Where were YOU?

November 22, 1963?

I was in the lobby of the just-opened Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Hong Kong.

I had been living in HK as part of Bernie Cornfeld’s IOS (Investors Overseas Services) sales team, at least that’s what he thought. My real love was motor racing and had been for years.

During the past couple of weeks, I’d been practicing on the Guia Circuit in Macau for the tenth annual Macau Grand Prix, and running No. 27 on my UK-Champion, Braham, Formula Junior, I was the dark-horse favorite in this international gamblers’ redoubt.

During the practice runs, a Japanese lad had asked me to show him the proper line through the corners of this Monaco-like, round-the-streets circuit.

I came in second in the class race, but blew my engine on lap 19 of the 60-lap Grand Prix.

The next day I was supervising the loading of the remains of the car on the ferry bound for Hong Kong when the Japanese boy bowed his way forward,
“Would I come to Japan and help his father establish a grand prix team?”

Having had my fill of trying to sell mutual funds to ex-pats, I leapt at the chance.

Details and remuneration were quickly agreed, and contracts were drawn.

I’d packed and was waiting, as agreed, in the lobby of the Mandarin Oriental when, suddenly, a bellboy ran through the lobby holding up a special edition of the South China Morning Post…JFK had been shot in Dallas!

After a long, lonely wait, I finally spied the Japanese boy pushing through the chaotic lobby. The words came haltingly through his tears: his father had collapsed, his family was in disarray, everything had to be cancelled; so sorry. He handed me an expensive DuPont cigarette lighter as a symbol of his apology.

The lighter became an inspiration—in the hundreds of motivational speeches I went on to make regularly for IOS salesmen around the world, describing my ensuing successes; I used to quote JFK…

“The energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor will light our country(I would replace "country" with "company")and all who serve it—and the glow from that fire can(will)truly light the world.”
President John F. Kennedy, Inaugural Address, January 20, 1961.

Where were YOU?

8:36am, September 11, 2001?

I was at 53 Park Place, two short blocks from the north tower of the World Trade Center.

I had been living in a wonderful penthouse on top of the Vanderbilt YMCA on 47th Street between 2nd and Third Avenues in Manhattan. It was costly but I’d recently inherited $3 million from my mother and felt I could afford it as well as establishing a new photography gallery at 560 Broadway in SoHo.

Sidebar: The gallery was well received and reviewed. We attracted many people, especially the nearby Wall Street and WTC crowd of young, successful financial specialists. I remember one young man in particular. He had bought a large Christopher Burkett photograph of a desolate, Pacific coastline, slathered with shiny surf under wind-chased clouds against a dark blue sky. It took Brent, the gallery manager, several attempts to get Cookie to make just the right frame with just the right shade of dark blue. When Chris Hanley beamed and shook hands all round, we knew we had created a happy client for life.

The penthouse had vast terraces I’d planted with flowering bushes and trees, and every Sunday evening I’d entertain scores of friends with barbequed, Moroccan lamb, or The Point’s famous Country Ribs, accompanied by a live band and rivers of wine.

However, my latest flat mate, a great friend from Taipei, said he didn’t like to eat outside, and why didn’t I think of my future and sublet the apartment? (Hmpf!)

We short-listed four possible new pads, and finally settled on Park Place. The building was a newly converted, art deco office building with high ceilings, and only a few steps from several subway stations that could whisk me to my gallery in SoHo in only two stops!

The lease commenced on September first, but our first night there was the second. My diary says:
4 Tuesday: Hang all day. I virtually covered the walls with paintings and photographs.
5 Wednesday: Lunch with Betsy and Marianna
6 Thursday: Lawrence (the flat mate) starts English school at the Empire State Bldg.
7 Friday: Susan from Christies’ will come to appraise silver on the 11th
8 Saturday: Cable TV installed
9 Sunday: Sally and Dinah’s Blessing
10 Monday: Appointment with Fiduciary Trust Co in WTC; dinner Marianna
11 Tuesday: The diary says, “EVACUATED as the world changed forever!” This is how I described it in a subsequent letter to a photographer the gallery represented:

I got up as usual. The only two windows of the apartment face north; the view is a rib joint across the street. While tying my tie, I noticed a number of people down on the sidewalk pointing south and up at something. The third-floor apartment was very quiet; I hadn't heard anything and therefore didn't think anything of it.

Then Audrey called to ask if I was watching TV; I said no.
She said, “Turn it on.”
I asked why.
She said, “TURN IT ON!”
I did and saw the north tower of the WTC on fire.
Then I saw the clip of the second plane hitting the south tower.
My flat mate, Lawrence, and I went downstairs to look.
He went off to school, and I stood on the corner watching the towers burn.

Soon the police asked everyone to clear the area and I went back upstairs to watch TV. As I watched my favorite commentator, it seemed as though the south tower disappeared as I was watching.
At that second, my whole apartment raised and rocked as from a tsunami and a wall of white smoke went by my windows.
The south tower had collapsed.
I decided it was time to get out.
I grabbed my computer, and credit cards, and as I opened my door, a policeman, poised to knock, fell into my arms.
He told me to go down the elevator and out the back door.
I started to say, “Really? Use the elevator?”
He just pointed and said, “OUT!”
As I left the building, a workman next door handed me a carpenter's mask. (Where did he come from, and how did he have masks?)
I started to walk east then north very quickly towards my gallery in SoHo.
My feet were leaving footprints in the rapidly accumulating dust.
About 20 minutes later, I sensed the north tower collapse.

I waited in the gallery until about 1:30 writing emails to everyone that I was OK.
At 1:30, Lawrence arrived. He had arrived at school next to the Empire State Building to find it closed. Turning around, he discovered the subways had stopped working. He walked south to go back to the apartment until turned away by the police, and came to the gallery.

We dined with friends and slept in my apartment above the Vanderbilt YMCA. The new tenants hadn’t moved in yet.

The next day, we talked our way through the police barrier at Houston Street and Broadway, and spent the day in the gallery, again sending email. Again we stayed above the Y. The next morning we drove to Lewes, Delaware to stay with Sally and Dinah.

From the roof of my building on Jan 3, 2002:

As the days went by I thought I might have to close the gallery in the face of SoHo being closed off, but then I realized that I needed to mount a show that would inspire people and hopefully become a landmark in New York, standing for everything that makes us proud to be Americans.

Thus, “America The Beautiful,” a special, ongoing exhibition celebrating America and the enduring spirit of her people, opened on October 25th at The Edward Carter Gallery in SoHo.

The gallery stayed open and we mounted new shows.

Some time later, during the opening night of a new Christopher Burkett show, a radiant, middle-aged couple came up to me and asked if they could meet Brent, the manager. I motioned Brent over and Mr. and Mrs. Hanley said they had come to meet us and Christopher Burkett to thank us all for working so hard to please their son, Chris. He had told his parents how happy we had made him.
He had been on the 106th floor of the World Trade Center.

A few days ago I read the following in my morning paper here in Bangkok. Later that day, the story and an interview was all over CNN world wide.

Voices of Sept. 11 victims haunt the living
By Jim Dwyer, The New York Times

THURSDAY, MARCH 30, 2006

NEW YORK: No, Joe and Marie Hanley decided at first, they would not listen to the 911 tape of their son, Chris, calling for help from Windows on the World.

And no, Jack Gentul and his sons agreed, they had no intention of playing the tape of Alayne Gentul, wife and mother, calling 911, the number for emergencies, from the north tower of the World Trade Center.

Will Sept. 11 ever be over, Debbie Andreacchio wondered, after the mayor's office called her Monday, on her brother Jack's birthday, to say he had telephoned 911 on that morning four and a half years ago.

These three families were among 27 who learned in the last few days that the city had tape recordings of 911 phone calls made by loved ones from inside the twin towers. Faced with a court order issued three years ago and the prospect of new ultimatums, city lawyers this week offered tapes of the individual calls to the next of kin.

"Everything that surrounds 9/11 is insane," Andreacchio said. "Why wouldn't they let something like this out sooner? It never settles."

Disruptive as they are, the tapes hold unique power as aural relics and as portals into a lost and unseen moment for these three families.

So the Andreacchios, the Gentuls, and the Hanleys have decided to go ahead and obtain them.

On Monday, the Hanleys went to the city Law Department, signed some papers and took the recording back to their home on the East Side of Manhattan.

They ejected a disc labeled "Beethoven Concerto for Piano and Orchestra" and pushed in a white disc printed with the name of their only child, Christopher James Hanley.

"Time of the call oh-eight-hundred hour, fifty minutes and thirty seconds," a stranger's voice intoned.

That would be 8:50:30 a.m. - just four minutes after the first plane struck.

Then a familiar voice came from the speakers. "Yeah, hi, I am on the 106th floor of the World Trade Center, which had an explosion," their son said.

"The 106th floor?" replied the operator.

"We had a conference up here," Chris Hanley said. "There's about 100 people up here."

Hanley, 35, worked for Radianz, then a division of Reuters. That morning, he was attending a conference organized by Risk Waters, a financial publisher, in the restaurant at the top of the north tower.

The plane had crashed into the building between the 94th and 99th floors, about 80 feet, or 24 meters, below the restaurant, but the smoke had risen to the very top of the building. Despite its distance from the impact area, conditions at the restaurant quickly became difficult.

The available records suggest that Hanley was among the first people inside either tower to reach the 911 system. His voice is clear.

"What is your last name?" asked the operator.

"Hanley," he replied.

"H-A-N," the operator says.

"We have smoke and it's pretty bad," he said.

A moment later, the operator said, "O.K., we have the job. Let me connect you with the fire, O.K.?"

"Yes," Hanley replied, hearing the word fire. "There is fire, smoke. We have about 100 people here. We can't get down the stairs."

His parents said they recognized their son, not only in his tone, but his manner. "He was strong and was thinking so clearly and beautifully," Marie Hanley said. "Patient with the Fire Department and 911. It brought everything back up again."

Joseph Hanley said, "It made me proud of him. That he was able to maintain his coolness."

"Grace under pressure," Marie Hanley said.

The valor of the emergency responders quickly became a familiar part of the chronicles of Sept. 11. The acts of civilians trapped on the high floors remained largely invisible.

Alayne Gentul, who worked in the south tower, the second of the buildings to be hit, had given decisive orders for her staff and others to leave the 90th and 94th floors, according to the accounts of survivors. Then she and others made their way to the 97th floor to clear out others. She was trapped with them when the second plane hit.

Gentul said he had learned three years ago from a New York Times reporter that his wife had called 911 from the 97th floor, so he was not shocked to receive a letter last weekend from the city about it.

He discussed the tape with his children, he said.

"We are going to request the recordings, but we have no intention of listening to it," said Gentul, the dean of students at the New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark, New Jersey. "We thought we would request it to keep the choice open for the children, or for their children."

The city is scheduled Friday to release all the calls from the towers, but with the voices of the callers erased, leaving only the operators' sides of the communications. The city won court approval for this approach by arguing that privacy of the callers should be protected.

On Wednesday, acting on a request by The New York Times, a state judge in Manhattan said that the city must leave in the names of the callers if the operators mentioned them. The city plans to appeal.

For many of those closest to the day, the release of the tapes is yet another Sisyphean moment in the march away from Sept. 11, in which every step forward in time seems to be matched by one that sends them lurching back toward the day again.

"Part of us wishes this whole matter could move on and our lives could move on," said Gentul, who has remarried.

Jack Andreacchio, who worked on the 80th floor of the south tower, had moved many people off the floor and had actually gotten 10 floors down, when he returned to the 80th floor. The wing of the second plane essentially sliced his floor in half.

Andreacchio managed to call his sister Debbie, and describe his plight, and to apologize for the ghastly memory that he was imposing on her. Their call dropped out, she said.

Then Andreacchio was connected by chance to the 911 system. A man who called into the trade center, in search of a relative, instead found Andreacchio, and transferred him to a 911 operator.

"I want to hear it," she said. "I want to hear exactly what's on it. I'd like certain people to hear it. This thing just keeps coming back and hitting us in the face.

The Hanleys said that they were puzzled by much about Sept. 11 - citing the president's use of the attack on New York to justify the war in Iraq, and the procedures at the 911 system, in which a police operator took information from their son, and then passed his call to a Fire Department dispatcher, who picked up after six rings.

"Just keep the windows open," the fire dispatcher said. "It's going to be a while because there is a fire going on downstairs."

"We can't open the windows unless we break them," Hanley said.

"O.K. Just sit tight," the dispatcher said. "Just sit tight, we are on the way."

"All right," Hanley replied. "Please hurry."

His mother said it was only in those final two words that she detected any note of worry in his voice.

Those were the words, his father said, that have stayed with him.

"That was the cruncher," he said. "'Please hurry.'"

TRANSCRIPT AND AUDIO
A Call for Help

Published: March 29, 2006

The following is the transcript of the 911 call made by Christopher Hanley on Sept. 11, 2001.

Christopher Hanley's Call

NYPD OPERATOR: Police Operator One-Eight-Eight-Six. What is your emergency?

Christopher Hanley: Yeah. Hi. I’m on the 106th floor of the World Trade Center. We just had an explosion on the, on the like 105th floor.

NYPD: The One-O-Six floor?

CH: Yes.

NYPD: One-O-Six. Ok. Um..

CH: We have a conference up here. There is about 100 people up here.

NYPD: What is your last name?

CH: Hanley. H – A – N- L- E-Y.

NYPD: H-A-N..

CH: We have smoke and it’s pretty bad.
(Operator can be heard typing…..)

NYPD: This is on the One-O-Six floor, right?

CH: Hello?

NYPD: OK, we have the job. Let me connect you with the fire, OK?

CH: Yes, there is fire, smoke.

NYPD: You have..Hold on, let me connect you with fire. OK?

CH: We have about 100 people here.
We can’t get down the stairs.

NYPD: Hold on. Let me connect you with fire.
(Pause)

NYPD: Come on now.
(PHONE RINGS)

FDNY DISPATCHER: Fire Department 408. Where’s the fire?

CH: Yeah. Hi. I’m on the 106th floor of the World Trade Center. We just had an explosion up here.

FDNY: Ok. One-O-Sixth floor.
What building are you in, sir? One or Two?

CH: That’s One World Trade.

FDNY: Alright.

NYPD: (Still on the line) One?

FDNY: Yeah.

CH: Yeah, there’s smoke and we have about 100 people up here.

FDNY: Sit tight. Do not leave, OK? There is a fire or an explosion or something in the building. Alright? I want you to stay where you are.

CH: Yes.

FDNY: Alright, what’s your phone number there?

CH: We’re on the 106th, the 106th floor.

FDNY: What’s your phone number.
Sir. Your phone number.

CH: 646-752-1436

FDNY: Alright, we’re there. We’re coming up to get you.

CH: I can see the smoke coming up from outside the windows down…

FDNY: Alright. We’re on the way.

CH: Huh?

FDNY: We’re on the way, sir.

CH: OK. Please Hurry.

FDNY: Alright, just keep the windows open. It’s going to be awhile because there’s a fire going on downstairs.

CH: We can’t open the windows unless we break them.

FDNY: OK. Just sit tight. Just sit tight. We’re on the way.

CH: Alright. Please hurry.

___________________________

I will never forget the evening the Hanleys came to thank us. I was so emotional, still am. They were so brave, so wonderful.
The gallery was good, it brought happiness and joy and beauty into people’s lives.

After 9/11, New York changed and I changed. I wanted to return to Asia’s sensitivities.
I closed the SoHo gallery at the end of June, 2003 and moved to Bangkok where I continue to collect and exhibit fine photography, and also teach at Bangkok University.

April, 2006

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