After September 11, seventy New York City firefighters put down their hoses and picked up bagpipes, and did not put them down for a year. They had 343 funerals to play. They played every one. The FDNY Emerald Society Pipes and Drums was founded in 1962. It was never meant to be a funeral band. It was Irish firefighters wanting a bit of home in the department. They played parades. St. Patrick's Day up Fifth Avenue. The marathon. Yankees ticker-tape parades. Weddings. Retirement parties. And every once in a while, when a firefighter died in the line of duty, they played him to his grave. Every once in a while. A few times a year, in a bad year. Every man in the band is a working firefighter, active or retired. Almost none of them had played an instrument before joining. It takes two years of training and twenty memorized tunes before a piper is allowed to play in public. You have to march, and breathe into the bag, and squeeze it with your arm, and finger the chanter, all at once, in a wool kilt, in whatever weather God sends. On September 11, 2001, the department lost 343 men. Chiefs. Captains. Lieutenants. Probies. Men from 75 different firehouses. In one morning. Within days, other pipe bands from across the country called and offered to help. Police bands. Bands from Boston, Chicago, Ireland. The Emerald Society said no. They said thank you, and no. They would play for their own. All of them. Every funeral, every memorial. It was a promise they had made to the department for forty years, and they were not going to hand it to strangers now. Then they did the math. Seventy pipers. Three hundred and forty-three funerals. And because so many bodies were still in the pile, many families would hold a memorial first, and a funeral months later when remains were found. Some would hold two. They split into small groups. Four pipers, a drummer. Six pipers, two drummers. Whatever they could spare. They played twelve funerals a day. Some days fifteen. A piper would finish Amazing Grace at a church in Queens at 9 a.m., get in a car, and be playing it again in Staten Island at 11, and again on Long Island at 1, and again in Brooklyn at 3. Same tune. Different church. Different widow. Different children in the front pew. One veteran piper, Ed Geraghty, who had been in the band for twenty-five years, said it plainly afterward. Sometimes you weren't sure where you were. They stopped fighting fires. They stopped almost everything else. The band pulled out of the marathon. The band did not march for the Yankees. When they were invited to the All-Ireland championships the following summer, they had to admit they had not practiced their competition music since September. There had been no time. By Thanksgiving 2001, they had played about 300 services. By the end of the year after, more than 400 funerals and memorials. Some of the men they buried were their own bandmates. Some were their brothers. Some were their fathers. Lieutenant Kevin Dowdell of Rescue 4 was killed in the towers. His body was never found. His son Patrick was an 18-year-old college freshman. Patrick joined the band. He learned the pipes. He learned them so that when his father's memorial came, he could stand in the kilt and play his father to rest. His younger brother James joined the FDNY and joined the band too. He fights fires with Ladder 174 in Brooklyn now, and he drums, and every September he marches to the memorial wall a few hundred feet from where his father died. Ed McLoughlin was one of the men who founded the band in 1962. He is 84 now. He has personally played at more than 150 services for the men of 9/11. He said it in seven words. "It was sorrowful, but you had to do it." Twenty-five years later, they are still doing it. More than 400 FDNY members have died since September 11 of cancers and lung diseases from breathing the pile. In 2023, the number of those deaths passed 343. The dying did not stop with the attack. So the funerals did not stop either. The band's drum major, Liam Flaherty, was asked about it. He said if you had told him twenty years ago that they would still be playing 9/11 funerals, he would not have believed you. Then he said, we will honor everyone. Until whenever the last day is. Seventy firefighters. One promise. Every single man. They kept it. They are keeping it still. 🇺🇸

On September 11, both towers of the World Trade Center came down less than one hundred yards from a 235-year-old church. Not one of its windows broke. For the next eight months, it did not close. Not once. Not for a single hour. St. Paul's Chapel opened in 1766. It is the oldest church building in Manhattan. On April 30, 1789, George Washington walked out of his inauguration as the first President of the United States and came straight here to pray. His pew is still inside. On the morning of September 11, 2001, a hundred and ten stories of steel fell in the churchyard's direction. A sycamore tree on the corner of the property, about a hundred years old, took the hit. A steel beam that should have gone through the chapel wall went into the tree instead. The sycamore was torn out by its roots. The chapel behind it stood. Every pane of glass intact. Only the organ was damaged by dust. Within days, the church made a decision. Across the street, thousands of firefighters, police, ironworkers, and volunteers were digging through sixteen acres of rubble for the dead. They were working twelve and sixteen hour shifts. They had nowhere to sit. Nowhere to eat. Nowhere to sleep. Nowhere to be a human being for ten minutes. So St. Paul's opened its doors. And it left them open, twenty-four hours a day, until May 30, 2002. Here is what the inside of a church looked like for those eight months. The choir loft became a dormitory. Cots in rows. Firefighters too exhausted to make it home to Queens or Brooklyn slept there in their turnout gear. The pews became beds. Men in steel-toed boots lay down on 235-year-old wood and slept for an hour, and got up, and went back to the pile. Three thousand meals a day. Breakfast, sandwiches, bagels, coffee, and, because New York restaurants were sending whatever they had, Thai food, Italian, Mexican. One volunteer put it simply. If it was Monday, it was meatloaf. George Washington's pew, the one he knelt in as the first President of this country, became the podiatry station. Volunteer foot doctors sat there and treated blisters and torn-open feet. The workers were spending sixteen hours a day on twisted steel and broken glass. Their feet were destroyed. A podiatrist would sit them down in Washington's pew, take off their boots, and go to work. The volunteers said the podiatrists were the most popular people in the building. Chiropractors worked the aisles. Massage therapists set up tables. Musicians came and played, quietly, so that men who had been pulling bodies out of the ground for twelve hours could sit with their eyes closed and hear something that was not a diesel engine. More than five thousand volunteers passed through, in twelve-hour shifts, around the clock, for eight months. They came from every state. Most of them had never been to New York. They made beds. They served meals. They washed dishes. They sat with firefighters who did not want to talk and did not want to be alone. The clergy wore a vestment during services, and workers started pinning their patches to it. FDNY. NYPD. Port Authority. Ironworkers Local 40. Search and rescue teams from Texas and California. By the end it was covered. Outside, the wrought-iron fence around the churchyard filled up. Flags. Photographs of the missing. Children's drawings. Rosaries. Letters. It stretched the full length of the block. A wall of grief in front of a building that had somehow come through untouched. A poet who volunteered there said it this way. What happened at Ground Zero was hate. What happened at St. Paul's was the reverse of it. On May 30, 2002, the recovery operation officially ended. That same day, St. Paul's held a closing service for the workers, and the eight-month ministry ended. The church cleaned up. They repaired the organ. They refinished the floors. But there was one thing they decided not to fix. The pews. Two hundred and thirty-five years old, and now covered in scratches and gouges. From steel-toed boots. From tool belts. From men who lay down in them, for an hour, in the middle of the worst days of their lives. The church left every mark. They are still there. You can walk in today, sit down where a firefighter slept in October 2001, and run your hand along the wood, and feel where his belt buckle caught. The roots of the sycamore are cast in bronze in the churchyard now. The tree died. The church lived. And then it spent eight months keeping other people alive. Not one window broke. Not one door closed. 🇺🇸

A Muslim mayor of New York City makes even less sense to me than making a Japanese person the mayor of Pearl Harbor. Seriously. How does that make any sense?