Reflections on 9/11 and Rebuilding

They never talked about Jack Welch or anything else.

It was just immediately like, there's a fire in the World Trade

Center, building one, two, one,

and

it's at the top. And they said,

"It must be a boiler that exploded," but I know all about boilers.

The boilers are in the basement. They're not at the top, right?

So it wasn't a boiler.

But nobody saw the plane hit. No, very few people saw it hit.

And I have an apartment where I'm viewing the World Trade Center from Midtown.

I was downtown, but it's not very far when a building's a hundred and fifteen

stories tall,

and I'm viewing this thing happen.

I said, "That's crazy. It couldn't be a plane.

Maybe it was a missile. Maybe it was something, but it, it's not anything

that we built, like the boilers and the air conditioners." It's none of

that stuff.

I said, "Wow, that's..." And it was really br-- And then I'm watching,

and I saw

the second plane hit, and you saw that come, and you're watching it,

and it's...

'Cause I watched the air

patterns for years, and you s-- you know, you know where the planes are.

They go up, right up the Hudson River.

This thing was coming right into the second building.

And I said, "Wow." So I watched that happen,

and I said, "Wow, we are now

in a different time." So I saw it, and I said,

"The world has just changed."

And I went down, and I, I was building a building in New York,

and I had a lot of

construction workers. And I went down there very shortly

thereafter, the

following day. You couldn't go down the same day,

but like the following day,

very, very quickly afterwards, and we worked long and

hard,

uh, but it was just so terrible and so hopeless.

It was so hopeless, such a terrible thing.

And, and you know, people can say what they want about New

York, but they rebuilt

that project so fast. It was so incredible to see.

Just the removal of the debris, you know, this was like a mountain.

These were massive buildings,

and they came straight down,

and just massive, and it was done so quickly.

And the job was approved, and the job went up, the new one,

the new World Trade

Center.

And it was amazing. Within a sh- relatively short period of time,

you had a, a new building up,

gleaming and glistening.

And I don't think New York's ever gotten enough credit for that.

I think a lot of, a lot of places would've been years

and years before, if they

ever got it started, actually, but years and years.

So it had a big impact. But I did say we have just entered

a different phase of the world.