Ken Corcoran on the viewing deck of the roof of the south tower of the World Trade Center.

‘That image will be in my mind forever’

Mullingar native Ken Corcoran was at the World Trade Center less than two weeks before 9/11 and was working in Manhattan on the day the Twin Towers were attacked. He vividly remembers the day.

I had moved to New York in July 2000 and had been up the WTC several times with friends and family members.

My Mam and sister visited me in August 2001 for two weeks. On August 30, the three of us did the downtown loop, which is a bus tour. We got off at the WTC and my sister and I went up the WTC to the observation deck and roof. The views from it were amazing.

I dropped them to the airport on September 9 after their trip, and I was due back at work downtown on the 10th.

We were working on a job, I’m a carpenter, on Franklin and Hudson Street, which is in Tribeca, about nine blocks north of the WTC – more or less the same distance from Millie Walsh’s to Dolan’s Bar.

Monday night [September 10] though, I was asked to go to a new job in the metropolitan hospital on 97th Street and 2nd Avenue the following morning. The morning of 9/11, I was in the hospital working on a doctor’s office listening to the radio when the news broke that a plane had hit the North Tower.

It wasn’t uncommon to see Cessna planes flying up the Hudson River so straight away that was what everyone was talking about. Fifteen minutes later, panic pretty much broke out in the wing of the hospital we were in as news broke that a second plane had hit the South Tower.

We found a TV in one of the rooms and that was when we first got a glimpse of what was happening. It seemed surreal. Myself and one of the guys I was working with went out to 2nd Avenue and you could see smoke in the distance. Fire trucks and cop cars were streaming down 2nd Avenue, lights and sirens going.

We went back in and continued working. An hour later, the supervisor told us the South Tower had collapsed and that we might have to wrap up tools and leave the building. It was crazy. Thirty minutes later, the north tower collapsed and security were evacuating us all out of the hospital.

Some sicko had called a bomb threat in on the hospital. That was to be a running thread over the next six months in hospitals and high profile buildings all over the city.

I managed to call home from a pay phone before I left, to let my parents know I was okay. When I had brought my mam on the bus trip 11 days previously, I had pointed out that I had been working so close to the WTC, and knew she would be worried sick.

Myself and my co worker jumped in the van and decided to drive uptown to get the Triborough Bridge on 125th Street out of the city. Traffic came to a standstill around 116th Street and I got out to see what was happening.

Some guys there said they heard on the radio that the city was closing all the bridges and tunnels to traffic. I was anxious and I didn’t know whether I would get home that evening, so I drove east across 117th Street and up Madison Avenue until I got to 128th Street. I had used that route previously to get on the bridge, as most people would use 125th Street.

The cops were closing down the streets leading to the bridge but I managed to pass as they were doing so. A cop stopped me at the entry to the bridge asking how I got there, I just asked him to please let me get back to Queens. Fair play to him, he called on his radio and asked them to lift the barricade and ‘just said one more truck coming through then close it’.

When I got through the toll, ours was the only vehicle on the Queens-bound side on the bridge, it was insane. Four empty lanes on my side. There was one cop car on the other side heading towards the toll with its lights on.

That’s when I saw what was going on. Normally as you drove from The Bronx to Queens, the WTC was very visible in the distance from the bridge. All I could see was a gigantic plume of smoke filling the sky and blowing towards Brooklyn. That image will forever be in my mind.

When I got to Astoria, which was the other side of the bridge, I dropped off my co-worker, stopped at my boss’s house, which was in that neighbourhood, and finally headed home.

I got home just after 2pm. It had taken over three hours to get there, but I was lucky, I had lots of friends who had to walk home over the bridges and they didn’t get home till hours later.

Where I lived, there were two firehouses, one at either end of the neighbourhood. The one closest to me lost two firefighters that day, the second one lost 19 firefighters, which was the largest casualty in one house in the FDNY.

I didn’t know them personally but the sense of loss felt in the neighbourhood was profound. The weeks and months after the attack, there was a feel of cautiousness.

Getting on the subway, being in heavily populated areas, there was a certain amount of watchfulness, especially seeing a massive police presence everywhere, which made you know things were different. There were check points on all bridges, tunnels and major landmarks/locations in the city.

Driving to work, I would get stopped regularly, so much so it became part of the daily trip.

Things did start getting back to normal soon after though, a new normal, but normal none the less.

I never felt like I needed to leave after that, I never felt a worry that would make me pack up and move back to Ireland. I was confident in the fact that there was no way this would ever happen again – that the federal agencies, the police, would all work to keep the country safe. And they pretty much did that for the most part.

I did eventually move back to Ireland, in December 2019. Twenty years on, it [9/11] has absolutely made a lasting impact on the city. New Yorkers are strong willed, patriotic and resilient. Their refusal to never forget what happened that day and the way they honour and commemorate those who died on September 11 is wonderful. New York is a strong city because of the strong people that live there.