Tell me about your 9/11.

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11. I was on a comuter train from Westchester County to my job in Manhattan.

Someone on the train reported aloud that a plane had hit one of the World Trade Center towers. It shocked everyone in the car that such an accident could happen. A few minutes later the report of the second tower being hit let us all know we were under attack.

When we got to Grand Central and got off we saw many people crying and expressing grief. Same thing as we took the Shuttle to get to the subway to continue to the job. I worked on 25th and Park, several blocks uptown from Ground Zero.

For weeks after the attack the smell and smoke stayed in the air at my building on Park Ave. and we'd see battered fire trucks being hauled uptown from the wreckage. Make shift billboards sprung up on the sides of building where people posted photos of their missing loved ones with little tear-off tabs with phone numbers to call if anyone knew of the person'ss whereabouts or fate.

It was the worse day. My wife lost a first cousin in one of the towers and my brother-in-law's girlfriend lost a son, a cop who ran into the building to help. He never got out.

I was a newspaper art director and we had to scrap our whole plan for the paper for that day. We dispatched reporters and photographers down to the site and a cartographer to do a graphic of the site to show which building besides WTC were damaged while we furiously worked on what was the biggest story any of us had ever covered.

The reporters and photographers did great jobs and came back with good stuff. The cartographer came back with something completely unusable so we had change course on that layout. Our front page was a huge color shot a couple of blocks from the WTC that showed complete devastation with battered vehicles, debris all over the street, powdered dust covering everything, dazed people cover in dust trudging away from the buildings. It was war zone stuff.