In their words: Ilan Arboleda

We’re just going to start with a more general question: If you could just tell us about your experiences from that day, walk us through how that day went for you.

The night before, it was a beautiful night in New York, and it was a beautiful day in New York the next day. The night before I was out with a bunch of friends — I think some Ransom alumni now that I think about it. We were out with a bunch of friends, we were out late, and we had a great time. The next morning I woke up; I remember it was a perfect, beautiful day. I mean, It was one of the most beautiful days in New York I remember; it was the start of fall, and it was just like the most perfect day in New York you could possibly imagine. I woke up really early and I had to get to my office, which was on the corner of 23rd and 6th. Back then, 6th Avenue was not as built up, and my corner office on the corner of 23rd and 6th saw all the way straight down to the World Trade Center; I used to tell everyone I have the best view in this city, I have a beautiful view of 80 uninterrupted floors of the World Trade Center, both of them. And I loved having that view, it was incredible to have that view.

I woke up early that day to go to the office. I had lived, just so you know, one block from the World Trade Center, for multiple years. But about 8 months before 9/11, I moved all the way to the Upper East Side — 77th and 2nd, but I lived a block away from the World Trade Center for many years. So, I hadn’t changed my voting registration and 9/11 happened to be the Democratic primary for Mayor of New York, and my voting booth was still inside the World Trade Center. So, I got to the office real early, and then I remembered it was time to vote, and I got to the office early enough that I still had time to go run down to the World Trade Center and come back up before the start of my workday. I think it was [around 8:00], and I’m walking from 23rd and 6th to 23rd and Broadway, about to get on to the N/R train, which takes you straight down to the World Trade Center. I’m standing on the corner of 23rd and Broadway, and there’s a bunch of people sort of looking up in the sky, so obviously it must have been like 8:50, 8:40, I can’t remember the exact timing of the day, but obviously the first building was on fire and there’s helicopters circling it. And all of a sudden I saw a fireball come out of the other side; I didn’t see a plane hit, but I saw the fireball from the second plane. And I was like, “Holy shit,” everyone’s screaming on the street but they all thought it was one of the helicopters that was circling trying to get a view of the first one burning, hitting the second building. That’s what everyone thought. I remember calling my mom, calling my ex-girlfriend, and I said rather than go back downtown — that’s going to be complete pandemonium — I’m not going to vote that day, and I went back to my office. So I walked back to 23rd and 6th, went up to the 12th floor, and had a perfect view of everything that was unfolding. I told everyone at the office that something was going on with the World Trade Center, someone turned on the TV, and we all started watching what was going on both live and on the TV — am I too wordy for you? Do you want this more abbreviated?

No no, this is perfect.

Okay. So we had a view of both watching it on television live and watching it right in front of our faces live. Our whole floor — the 12th floor of the office I worked on — was all just all views of all downtown, and I had the corner office just looking at everything downtown. Everyone just sat there watching what was going on and it slowly escalated and escalated and we realized something was happening and obviously we were under attack. I remember not being able to get through to people on the phones. This was the early days of cellphone technology and the cell phone towers all happened to be on the World Trade Center, plus the grid was overwhelmed, and so I called my mom in Miami who teaches at Alexander Montessori, and my sister who was working on 53rd and 5th Avenue. We sort of stayed on an open line for the next four hours and didn’t hang up with each other as we were sort of figuring out what was going on. Back then they had these crazy little headsets you could wear wirelessly to your phone, so I was wearing this headset for the next four hours. And then I remember arguing, people in the office were getting more and more scared as time was going on because it really felt like we were under attack, and back then, obviously the Internet was existent, but it was very limited — you know, there weren’t major news pages — so everything we were watching was really on television.

And you know we’re hearing we’re under attack, that there’s planes circling New York City ready to hit the next targets. My sister’s freaking because her husband is in a class because he’s getting his Master’s degree, he’s in a class in the basement of the Empire State Building. We’re hearing that the Empire State Building is the next target to hit; then we hear slowly, you know, the Pentagon has been hit, then we hear something about how the White House has been hit, no the White House hasn’t been hit, oh the President has been hit, no the President hasn’t been hit. We hear 20 different things, the rumors are swirling, and then what’s fascinating was seeing everyone in the office, different levels of response. Some people were panicking, some people were crying, some people were just okay, some people didn’t want to think about it and were just working away — they didn’t want to stop working. It was a very interesting response.

And I remember sitting there with someone arguing about whether, after a certain amount of time, whether the buildings were going to go down or not. He’s like, “They’re going down,” and I’m like, “There’s no way, there’s no way those buildings are going down,” he’s like, “They’re going down,” and then right before our eyes they disappeared. And that was something I’ll never forget, was watching the buildings just disappear right in front of my eyes. I could see the people coming out, from where I was, I was close enough. I could see the people jumping. At first, I thought it was debris but then I realized after a while it was people, and I had binoculars in the office, and we could see people jumping, and that was horrifying. At the time we thought, there’s 30,000 people in that building; you know, we didn’t realize what time of day it was and how many people would be in the building, so we thought 30,000 people just died — we had no idea what had just happened. Once those buildings went down, it was first disbelief, and then it was full-on panic in the office, and then trying to make a decision of what to do. And on the phone with my sister, my mother, I’m trying to explain to her, she’s still trying to teach a class, class stopped, she taught 4th through 6th-grade history at Alexander. And my sister was panicking because her husband was in the Empire State Building and she wanted to leave. I said, “Don’t leave, I’m going to come and get you.”

They had closed down all the bridges, all the tunnels, all the boats, everything to get out of the city, and I was one of the very few people in the city who lived in Manhattan; most of the people lived outside of Manhattan and had to travel these ways and were stuck, the people in my office. So I basically told everyone, “You’re coming to my place. We’re getting out of this building on the 12th floor, and you’re going to come to my place.” . . . And I led this caravan of 15 people through the streets of New York. After a while when we were still arguing about what to do, we were seeing what looked like zombies. It was like the zombie apocalypse, everyone covered in soot, in grey soot, from the falling of the buildings, coming uptown in massive waves, and it literally looked like the zombie apocalypse: people walking up 6th Avenue, up Broadway, up 7th Avenue, I could see from my vantage point, and everyone just covered in ash, in soot, and just in panic.

I set off with this caravan after a number of hours, by then it was probably like noon. I finally hung up with my sister, hung up with my mom, told my sister, “I’m coming to get you.” And we walked, I took this caravan, I think it was 13 people, we walked up 6th Avenue, and when we got to 29th Street, we realized we’re right in front of the Empire State Building, and maybe it’s not so safe; we better walk around. We didn’t know what was going to happen, we didn’t know if the Empire State Building was going to be attacked. We walked all the way to 8th Avenue, and then past the Empire State Building, and then back around 35th Street back to 6th Avenue, and then over to 5th, and then I went to my sister’s building at 53rd and 5th, and she was gone. She had actually disappeared on me; she couldn’t wait for me to go with her to get her husband so she went and got her husband herself. By the way, no cell phones worked, there was no way to communicate with anyone, there was pandemonium in the streets — cellphones wouldn’t work and payphones wouldn’t work, I couldn’t get through to anyone. Finally my sister shows up with her husband, and we lead this whole caravan, it’s 15 of us now, heading all the way uptown to the Upper East Side.

When I get to my apartment, there’s a note on my door from my best friend, who said, “I’m okay, I’m alright, I was down there at the World Trade Center, I came up to you because I had nowhere else to go, I couldn’t get back to my house,” because he lived next door to the United Nations, and they blocked his ability to get home, so he walked all the way from the World Trade Center where he worked across the street at One Liberty Plaza, at Bankers Trust and Deutsche Bank, and literally got out of the subway as the buildings were falling, went on covered in soot, showed up at my apartment, and left a note. I found him about an hour later just wandering around. He didn’t stay very long in my apartment; by the time we got up there they had opened 59th Street bridge [which joins Manhattan and Queens] for foot traffic, so all of those people that caravanned up with me ended up walking across the bridge and left me. And then I met up with my sister, her husband, and my friend, who was covered in soot, and we went to a friend’s house. These were all Gulliver kids I should say, my friend’s house from Gulliver, my sister went to Gulliver, so it was Gulliver friends and some Ransom kids, all at this one apartment watching the news. We ate a lot of sushi, and around 2 in the morning they finally opened up the 59th Street bridge to cars. Someone got us a car, and we drove out to Long Island, and we waited there for three days.

So that’s essentially the story. I would say every day for the first three weeks after the crash of planes, every time I would close my eyes I would see those buildings fall. What was most amazing about when I came back . . . is how the city came together afterward. I had lived in New York for only a few years at that point and never felt like a New Yorker and after that, I felt like a New Yorker. And it was just like Miami after Hurricane Andrew — the whole city came together, everyone in New York came together — oh, and I forgot one more thing. We all went to donate blood at Lennoxville hospital — I lived near Lennoxville hospital on 77th Street. There was a line 5 blocks long to donate blood. We waited in line for about half an hour, and after about half an hour they came out and basically said “There are no survivors. We don’t need any blood.” So they sent everyone away that was trying to donate blood.

Anyways, so I said, what was amazing about it afterward was how the city came together. The feeling in the city was so crazy afterward, you know between the anthrax scare, the excavation of the wreckage, and the smoke that was coming out for weeks at a time with asbestos and everything. The city was eerie for weeks, for months. Carting away the big excavation cranes, trucks going uptown carting away all the debris, and all the wreckage. It was just a very strange place, but it was the first time I felt like a New Yorker after that. And, obviously, something I’ll never forget, I remember my grandma was still alive at the time; she was born in 1905, and she lived through WWII, she lived through Pearl Harbor, she lived through so much. And I said, “Is this the worst thing that’s ever happened to you in the United States?” and she said, “This is the worst thing that we’ve ever experienced.” She had lived through so much, she lived through the entire 20th century.

Well thank you for that... wow. So I guess one question we have is you said you lived one block from the World Trade Center right?

MmmHmm.

So long-term after 9/11, did that affect your ability to get into your house, or apartment, or anything like that?

So just to be clear, I lived — about 8 months before, my girlfriend and I used to live together at the time. I broke up with my girlfriend. I moved to the Upper East Side, and she stayed in that apartment. So I lived uptown when it happened. I was heading back downtown because I hadn’t moved my registration booth to go vote that day. I was actually headed to the World Trade Center. I don’t know if you know, but the World Trade Center was not just two buildings, it was a giant complex, and at the base of the complex of the buildings was a mall, movie theaters, subway trains, restaurants, a million different things. So I had a voting booth there, I went there every day for my groceries, and you know to go to the drugstore to get medication, anything I needed. Since I lived a block away, that was my hub, that was my daily life there. So I was heading there to go vote. So to answer your question about my girlfriend, ex-girlfriend at the time, she was displaced permanently — she was never allowed to go back. Eventually, she moved out without ever recovering. FEMA ended up recovering her stuff for her because the building was covered, she had left the window open and all the debris from the World Trade Center went into her apartment and destroyed her apartment. She wasn’t there that morning, fortunately. So yeah, she was never able to go back.

And did you still have full access to like your office building afterward, or was it close enough to the World Trade Center that they closed it?

So they closed everything below 14th Street, and my office was on 23rd Street, so I was fine; I wasn’t displaced. We went back to work after about a week. I did some volunteering, and if you were volunteering then you didn’t have to go to work. I did a little bit of volunteering, not much volunteering. I’m actually... in the long term, I’m glad that I didn’t do too much volunteering because so many of those volunteers suffered from so many pulmonary diseases and cancers later on.

Did you ever feel... we read some different oral histories in class, and a few of them kind of mentioned that they felt a divide between New York — one of them actually specifically said below 14th Street and above 14th Street. It just felt like two different parts of New York because below 14th Street people were much more directly affected, whereas some of the people in, like, Upper Manhattan weren’t as directly affected by the aftermath of 9/11. Did you feel any kind of divide in New York, or did you feel more unity?

I felt unity. I mean, there was always a cultural difference between below 14th Street and above 14th Street because at the time, below 14th Street was downtown New York, it was younger people, and it was the vibe, the restaurants, the bars, the whole thing. So it became sort of a ghost zone for a little while, and a lot of the night life moved north after 9/11 to other parts of the city just because things were closed for so long. Most of my friends were below 14th Street. I had just moved to the Upper East Side because when I had broken up with my ex-girlfriend, I had this great opportunity at this amazing apartment in the Upper East Side so I moved up there. So I didn’t feel the divide that you’re talking about; if anything, I felt a divide between New York and the rest of the country. It felt like a pronounced divide.

Would you mind elaborating on your experiences with that divide?

Absolutely. There was a call to war afterwards, and my feeling was that most New Yorkers had no interest in going to war and they were the ones who experienced the attack, yet everyone outside of New York seemed to be ready to go to war. There was a profound feeling in New York; it's like everyone wants to go to war, and here we are — the ones who actually got attacked — and we don’t want that. That was the feeling that I felt at the time. Maybe that was my political leanings, but everyone I knew in New York at the time was feeling that. Why is the rest of the country trying to go to war when we’re the ones who were actually attacked, and we don’t want this?

At what point after 9/11 did you feel that it was acceptable to go back to living your “normal” lifestyle? We talked about that a lot in our class, and it seems that there is a lot of variation in people’s opinions.

So weirdly, I had an interesting reaction to 9/11. I was very calm, and one of the reasons I led that caravan is, during the crisis, my reaction — you know they talk about this fight-or-flight sort of thing. I was ready to stay and fight, so I felt... how do I describe it? I don’t know if you guys know what I do. I’m a filmmaker, and I make movies, and I made a movie about veterans and their experiences in war. And to hear them talk about going to war, what it feels like, they all talk about an adrenaline rush. And during 9/11, I had an adrenaline rush. I felt like, ready to fight, almost. That was my automatic, unconscious response to the action. I was ready to be in action, I felt that. Afterwards, I felt okay, I felt normal. But to answer your question, it was a few months later after that craziness, the anthrax scare is what scared the living daylights out of me, where I actually felt scared, as opposed to 9/11 where I didn’t feel scared, I felt intense. The anthrax scare scared the hell out of me, and it scared all of New York on a whole different level because we had just witnessed this giant disaster, and now it seemed at any little corner — do you guys know about the anthrax scare by the way?

Yeah we talked about it in class.

It was the anthrax scare a few months later that literally I was like, “I’ve got to get off the streets, I’ve got to go to a movie theater, I’ve gotta do anything to get away from it.” You know, any time there was a little sign of like a white powder, people would be in pandemonium in the streets. We’d be on the subway, and someone would say, “White powder!” and they’d stop the subway and everyone would jump off of the subway and panic and run. It was that time, that unknown, during those months afterwards, that really kept people unsettled I think for a long time, and it wasn't until a few months after that, I would say, you know, six to nine months later, that things felt a little more calm. It became this new normal that you’d see missing people, and all the signs and the flags, and the tributes became normal, the fireman tributes, you know these things were endless.

It was a little surreal, and I mean I’m just recalling all of this stuff for the first time actually. It was daily that you’d hear sirens all day long, whether it was police sirens, or ambulance sirens, for months that’s all you’d hear. So there was a weird sense that the city’s been displaced. Probably a year before it was normal again. But it was the anthrax scare that really amped it up and made the city fearful afterwards. . . . I’ll mention that Lennoxville hospital, afterwards, where I went to give blood when I lived right next door to it, that’s where they took all of the anthrax patients afterwards. So I was REALLY scared because here were people suffering from anthrax a block away from me, dying.

So you mentioned that you’re a filmmaker. How do you think 9/11 affected you as a filmmaker and also just like the filmmaking industry as a whole?

Well, it decimated the film industry for a while, like what’s happening now [the COVID-19 pandemic] is going to decimate the film industry. It took a long time to recover. My company, we let a bunch of people go at that time. It was — it was a real retraction. It took years for the industry to come back actually, especially in New York. Filming in New York disappeared for many years. After that it went to Toronto, it went to other cities, and other states passed tax incentives to bring business there, to really beat New York. It wasn’t until five, six years ago that New York really came back.

How often do you think that 9/11 still affects you in your daily life, or how much it comes up when you meet people, or in conversations, or, all of that?

It’s almost like, if you have a 9/11 story, you share it with another person who has a 9/11 person story. You know, my 9/11 story is... the only intense part of it was I was heading there, I was on my way to the World Trade Center when it happened. So, you know, I had proximity, I had distance, and I was there to bear witness. You know my best friend was in it, in the middle of it. My wife, if you wanted to hear her story, not that she’s an alumni, but one of her best friends died that day at Cantor Fitzgerald on the 106th floor. She could tell that story if you wanted that testimonial. Sorry, what was your question again?

Just about how much it comes up in your daily life.

Ah. It comes up a lot. People recount the stories. It comes up a lot now that I’m working on a current project with a bunch of people your age, so it’s part of the discussion a lot. And then, also discussion with — when people ask what it’s like to be a New Yorker, I always say that’s when I felt like a New Yorker. So, in terms of lasting trauma, I don’t have it. One of my employees, Jessica, her father was a first responder, and it destroyed him. He was never the same man again and descended into substance abuse, and physical pain, and all sorts of issues as a result of being a first responder. So, you know, there are many people who still live with that trauma on a daily basis. I’m fortunate that I don’t.

So, do you have children, and if you do, do you share your experience on 9/11 with them, or is it something that you talk about?

Well, she’s 7 months old…

Ohhh [laughter] okay!

And so, hopefully she’ll be a future Ransom student one day. But I mean, I will tell her about it of course. It’ll be so removed from her by the time she’s old enough to comprehend, you know. But I think it’s important to keep these legacies and these oral histories alive because it is such… such a major event in our lives.

Right. Have you... Well, you live in New York. Have you been to the memorial?

I knew you were gonna ask that. I’ve never been. I’ve felt no reason to go relive it and revisit it. I witnessed every single second of it at that time, and trying to capture those images or see those images… It’s not like, “Oh I don’t want to see it, it’s too much for me,” it’s not that. It’s like, all the lines and the time to do it, and you know, famously New Yorkers never go see the tourist attractions. So I’ve never felt compelled to do it. I think I went to an art exhibit once that was doing 9/11 memorial stuff, but the actual memorial [inside the museum]... I’ve never been down there. Now I’ve been to the World Trade Center since then, but I’ve never actually gone to the memorial. I mean, my financial manager is in the World Trade Center so I’ve been there a bunch. But I’ve not been to the memorial.

So you said that your wife had an interesting story. If she could share it, we’d love to hear it.

[At this point, Ilan called his wife, Rojika Arboleda, to come downstairs to tell her story from the day of 9/11. She was working for a finance company in midtown on 9/11. Her friend was working for Cantor Fitzgerald, a financial services company located just above the impact zone of the north tower. On 9/11, 658 of its 960 employees — everyone who had come to work at the New York headquarters that morning — were killed in the attack.]

So for our class on the Roots and Legacy of 9/11, we’re doing an oral history project, and we’re interviewing different people that kind of have connections to Ransom Everglades. Ilan was just telling us how you had a personal story and a personal connection to 9/11. So, if you could just kind of walk us through your day?

Yeah, it was surreal, kind of like what’s going on right now which is pretty surreal. I had a really good friend growing up who I had just gotten in touch with in August. We had reconnected, we lost touch during college. This was my first year out of college, and I was working in finance. I was working on 56th Street, which is midtown, and, you know everything happened downtown. So, I was working at a financial company, and I had reconnected with this friend of mine. We would email everyday, and she worked in the World Trade Center, but I had no idea what floor she worked on. I just — It just didn't even occur to me to ask, but just kept emailing back and forth all day long for like, a month straight, and then we made plans to see each other.

Ilan: This is before text messaging. So email was the best way to communicate.

Rojika: Yes. So, we had to cancel one dinner, and then finally we had a dinner booked and it was going to happen. So, the night before 9/11, there was the Michael Jackson concert, which was like a huge deal in New York City. It was at Madison Square Garden, so I was going to that concert, and the next morning, probably around 7, 7:30 am, she messages me, “How was the Michael Jackson concert?” Now, I knew that she was working for Cantor Fitzgerald, but I didn’t realize that she was working on the 103rd floor. So I get to work, and since I worked for a financial services company, we always had CNBC up on the TVs in our office, so we always had TVs on. And it was just basically the market, right. And all of the sudden — you know, I got into work a little later that morning, and as soon as I got in, I logged in, and all of the sudden I’m looking up at the TV, and I see that there’s a view of the World Trade Center, and there’s news reports of something happening there. So, I immediately, you know, check my email, see her message, and respond back. I’m like, “Are you okay? You know I just saw there's something going on there.” I think one of the towers had gone down at that point — or it hadn’t gone down yet but they saw something flying into it, so that's pretty much what we saw on the screen.

So I immediately message her — “What happened, are you okay?” — no response. I start calling her, no response. I start calling her cell phone, no response. I start calling her mother at her house in Long Island, no response, nothing. Finally at this point, everyone’s glued to the TVs, and, you know, the towers go down. I had friends in New York City, and I had a brother in New York City. So, my brother — and mind you, the cell phones, it was horrific getting through to anybody. I mean, all the lines were like busy signals. So my brother finally got through to me; he’s like, “I’m coming to pick you up.” I finally get through to one of my other friends, and she comes and meets me, and we get picked up by my brother, and we drive, we start driving downtown, trying to get out of the city. Literally, there are people walking from downtown with white dust all over themselves, like they’re just white. Finally, you couldn’t even get out of the city, they had closed all of the bridges. The only way you could get out of the city was by boat. So, basically, I was living in Long Island at the time. So, I had to get back there. We ended up staying in the city I think until like 11:00 until they finally opened one of the bridges for us to get out.

But, my friend passed away. They never found her — I mean obviously. There were signs everywhere looking for her because everyone thought that maybe somebody had, you know, lost their memory, maybe they were in a hospital... maybe, you know, they were getting treatment somewhere and they didn’t remember who they were, I mean there were all these thoughts of what was happening. There were signs posted all over downtown, family members putting signs up looking for their loved ones. We had a candlelight vigil for her, like my entire high school, which was in Long Island. And what they did was, her family actually started a foundation in her name, and basically it's a foundation where they raise money to give kids who don’t have money a backpack and books for the school year. So they fill it with school supplies, they fill it with books, and they give it to students all over the city. You know, kids that don’t have the resources.

But, I mean I’m sure you’ve read tons about 9/11, I’m sure you’ve seen, you know, I haven’t even watched any of the movies on it, or the documentaries on it at all. It was, it was, honestly, like the movie, was it Armageddon? Which was that movie where there was like that explosion in the city — Armageddon I think. It literally felt like that. Nobody knew what was next. All of the sudden, the tallest buildings that you know from growing up crumble to the ground, and then I had friends that lived down there. I mean, Ilan lived down there, and they couldn't go back to their homes, you know, for I mean, how many months was it?

Ilan: 4 months.

Rojika: Yeah, 4 months. After 9/11 my company actually ended up moving across the street from it. So that was a very strange, weird feeling to be right across the street from it, because it was empty. But, it was, it was pretty horrifying. I think everyone in the city has a story where they knew somebody, or just their story of trying to get home that day, or, where they were, whether they were even in the building. So it was crazy. It was pretty scary. So, I mean it was just heartbreaking because this friend of mine, she was working as a bond trader at Cantor Fitzgerald, and all she wanted to do was be a social worker. So she had actually decided like two nights before or the night before that she was going to apply to go to school for that. So she was — she was done with, you know, working in finance. And she was, I think, 22 years old, 22 or 23 years old. So, I mean, it was crazy. You guys can actually even look her up. There’s a lot about her and the foundation, her name is Brooke Jackman, and it’s the Brooke Jackman Foundation. So, you’ll see tons of articles about what her family has done in her honor.