Former Manhattan Borough President C. Virginia Fields gathered her former staff in Harlem to mark the 25th anniversary of the terror attacks on New York City. Together, they shared their firsthand accounts of the harrowing events during and after the planes struck the Twin Towers on Sept. 11, 2001.
“[This is] an opportunity for us to reflect, to remember, an opportunity to resolve our commitment to doing what we can, wherever we sit or stand,” said Fields at the gathering Friday at the Dwyer Cultural Center on Sept. 11, 2026. “And that is to fight against racism. Anti-Semitism. Islamophobia. Homophobia. All of the hate that is feeling our lives in terms of what we see and what we experience. So it’s up to us in terms of saying, ‘Never again.’”
Fields, 81, recounted that the morning of the terror attacks was Election Day and that the polls and schools were open. She talked about being at Ruthie’s restaurant with a staff member uptown and witnessing the second plane crash into the towers. She remembers the 32nd Police Precinct and the fire departments heading downtown as people were running out of the dust and smoke.
“Everybody, and the staff that we were with came to my house, which is about two or three blocks away, because nothing was working around you, cell phones or anything. And I still maintained a landline today,” said Fields. “That’s the only way I was there getting a call out to my family to say, I’m okay.”
She noted that the lack of phone service and communication posed a major obstacle to delivering aid to stranded New Yorkers. To help people reach their families and friends, phone companies supplied free devices, while others set up trucks offering complimentary calls.
“People had signs posted everywhere, looking for their loved ones,” she said. “People were singing wherever they could, notes of love and support throughout. And this was going on daily. People were lighting candles. These kinds of things were going on day after day for months, day and night … It was just such a difficult time, obviously, for all of us and people just trying to find their loved one.”
It was later found that Harlem had lost several prominent members in the attack, such as Clyde Frazier Jr., who was the son of Frederick E. Samuel Community Democratic Club’s Clyde Frazier Sr.
Additionally, 343 New York City Fire Department (FDNY) firefighters died on 9/11, with 12 of them being Black firefighters. Their names were Gerard Baptiste, Capt. Vernon Cherry, Tarel Coleman, Andre Fletcher, Keith Glascoe, Ronnie Henderson, William Henry, Karl Henri Joseph, Keithroy Maynard, Vernon Richard, Shawn Powell and Leon Smith Jr. The city confirms that 343 FDNY members died in the attacks.
“Twenty-five years ago, America, the world, New York City, our families, were attacked. On that day, we witnessed, and we saw precious lives be lost. People who woke up in the morning, looking to just provide for their families, never return home,” said Rev. Dr. Kevin Johnson of Abyssinian Baptist Church. “We ask now that on this 25th anniversary of 9/11, that this will never, ever happen not only to New York, but to no other country.”
Former City Councilmember Alan Gerson, 68, represented District 1 and was a Greenwich Village resident in downtown Manhattan. He was still a candidate on the morning of 9/11 and was visiting polling sites at schools. By the time he got to P.S. 234, he remembers hearing the first plane fly directly overhead.
“This was so loud. It was so incredibly loud, I looked up, and I knew something was wrong before anything else,” he said.
Afterward, he helped evacuate the building and get students home.
They eventually converted the school polling places into medical hubs for police and first responders to provide free health care for community members, said Fields.
After the towers’ collapse, Fields and her staff, as well as other elected officials, traveled down to Lower Manhattan to meet with people, especially trapped seniors, in the community and provide them with any information they could about housing, food, medication and transportation. Her office on 125th Street coordinated with the National Guard, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the American Red Cross to get people in tenement buildings emergency services. She also kept a desk for daily briefings at former Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s command center at 42nd Street, she said.
Fields presented an extensive slideshow of on-the-ground photos from Carl Crutchfield, the photographer who captured the aftermath of the attack’s debris and inches of dust on the buildings and cars in the area.
“The plane was coming down the Hudson, and just north of us, it literally went over our heads, and we watched it go into the building and it was surreal. And watching the building, the skin of the building came down, that silver skin, and it rippled in the air. It looked like tinsel from a Christmas tree falling,” said former Manhattan Councilmember Kathryn Freed, 79, who was in office from 1992 to 2001. She was also near the school polling site with Gerson.
Freed remembers fires burning at the Ground Zero site until past December 2001, and the sheer amount of dust impacting their homes in the downtown area months later.
Freed was adamant at the time about documenting the environmental harm and exposure caused by the buildings’ collapse. She fought to prove that the city denied that the air was toxic, contacting her own scientists to conduct independent studies of the debris at Albany and Warren streets. She turned over her findings about gross toxicity in the air to former Congressmember Jerry Nadler and the Ground Zero task force a month later, but nothing came of it.
“The results that we got showed how bad it was. And it was infuriating that the city kept saying, ‘It’s fine. Don’t worry about it,’” said Freed, who had bronchitis and breathing trouble presumably related to the exposure.
In a move that validated those concerns, Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani recently released more than 170,000 pages of city records regarding the attacks and their aftermath and settled two lawsuits brought by 9/11 Health Watch over air quality in the city following 9/11.
“I congratulate Mayor Mamdani for having the guts to do it, and let us know what happened,” said Freed.
For more information about the Sept. 11 records, go to nyc.gov/sept11docs.
