In their words: Alex Bezjian

Our first question is if you would mind telling us about your experiences that day.

The day of 9/11?

Yes, the actual day.

Ok... so maybe before I do that I should just sort of tell you where I was in my life and what I was doing. I had just graduated from graduate school at Stanford with a degree in financial mathematics and was all ready to hit Wall Street, which I did. I got a job starting June 1, 2001. I guess I was . . . just trying to find my way and make some sense of Wall Street, which is a pretty daunting place. The summer went well, and it was fun. I liked what I was doing, I liked my colleagues, but it was intense. I was working long hours . . . on a trading floor as a convertible bond trader — I don’t know if you guys have been on any trading floors ever but it can be a pretty noisy place, a pretty energetic place. It tends to be male dominated, and so you have a lot of colorful language being thrown around, especially on days that are busy, but I liked it. I liked the energy — you know everybody I knew was making a ton of money from what I could tell, and it was just an exciting place to be. . . . I was loving it, but I was still pretty green behind the ears, and I was still trying to figure out how I could contribute to their desks.

So, I rolled through a few months and we got to September and . . . I remember — I don’t know if it was days before or weeks before 9/11 happened — there was some guy who decided to get some sort of hang glider, and I think he may have had some sort of engine attached to it and he got himself wrapped around the torch of the Statue of Liberty, and this thing was on CNBC like all afternoon — you know, because we have financial channels on everywhere you look. And so it went on for like two hours. This guy was up there. They couldn’t get to him and he couldn’t free himself and so all these people were all watching him, and that kind of came into play when 9/11 was happening.

I remember getting to work early everyday like we did. I had worked with my boss everyday for the past four months and I had seen him lose it to a bunch of people on the trading floor . . . but he had never done that to me. And that morning he was asking me questions and I didn't have the answers readily available, and I could see his temper starting to flare and I got nervous. The first tower had already been hit when we came out of our morning meeting, and people were thinking it was another one of these small-time things. It was on TV, but we weren’t sure if a prop plane had hit it — we didn’t really look. You know, looking back — obviously hindsight, as it’s 2020 — but if you had looked at the hole in the side of the World Trade Center you would see all the black smoke coming out and it was a huge hole. There’s no way a small prop plane could have done that, but everyone was thinking of the previous week’s antics and thinking that someone had gotten lost or their steering went off, but in that case they would have broken a few windows and that probably would’ve been it.

Anyways, that tower had been hit and [my boss] was starting to lay into me. Another relevant fact is that another person at a desk a few feet away from me was on the phone with a guy who was in the second tower. He told us this after the fact, but that guy was initially told to evacuate the second tower after the first had been hit. Then, what they realized was that people were jumping from the first tower. I'm sure you know how sad this is, but you had bodies basically flying from the first tower and landing on the ground. They told everybody, then, in the second tower, “Actually we’ve changed our minds, don’t leave the tower, stay at your office.” And this guy had taken the elevator in the tower down to the lobby and said, “Forget that, I’m out of here” — and he was on the phone with the guy on our floor when the second plane hit the tower.

So I remember my boss starting to get mad at me, and I saw out of the corner of my eye a big fireball on the TV and this guy on the phone just screamed because he could hear it through the phone, and it was just one of these moments that I’ll never forget in my life. The scene of the fireball and the sight of that and the sound of this guy screaming and everybody staring at each other going, “What the heck just happened?” Thirty seconds later, all the managing directors of the floor — there were about five of them — [went into the CEO's office], and five minutes later came out and said, “Everybody out of here.” Because at that point it wasn’t just some prop or some idiot — something was happening.

So, we all got into the elevators. There were a bunch of people who lived in Brooklyn, New Jersey, and other places and, you know, they pretty quickly shut down the city and the subway. There was a lockdown with bridges, so people were trapped, and at the time you’d already seen two planes hit and you're hearing about other planes around the country that are crashing or have crashed, and you just don’t know if there are more attacks coming to the city. . . . I was friends with a bunch of people who didn’t live in the city so I was like, "You can come to my place and we can watch the news." Cell phones — I know this is a weird concept — but were just starting to be a thing back then. It was probably a year or two into people using them and they weren’t smartphones like this [indicating his phone] — flip phones, if you know about that. So, no one could get calls in or out — landlines, for whatever reason, were also struggling… And this is also kind of a weird thing, but email was kind of a new thing as well. Email was one of the only things working. I remember having to email everyone that I was okay because that’s what people were freaking out about around the country. My parents, obviously, my friends, wanted to know — you know, they knew I worked in finance.

I was in midtown, not downtown. But one of my best friends did work downtown and his building actually got hit by debris. He had to walk from downtown to uptown, and he told me some crazy stories too. He saw the dead bodies flying from the building, but I know this is about me not him. But anyways, I spent the rest of the day consoling and giving people a place to stay until they reopened the bridges and subways and people could leave later that night. As far as the day goes, that’s what it was. It was a very eerie feeling in Manhattan. I don’t know if you guys have been or not but it’s a busy place. You’ve got cabs going up and down, people honking; there’s always something going on. But that afternoon and evening, it’s like all of New York City got punched in the mouth and you could look straight down 3rd Avenue, 5th Avenue, any one of the busy avenues and see like two taxi cabs and that was it. Every time you looked southbound, no matter what avenue you were looking down, you would see the smoke sort of just going up into the air. That actually kept going for days — that wasn’t just September 11, that was a four- or five-day thing, and depending on the wind blowing you could smell it uptown — you could smell how bad everything was.

So you mentioned you were working in midtown — were you living in midtown too?

Yeah, I was living four blocks away from where I worked — pretty convenient but we had planned it that way. My office was on 45th and Lex, right on Grand Central (if you know it), and our place was on 49th and Lexington, so it was super convenient to have people come over, chill out, watch TV, see what the city was doing. . . . It’s a small community so a lot of people knew people who were lost in the attacks. Cantor Fitzgerald was there, which was a big firm that our firm did business with — unfortunately they lost I think 100% of their people because they were on the top floors. So everybody was just scrambling to find out info about their friends and not knowing if this was the start of something that was going to go on for days or if this was an isolated incident. You just don’t know at the moment, a little bit like this coronavirus, which might seem like it will go on forever, but you also don’t know if it will hit a peak soon and that will be it. It’s just a lot of uncertainty basically.

We read other oral histories at the start of the course and some of them describe this feeling that there was a divide in Manhattan between lower Manhattan (below 14th Street) and above 14th Street. We were wondering if you personally felt that there was a divide, or rather that New York was more unified during 9/11.

Well I was lucky to be above 14th Street. Everybody who was above obviously felt the repercussions but didn’t feel it as deeply — it wasn’t as visible. I think south of 14th Street, or anywhere near the financial district, was like a war zone. I mean, you can watch the videos and see as the buildings collapsed... the dust cloud just envelops you. You know I would say it was maybe divided, but not divided in that uptowners were feuding with downtowners — we were all in this together, we all collectively got punched, but downtown took the brunt of it obviously. They saw things and endured things that everybody north of 14th Street didn’t have to, as much. It’s different when you're near the bomb blast or a few miles away. So, I could see why people would say that, but I don’t know if divided is the right word. Everybody was fleeing uptown obviously. It smelled bad. It was kicking up a lot of dirt, which we now know years later gave a lot of people lung cancer — there’s been a lot of lawsuits that have happened as a result of workers going down there trying to rescue people. It was like if you’ve ever smelled an electrical fire — which smells bad — it was that but like times a million. The whole thing just smelled terrible, really really bad.

At what point after 9/11 did you feel it was okay to go back to your “normal” routine and day to day life?

Like work?

Work, but also in terms of like, social interactions, being able to laugh and have fun, and not having it be on your mind all the time — like you weren’t always thinking about this huge tragedy that just happened. When you could go back to how you were living before?

That probably was a while. Obviously the stock market was closed for four or five days, or something like that, and we tried to go back to work. It was important. New Yorkers have a sort of pride that nobody knocks us down — we’re tough, you know. But definitely in the two to three days after everybody was sort of shell-shocked that this just happened — like how could this happen how could we not see this coming. People were visibly shaken, no one was really going out, everybody was just trying to get their head around this. I had a lot of friends who had just moved to the city like I did — I had only been there four months so I was really new. I definitely didn’t consider myself a New Yorker yet, but I had a lot of friends who moved at the same time frame and said, “I’m out of here — I didn't sign up for this.” So, they got out because again, you didn’t know at the time if New York was just an ongoing target for things like this and so this was just going to be the new normal — we’re going to have one of these every 6-12 months.

So, we tried to go back to work, I think, the week after when the stock exchange opened — again, our building was not impacted at all but we were near Grand Central. I remember the week after, twice somebody called in a bomb threat to Grand Central and we were on the 42nd floor; the building was only 43 floors high. And, every time they called in a bomb threat we couldn’t take the elevators because they would shut them down, so we would have to run down 42 flights of stairs, which sounds easy enough but actually burns your legs, you feel it the next days because you’re running but trying not to fall down the stairs. . . . I remember carrying this huge purse bag of one of my coworkers — she was an older lady and she couldn’t do it. This happened not once, but twice, and so I think we tried to shut down for a few more days — like this is madness, who knows how long this would go on. The whole city was on edge so, to answer your question, going back to normal — like normal normal — I would say probably like two, three months.

The Yankees won the World Series that year and that was a big deal. [Note that while the Yankees actually lost in game 7 to the Arizona Diamondbacks, they did sweep their 3 home games in New York City, after being down 0-2 in the series.] It kind of united the city and showed the resilience of the city, but you know, these things were always in the back of people’s minds. If you look at real estate places, and I know because I ended up buying my place the following year in June, real estate prices all over Manhattan — the closer you got to Ground Zero the more you could see it, but the prices were depressed because who wanted to move to New York at the time? People thought it could be a regular thing. It’s kind of like moving to Miami right after it gets hit by a hurricane, like the month after: “Oh, they just got hit, maybe they’ll get hit again — do I really want to live here?" So, it took a while to get back to normal. It probably took two to three months to get back to day-to-day, but to stop thinking about 9/11 everyday is probably like a four- to six-month process. I went down to Ground Zero, I think, two months after it happened just to see. They had roped a bunch of places off, but you could walk to a few places and see the outline of what was left standing of the World Trade Center, and it was all just very surreal and eerie.

So you mention that you were fairly new to New York and didn’t consider yourself a New Yorker, and this actually came up in one of our other interviews. Do you think that after 9/11 you felt like a bit of a New Yorker?

Yeah, I’ve said that to a few people because it’s like a shared experience. There used to be a board game, if you play board games, called Chutes and Ladders where you hop along this grid that's 10 by 10, so it’s 100 squares, and if you landed on a square that had a slide you slid down and lost your place. But if you had a ladder you went up, and I feel like 9/11 was a huge ladder towards becoming a New Yorker. Suddenly everybody bonded together and it didn’t matter where you were from because you endured this with each other, and everybody instantly became honorary New Yorkers, even if you had only been there for three months. That’s exactly how it played out.

So, we talked in our class more on a national scale about this huge spike in patriotic behavior after 9/11. Did you feel more compelled to be more patriotic after 9/11 or what was your experience with that?

I didn’t love what the government was doing necessarily; they had enacted the Patriot Act which allowed them to invade people's privacy, and it was all in the name of security. Obviously I love my country. I play tennis, I love sports, and so I’m always rooting for USA in the Olympics or anything like that, but I didn’t go out and buy a flag or get American sunglasses or something like that that had the red, white, and blue on them. I obviously support it, but you have to be careful in those moments because sometimes they take it too far and negative things can come if you become too into your country or religion — it can cause this bad behavior. . . . I mentioned the Yankees because I know that was so important to the city at the time. They really needed something to rally around and they did. It sort of showed the heart and the resilience and what New Yorkers are all about. I would say rather than becoming an American patriot — I hated the Yankees when coming to New York but then I started to like them. They were bonding the city together and that was important at the time.

So you mention that a lot of things came out of 9/11 in terms of politics and the wars. Do you think 9/11 shifted any of your political views one way or another, or affected them in any major way?

I didn’t love that we went into Afghanistan. Obviously we had to show action, and I get that, but I feel like it was a little haphazard. I think if you looked at the people who crashed the planes, they were mostly Saudi; I had never heard of the Taliban before and now they were the people that were responsible. I’m a math guy — I told you — but I studied physics in college, so I’m kind of a science guy. I like to have data and dots, and I just felt like I wasn’t sure the government was doing that the right way. But you need to act swiftly and with force, right? That’s the American way — you don’t take shit from anybody, and so I understood the need to do something and show people who were obviously grieving . . . but also to show Americans around the world that we’re tough. But I wish they had done a little more homework before they just kind of flew into things, but that’s just me. People in the middle of the country, they were happy. They were like, “Let's flex our muscles, let's go to war with someone, we’ve got to get someone, someone's responsible.” I get it.

It seems like a lot of New Yorkers didn't want to go to war whereas a lot of the rest of the country did — would you agree with that?

Yeah, that is kind of contradictory if you think about it because the people who were impacted most — those who were directly impacted by it and potentially lost relatives or friends — that’s New Yorkers obviously, and DC, and anyone who lost someone on a plane. But New Yorkers tend to lean Democratic, and at the time you had a Republican president. And you know New Yorkers, I don’t want to pat ourselves on the back, but . . . we don’t just fall for the obvious thing or the campaign slogan or whatever. They are educated and want to know what the facts are, and based on the facts they make decisions. It's kind of like a football team mentality — when someone starts cheering, the rest do. But that’s not how New Yorkers operate. We want to understand what we are dealing with here and make an intelligent decision based on facts. I don’t want to cast aspersions on the rest of the country, but I do feel like, for whatever reason, other parts of the country don’t care as much about facts or just like the show and get swept up in the mania and that’s that. But that’s not how New Yorkers are, that’s not how Boston people are, you know, and I don’t think that’s how Ransom people are either, but you guys would know more about that than I would.

So do you still live in New York?

I bounce back and forth. I’m in Miami at the moment, actually. I have an apartment here, but I still live and work in New York. I still have the same place from 18 years ago, but I’m trying to transition more to be down here because my family’s down here, but I’m kind of in between at the moment.

How often do you think about 9/11 or how often does it come up in your daily life in terms of meeting people, or just in general.

These days not as much. You know it’s like any tragedy in that the years after it was on my mind a lot. I went to Ground Zero I think six or seven years ago for the first time — I hadn’t been down there since they made the reflection pools and — have you guys been to New York? Have you seen any of this stuff or…

Yeah. We actually went on a class trip in the beginning of the course so we got to go to New York, we stayed in TriBeCa, and we went to the museum and...

So the museum wasn’t open when I was there. It was pretty new, but the reflection pools had been there for months, maybe years, but I just hadn’t made it down there. I had a business meeting down there and when it was done I didn’t want to go back to the office so I kind of just goofed off. I went there and it was a particularly cold day, it was rainy so there was no line to get in and I kind of just walked up and went and that brought a lot of it back to me because it was emotional, it's — I don't want to necessarily draw parallels to what’s happening now with the coronavirus, but it's got some similarities because these are kind of stressful times, you know. We haven’t seen the amount of deaths that would cause — obviously a lot more people died on 9/11 in New York, knock on wood, or Florida and with that comes a level of seriousness but we could get there. [Since this interview, the death toll from COVID-19 has far surpassed that on 9/11, both in New York and nationally.] This will play out over a longer period of time. 9/11 was just like, you know, one instant and zap it’s over. So, it was hard for I’d say many years after, just because you have these emotions. And the firefighters, I think, were particularly hard for me because they really put their lives on the line. I was never a huge fan of the NYPD because I knew a lot of corruption stories, but the firefighters seemed more selfless and would run into the burning building, and they did, and a lot of them died in 9/11.

I’ll tell you a story. It was one of these things that we did on Wall Street all the time where we went out at like 6:00 all together. . . . There was a lot of drinking going on around 9/11, people just needed to forget about it and be with friends. So, we went out, we were drinking from probably 6:00 to 11:00 and there was probably a group of 15 to 20 of us, all coworkers, and I remember around 11:00 the front door burst open and three firefighters came through and I feel like the whole bar stopped and everybody just wanted to buy these guys a drink. So for whatever reason, even though it was a crowded bar one of the firefighters came over to me, and I just said, “Dude can I buy you a drink?” . . . He told me he had been to three funerals that day and he was sad and clearly he was already drunk, and I don’t remember much of what we talked about. I think we talked for like 20 or 30 minutes, and he was telling me about his family and his kids and all the people he knew. At some point, we kind of had our arms around each other which was not something I normally do with strange guys that I just meet but you know, I don’t know, everyone was just so in love with FDNY because they encapsulated all of the best qualities. . . .

How do you think 9/11 really changed New York, or the country in general, or if you really feel that the change was like concentrated in Manhattan, or…

Well you know, everybody banded together. It was a tragedy, a big one that nobody saw coming, and like I said people were shell-shocked for a few days but then they rallied around it. I think something like that would probably happen nowadays, but there it was, like we have to show everyone that life goes on. That was a big message that not just New York but the rest of the country adopted: if we don’t — if we all are sad and don’t go about our lives as we normally do — then the terrorists win. So, the best way to show the terrorists that they can't get to us is that we continue on as we were. So I think the country really rallied around that, and as we talked about, there was a spike in patriotism. Legislatively there were a bunch of laws enacted around this that had consequences for many years to come. I think everybody just tried to spin a negative into a bigger positive; it just goes to show that Americans are tough, New Yorkers are tough.

Now looking back and knowing this wasn’t going to be happening every few years obviously changes things, but I just remember there was an overall sense that people were like — the World Trade Center [towers] were the two tallest buildings at the time, but people were wondering, so is the Empire State going to get hit one of these times? Is the Chrysler building going to get hit? And now weirdly enough they’re building all of these tall buildings in Midtown. There’s always kind of an overreaction; people were wondering how easy it is to get a 747 as a terrorist and use it as a flying bomb and obviously that hasn’t happened again, but you didn’t know. I think the overall long term effect is that it rallied America together, but we had some crazy policies as a result that I think looking back, people might not have been so hasty. I don’t know if that answers your question.

Yeah, we just have one more question for you, so you’ve been to Ground Zero but you haven’t been to the memorial inside the museum?

I went to Ground Zero like three weeks after it happened and then I went to the footprint around seven years ago, the pools, and that, like I said, dredged a lot of old memories back, and emotions. But I haven’t been back to it since those seven years.

We’re just wondering would you ever want to go inside and see the memorial or do you not want to see it again since you lived through it — like going into the museum and going through the whole timeline thing.

Yeah, look, I’m not against going. I’m not one of these old people who’s like, “I lived it so I don’t need to go” or whatever. It’s kind of an emotional thing, I guess, not as I’m telling you now but when you get there and see the pictures you are reminded of things. But I’m certainly not against going. I just happened to be down in that area when I went seven years ago, and I was really impressed by how well they did. There were so many things that happened in the days and months after. They had these two beams of light where the footprints of the towers were before they made the pools. They would just shine these beams of light into the sky and I think you could see them with satellites in space, but it was a metaphor about light and how we persevere and all of those sorts of things.

You know, there was big controversy whether they should build on there again and if they do, what should they build. Should they build something like the original towers, should they build something like the two towers or one tower? Obviously they ended up going with one, but there was a lot of emotion going around with this stuff. If you lost someone, it’s extremely hard, and the stories that I heard — and we haven’t really touched on these — it’s dark. There were people who were trapped above where the planes hit and with the smoke they were inhaling they actually thought their chances of survival were better jumping off 100 floors than staying where they were. That’s really sad because they didn’t die when the plane hit, they were just forced to make a terrible decision and — another component, as we talk I’m reminded of things — but there were people coming to work in the weeks after with parachutes, like backpacks, or some people had these crazy suction cup things where they could rappel down the building and glass if they had to. That’s how people were living in the weeks and months after this happened. It might be an overreaction, but if you could afford a parachute you’d bring it to work, and if that happened to you, you could jump out the window and parachute safely. Although in Manhattan there are buildings everywhere so you’d probably run into one, but those are the kinds of things that were happening because people heard these stories of people deciding whether to jump or not jump.

So, when I see those things I am reminded of stuff like that, and it’s great to see the country rallied around it but it’s very sad to remember those things. And it could have been worse, that's the other thing about this. The first plane hit around 8 a.m., maybe a little before — you guys would know better about this — and that’s around when people are starting to get to work. [The first plane hit the North Tower at 8:46 a.m., but, as Alex said, it was still before the start of the 9:00 workday.] . . . Because it hit so early a lot of people didn’t get to their desks in those buildings so the death count could have been way worse if they had been half an hour later, even more. You take the silver linings where you can get them, but that’s kind of luck. I forget the final death toll . . . but I mean it could have been even double that if they had waited a bit more.