Surviving 9/11 and making it home: 25 years later an Islander remembers 

“It was a day just like today,” Daniel Hochman said recently on a late summer morning, describing the weather the day 25 years ago when the world changed.

Sitting on the deck of his sailboat docked in Greenport, Mr. Hochman was looking at the high blue sky with a few clipper ship clouds floating slowly over Shelter Island. “Just like today,” he said, again, without needing to add that the weather was the only thing remotely similar to Sept. 11, 2001.

An Island resident for 35 years with his wife Mara and their two children, they also have a home in New York City. Twenty-five years ago they were living a few blocks north of where the World Trade Center stood. Now retired, in those days home was close enough to walk to his office on the 83rd floor of the North Tower where he was a trader in the commodities market. It was also close enough for Mara to walk the kids to P.S. 234 for the first day of school that September morning.

“I thought later that if the kids and Mara had looked up at a certain angle when they were in the courtyard of the school before classes, they would have seen the first plane above them,” Mr. Hochman said.

He had been in the first terror attack of the World Trade Center in 1993 when a bomb exploded in a parking garage. He had been on the eighth floor and it was a harrowing trip down to street level through smoke and darkness. But harrowing doesn’t begin to describe his experience eight years later.

Surviving

That bright, mild September morning, he left for work early, as always, embracing his kids and wishing them good luck on their first days of kindergarten and 4th grade. He followed his morning routine of walking to work, getting a newspaper and grabbing a coffee on his way. 

The 83rd floor office was small by Trade Center standards, just 20 or so people. It was a loose and comfortable work environment; there was a ping pong table set up where he had played with his kids when he had taken them to work just the day before. On that Tuesday morning, just six or seven early birds were in when Mr. Hochman settled at his desk with his back to the wide window and fired up his Bloomberg Terminal — a state-of-the-art computer in 2001. 

At about a quarter to 9, he and his colleagues heard “what sounded like a large, really loud ‘thump,’ you know, and then a rolling, traveling kind of sound. The ceiling tiles were moving. We all just looked at each other.” The Boeing 767, with 92 people aboard, had struck eight floors above at 450 miles an hour.

Everyone went to the windows.  They saw no flames, but filling their view were “these black embers floating down.” There was a metal door to the office and they saw smoke coming in from below. When they opened the door, a co-worker was standing there, with burns on his body and head. They quickly tried to help him, getting wet towels to relieve his pain. 

“We all had only one thought: ‘Let’s get the hell out of here.’” Mr. Hochman said.

There were two staircases, both mobbed by office workers. Surprisingly, he said, there was little panic. A vivid memory — one of a hundred that sticks — was looking down 20 to 30 flights at the banisters on the stairway. “All I saw were forearms and hands, hundreds and hundreds of them, of people gripping the rails.” He paused. “Hundreds and hundreds.”

It was agonizingly slow. It turns out that part of the delay were firefighters making their way up lugging heavy equipment, bravely climbing to their deaths.

“I don’t think I felt my feet touch those stairs,” Mr. Hochman said as the slow descent to street level took about an hour. The lobby was filled with first responders and office workers making their way to the street. Again, in his memory, Mr. Hochman was astonished at how calm everyone was in the midst of the catastrophe. 

Outside thick smoke and ash from the burning building above him had started to cover him. He took off his shirt and drenched it in a can of orange soda someone gave to him and wrapped it around his face. His only thoughts were of his family. Not knowing what was happening in the rest of the city, he was desperate to contact them. 

In the escalating chaos of the street he asked a policeman if he could borrow a cellphone to call home. The cop’s response? “Get out of here!”

He was walking north on Church Street toward home when he heard “this low, rumbling sound. The air was trembling. The ground was shaking.” The South Tower was collapsing. “I went down a side street and saw ash and smoke rolling in a big wave down Church Street,” Mr. Hochman said. “I was running for my life, right at the edge of a plume of smoke.” 

Home

Mara got the children home from school and safe, but there was no word from her husband. The TV and radio were broadcasting reports non-stop about the Twin Tower attacks. The phone didn’t stop ringing, with friends, family and acquaintances calling who knew where Daniel worked. Neighbors in the apartment house were constantly stopping by.

Their oldest answered the phone now and then and Mara heard him say, “Daddy.” Overcome with grief, believing her husband was dead, she said, “That’s not daddy.”

But it was. Mr. Hochman had found a phone at New York University Law School on his way north and called, telling his son, “It’s Daddy. I’m coming home.”

When he arrived at the door, he was silent. “There was another trader there with his wife, comforting my family. They thought I was a goner.” The embraces with his wife and children didn’t need words. He was covered in ash, his face and hair powdered white. “I looked in his eyes,” Mara said. “It wasn’t Danny. He had changed.”

The family went to friend’s place on 69th Street in Manhattan, and then went to their home on Shelter Island where they stayed for a couple of weeks, healing and recuperating. Returning to the city, the children were sent to a new school in the Chelsea area and P.S. 34 became a Police Command Center.

Leaning back on his yacht’s deck, Mr. Hochman said the following days, weeks and months he felt overwhelmed that 9/11 was “the day the world came together. We were overwhelmed with gifts from all over the world.”

“I’ve never really talked about this,” he added, noting that the one exception had been with his neighbor, the journalist Pete Hamill on the first anniversary of the terrorist attacks. He’s also never been to the memorial at the Trade Center. 

“I just didn’t want to dwell on it, you know?” he said. “But now, with the 25th anniversary coming up, I thought it would be good to tell the story. Or, at least my part of the story.”