 17 minutes ran out. At 9:03 a.m., United Flight 175 hit the South Tower at roughly 540 miles an hour, entering between the 77th and 85th floors, banked hard with the left wing low. The 78th floor sky lobby was inside the impact. The aircraft came through a room packed with civilians. The ceiling and walls came down on top of them. Aviation fuel atomized through the space and ignited, and more of it poured down the open elevator shafts and blew out of elevator doors on floors far below, burning people who were nowhere near the airplane. Of the two hundred plus people standing in that lobby, somewhere around a dozen got off the floor alive. The ones who did describe the same things. Total darkness with fire in it. The smell of jet fuel. Not being able to hear. And bodies, everywhere, in the wreckage and on what was left of the floor. Judy Wein had a broken arm, broken ribs and a punctured lung. Ling Young was burned over most of her body and walked with her arms held out from her sides because she could not stand anything touching her skin. Ed Nicholls was cut badly. Gigi Singer got out. Donna Spera got out burned. Two things saved them. The first is geometry. The aircraft hit off center. Stairwells B and C in the core were destroyed. Stairway A, in the northwest corner, farthest from the entry path, came through it marginally passable. In a building where everything else was severed, there was one narrow route down, and almost nobody alive up there knew it existed. The second is that a 24 year old equities trader named Welles Crowther, who had a red bandana over his face and had been a volunteer firefighter since he was 16, found that stairwell. He went down it as far as the 50s to be sure it went through, climbed back up to 78, and then stood in that room and shouted at the wounded that everyone who could stand should stand now and everyone who could help should help. Then he carried people down. Ling Young was eventually taken in hand by Fire Marshal James Devery. She and Wein and Singer and Nicholls reached a working freight elevator on the 40th floor. Here is the number that tells you everything about that floor. Roughly 600 people were at or above the impact zone in the South Tower. Eighteen of them got out. Every single one of the eighteen came down Stairway A. At 9:52 a.m., FDNY Battalion Chief Orio Palmer stepped out of Stairway A onto the 78th floor, having climbed 38 flights in bunker gear to get there, with Fire Marshal Ronald Bucca beside him. Palmer got on the radio in a completely level voice, reported two isolated pockets of fire he believed two hose lines could knock down, and reported numerous civilian dead. He was the last human being to describe that room to anyone. At 9:59 a.m. the South Tower collapsed. The 78th floor sky lobby, the people still in it, Palmer and Bucca all came down together into the plaza. None of it was a battlefield. There was no objective on that floor and no reason for it to exist except that the building was too tall for one elevator ride. It was a place where insurance clerks and tax examiners and traders stood every single morning holding coffee, checking their watches, waiting to change cars. For fifty six minutes on a Tuesday it was the most horrifying place in the United States of America, and almost nobody who was standing in it ever knew what hit them.

I downloaded all 12,000 pages of FDNY 9/11 oral history records and some of the testimony is soul destroying. It literally reads like Dante's Inferno. These people were in hell. The testimony of firefighter John Morabito: ''When I walked through the lobby, there was broken glass everywhere. There were also two people in the lobby: a gentleman who was already burned and was dead, and a female. She was nude. Her clothes had burnt away. Her skin was burnt away. She was still alive. She was trying to communicate. Her eyes were sealed shut. Her throat apparently was sealed. She couldn't really communicate. Within the next two minutes, she had perished right there. We never actually got her any assistance. We couldn't get her an ambulance, and we didn't get her out of there.''

September is a month of remembrance. ❤️ Five young lives were taken far too soon aboard American Airlines Flight 77 on September 11, 2001. Rodney Dickens, 11 Asia SiVon Cottom, 11 Bernard Curtis Brown II, 11 Zoe Falkenberg, 8 Dana Falkenberg, 3 They had families who loved them and entire futures still ahead of them. Five innocent lives. Forever young. Never forgotten. ❤️🙏

Thank you to everyone who joined us at our annual 9/11 Memorial Service yesterday. As we marked the 25th anniversary of September 11, 2001, we invite you to watch our mini documentary (linked below) about the Middletown Township WTC Memorial Gardens. youtu.be/Jhuzwrllpoo

There is a photograph that goes around every September of a mostly empty parking lot with a scatter of cars left in it. People share it as the saddest picture of 9/11 and a lot of people assume it is fake or mislabeled. It is real. It is the commuter lot at Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey, and it comes from an NFL documentary about how the attacks hit the region. Here is what you are looking at. The Meadowlands lot was a park and ride. Thousands of people from northern New Jersey drove there in the morning, left the car, and took a bus or a train into Manhattan. Same as the lots at Middletown, Metropark, Hoboken, Glen Rock, Ridgewood, and every Long Island Rail Road station from Rockville Centre to Huntington. On the morning of September 11, those people did what they did every weekday. Coffee in the cup holder. Radio on. Park in the usual row. Lock it. Walk to the platform. Then they went to work on the 92nd floor. By that evening the lots should have been empty. Instead the cars sat there. And they kept sitting there, through the night, and the next day, and the next. John Mara, who ran the Giants, drove past that lot every day and said it was gut wrenching, because you knew exactly what each of those cars meant. Tiki Barber said the same thing. There were cars there that never left, and you knew that person did not come home. New Jersey lost roughly 700 residents that day. Middletown alone, a Monmouth County commuter town, lost 37 people, the worst per capita toll of any municipality outside New York City. People there will tell you that their clearest memory of that week is not the television footage. It is the train and bus station lots sitting full. Think about what a parking lot actually is. It is a machine built entirely on the assumption that everybody comes back. Every single car in it is a promise that someone is returning to this exact spot at the end of the day. It is the most ordinary promise in American life and nobody thinks about it once. For about a week in September 2001, you could stand in those lots and count the ones that were broken. They emptied slowly. A brother would come with a spare key. A wife would come with a friend driving behind her. Some sat long enough to be covered in pollen and dust and to collect notices. No memorial was ever built at the Meadowlands lot. It did not need one. For those few weeks it was the most accurate casualty list in the state, sitting out in the open in the sun, and everyone driving past on Route 3 could read it.

She was 8 years old. Her name was Zoe Falkenberg, and on the morning of September 11, 2001, she climbed aboard American Airlines Flight 77 with her mom, dad, and 3-year-old little sister, Dana. To Zoe, this wasn’t a flight that would become part of American history. It was the beginning of an adventure. Her family was going to Australia for two months while her mother, Leslie Whittington, completed a fellowship at Australian National University. Her father, Charles Falkenberg, had taken leave from work so all four of them could experience it together. They had talked about seeing kangaroos and koalas and exploring a place on the other side of the world. (ABC News) Zoe sat between her dad and her little sister. Her mom was across the aisle. She was tiny for her age, but one of the brightest kids in her class. She loved Girl Scouts, ballet, swimming, and performing. More than anything, she loved books. Harry Potter was a favorite. At home, reading was a family ritual. Her parents would curl up on the couch with Zoe and Dana every night, then after Dana went to bed, Zoe got to stay up for the longer stories. Sometimes Harry Potter. Sometimes Tolkien. (Naval History and Heritage Command) And Zoe already had plans for when she came home. She and her best friend Katie were going to have a Beanie Babies birthday party together. That detail gets me. Because children don’t think about whether they’ll make it home from a family vacation. They think about stuffed animals and birthday parties and books they haven’t finished yet. Just before the family boarded their flight, they mailed postcards to relatives from Dulles Airport. Those postcards began arriving after September 11. Little messages from a family excited about the adventure ahead of them. Messages that essentially said, “We love you.” Zoe never got Australia. She never got her Beanie Babies party. Dana never got to grow up beside her big sister. Their parents never got to watch either of their daughters become women. At 9:37 a.m., American Airlines Flight 77 struck the Pentagon. Zoe, Dana, Leslie, and Charles died together. Dana, only 3, was the youngest person aboard the plane. Twenty-five years later, I don’t want Zoe remembered simply as one of the passengers on Flight 77. Her name was Zoe Falkenberg. She was 8. She loved Harry Potter. She had a birthday party waiting for her when she got home. And she should have had an entire lifetime after it.

God Bless America 🇺🇸 I BET YOU DIDN'Y KNOW ABOUT THIS: AFTER FLIGHT 77 HIT THE PENTAGON ON 9/11, THE FOLLOWING HAPPENED. A daycare facility inside the Pentagon had many children, including infants who were in heavy cribs. The daycare supervisor, looking at all the children they needed to evacuate, was in a panic over what they could do. There were many children, mostly toddlers, as well as the infants who would need to be taken out with the cribs. There was no time to try to bundle them into carriers and strollers. Just then a young Marine came running into the center and asked what they needed. After hearing what the center director was trying to do, he ran back out into the hallway and disappeared. The director thought, "Well, here we are, on our own." About 2 minutes later, that Marine returned with 40 other Marines in tow. Each of them grabbed a crib with a child, and the rest started gathering up toddlers. The director and her staff then helped them take all the children out of the center and down toward the park near the Potomac . Once they got about 3/4 of a mile outside the building, the Marines stopped in the park, and then did a fabulous thing - they formed a circle with the cribs, which were quite sturdy and heavy, like the covered wagons in the Old West. Inside this circle of cribs, they put the toddlers, to keep them from wandering off. Outside this circle were the 40 Marines, forming a perimeter around the children and waiting for instructions. There they remained until the parents could be notified and come get their children. The chaplain then said, "I don't think any of us saw nor heard of this on any of the news stories of the day. It was an incredible story of our men there.” There wasn't a dry eye in the room. The thought of those Marines and what they did and how fast they reacted; could we expect any less from them? It was one of the most touching stories from the Pentagon. It's the military, not the politicians that ensures our right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It's the military who salutes the flag, who serves beneath the flag, and whose coffin is draped by the flag. If you care to offer the smallest token of recognition and appreciation for the military, please pass this on and pray for our men and women, who have served and are currently serving our country, and honor the memory of those who have given the ultimate sacrifice! God Bless The USA! Never forget!!!

On the morning of September 11, 2001, Gander, Newfoundland was a town of roughly 10,000 people with an oversized airport nobody needed anymore. Its runways had been built for transatlantic propeller planes that stopped to refuel. Jets had made it obsolete decades earlier. Then American airspace closed. Thirty-eight wide-body airliners were ordered out of the sky and told to land at Gander. Within hours, a town of 10,000 had roughly 6,600 strangers standing on its tarmac — passengers and crew from more than a dozen countries, most of whom had no idea yet why they had been diverted. There were no hotels. There was no plan. There was no funding coming. So the town simply started. The school bus drivers were on strike that week. They put down their picket signs and drove for free. Every bus in Gander ran for days. The schools, church halls, and Legion clubhouses were emptied and turned into shelters overnight. Pharmacists worked through the night filling prescriptions for people whose medication was locked in cargo holds they could not access. Residents drove to the shelters and took strangers home. They handed over house keys, showers, phones, and spare beds to people whose names they could barely pronounce. Nobody asked for identification. One passenger later described walking into a stranger's kitchen and being handed a plate before anyone asked a single question about who he was. The planes sat on that tarmac for five days. When the passengers finally flew out, they did not want to leave it there. Travelers on one of the flights passed a hat mid-air and started a scholarship fund for the children of the region. It has since grown past $2 million and has sent hundreds of Newfoundland students to college. Gander never billed anyone. The town later said it would not have known what to charge for. The story became a Broadway musical two decades later, but the people who lived it have always been uncomfortable with the attention. Their standard answer, repeated in interview after interview, is that they did not do anything special — they just did what you do. Real decency isn't defined by the size of the gesture or the resources behind it — it is defined by a town that had nothing prepared, opened its doors anyway, and never once thought it deserved a thank-you. #storyarcsoftheages #history #historyfacts #factsyoudidntknow

This is Asia Cottom. She was 11 years old & had just started 6th grade. Asia was selected by National Geographic Society as one of three students in the Washington DC area to visit the National Marine Sanctuary on the coast of Santa Barbara. On September 11, 2001, she boarded American Airlines Flight 77 alongside fellow students & teachers. Terrorists overtook the plane & crashed it into the Pentagon, killing everyone on aboard. Her parents received hundreds of letters of condolences & donations from around the world. They started a memorial scholarship in Asia's honor. Asia hoped to become a pediatrician one day. She loved Tweety Bird, dancing, art, soccer and rollerblading. We Will Never Forget🙏🇺🇸

If this footage was filmed and posted today, many people would think it’s AI The absolute scale of the wreckage is unfathomable. Steve Grogan’s son casually uploaded this to YouTube several years ago with the title “September 12, 2001 Ground Zero” and in the description it says “A quick video my father filmed”. That’s it .. The footage went relatively unseen for several years, but has recently been found and watched by millions. But this is my first time seeing it. It’s hard to even tell where the exact film locations are since we don’t have the reference points of the WTC towers any longer.

Kevin Cosgrove called 9-1-1 from the 105th floor of the South Tower of the World Trade Center at 9:53 AM. In these five heartbreaking minutes, he talks about his wife and kids, worrying he won’t make it out. The call ends when the South Tower begins to collapse.

🚨MUST WATCH AND SHARE🚨 I cut time of these presentations by half, so no one can say they don't have the time to learn what actually happened on 9/11 to the Twin Towers and WTC 7. WTCs in under 5 minutes:

I'm going through old footage of 9/11, and this one really shows what it was like for people who weren't even in the immediate vicinity of the towers. Absolutely insane

This is Barbara Keating. She was a 72 year old with 5 children and 12 grandchildren when she was killed in the 9/11 terror attack. She is being laid to rest today. Her remains were identified last year. 40% of the people killed still have not been recovered or positively identified. Teams continue to search through rubble & debris collected from the World Trade Center site. Roughly 1,100 victims are still unaccounted for. Barbara was flying home to California after visiting family when Al-Qaida terrorists crashed American Airlines flight 11 into the north tower of the World Trade Center. We will Never Forget🙏🇺🇸

This is Christine Lee Hanson. She was 2 1/2 years old & the youngest victim of the September 11 terrorist attack. Christine was a passenger on United Airlines Flight 175 along with her parents Peter & Sue Kim Hanson. The family was traveling from Boston to Los Angeles for a family vacation to Disneyland. Their flight was hijacked & crashed into the South Tower of the World Trade Center. Her beloved Peter Rabbit stuffed animal was entrusted to the 9/11 memorial museum by her grandparents. We Will Never Forget 🙏🇺🇸

This is Nicole Carol Miller. She was a 21 year old Dean's List student at West Valley College in Saratoga, California. She was an accomplished athlete & softball scholarship recipient. She worked as a waitress & taught fitness classes. She had been on vacation with a friend to NYC. Her flight on September 10th was canceled due to severe thunderstorms & rescheduled for the following morning. She boarded United Airlines Flight 93 on the morning of September 11th. She & her fellow passengers revolted against the terrorist hijackers resulting in the plane crashing in a field in Pennsylvania. She was survived by her parents, stepparents & siblings. We Will Never Forget 🙏🇺🇸

There is very little clear footage of flight 11 flying over manhattan and striking the north tower. Practically none exists in fact. But we have Jules Naudet’s footage, that not only captures this rare event, but actually follows firemen into those very towers that ultimately became perhaps the most famous unintended film and documentary ever created. Jules is tagging along with batallion chief Joseph pfeifer as they respond to a mundane gas leak call at church and lispenard. The firsr couple minutes is pretty boring, regular Tuesday morning work. Beautiful sunny day, twin towers in the background. Until 1 min 45 sec into the footage can you can an unusually low jetliner flying directly over manhattan. Everyone looks up in confusion, and what they see next changed America forever.

This is the video I was talking about and once I learned what that noise was it affected me mentally. I had nightmares. This should be shown to all the young mocking the memorials. Maybe they can get a sense of the horror.

Moira Smith helped pull survivors from the wreckage of the World Trade Center, then kept moving back toward the burning towers while thousands of people were trying desperately to escape. She had already guided people to safety when the situation became even more dangerous. She never made it home. Smith was an NYPD officer assigned to Manhattan’s 13th Precinct. On September 11, 2001, she was working near the World Trade Center when the attacks began. After the first plane struck the North Tower, Smith ran toward the disaster. She helped injured people out of the wreckage and moved survivors away from danger. Then the second plane hit the South Tower, sending the area into even greater chaos. Smith kept working. She treated victims, helped people escape, and continued directing survivors away from the towers. At one point, she was photographed inside the lobby of the North Tower assisting a blood-covered survivor. That photograph became one of the haunting images of September 11. It shows a police officer in the middle of devastation, surrounded by blood and confusion, still focused on the person beside her. Smith was not posing for history. She was simply doing the job in front of her. Help the injured. Get people out. Go back for whoever still needed help. Smith had opportunities to move farther from the danger, but she stayed. The towers were burning, debris was falling, and thousands of people were moving away from the area. She continued toward those who needed assistance. Moira Smith was last seen near the North Tower shortly before it collapsed. She was killed that morning. She was thirty-eight years old. Smith left behind her husband, James, and their two young children. Her daughter, Patricia, was only two years old. Her son, Michael, was still a baby. Her death carried another painful distinction. Moira Smith was the only female NYPD officer killed on September 11. She was also the first NYPD officer whose death that day was officially confirmed. But those distinctions do not explain why her story remains so powerful. The photograph does. A wounded survivor beside her. Blood everywhere. Her uniform still on. The building around her becoming increasingly dangerous. And Moira Smith still helping. She did not know that moment would become an enduring image. She was not trying to become a symbol of courage. She was following the responsibility she had accepted as a police officer. Years later, her daughter Patricia would become a New York City police officer herself, carrying the same badge her mother had once worn. Moira Smith is remembered not simply because she responded to one of the darkest mornings in American history. She is remembered because, when thousands of people were running away from the towers, she kept moving toward the people who still needed her. She helped others get out. Then she went back. And she never came home. #archaeohistories