Verbatim: The day everything changed: Port Angeles man gives first-person account of being in NYC on 9/11/01
Published 1:30 am Wednesday, September 9, 2026
Below is a verbatim account by Gene Silberman of Port Angeles of what he saw and experienced in New York City when the terrorist attacks occurred on the Twin Towers on Sept. 11, 2001:
“My name is Gene Silberman. I live in Port Angeles now, but I’m from New York City. I lived in New York City most of my life.
I’m an actor. That’s one of my jobs. On 9/11, I was supposed to pay a parking ticket.
One of the places where you could pay your ticket or fight it — and I was going to try to fight it — was a courthouse literally across the street from the Twin Towers. I was going to be there that morning to fight the ticket.
But I found out there was another courthouse up in Harlem, which was closer to where I lived on the Upper West Side. So I changed my mind. I said, ‘I’m going to go to that courthouse instead of the one at the Twin Towers.’
So I went in, fought my ticket and walked out of the courthouse. You could see the plume of smoke downtown. We were all out on the streets trying to figure out what it was.
Then, gradually, throughout the day, as you watched the news, it became evident what it was — to everyone’s horror.
That night, I was in acting class at Carnegie Hall, which is on 57th Street.
After acting class, a friend and I were really curious about what was going on by the Twin Towers, so we started walking downtown.
It’s a few miles all the way downtown. We ran into a Red Cross team that was giving out water, and we asked if we could help. We did. We grabbed some bottles of water and just kept walking. It was like a deserted war zone, with papers, dust and all of that.
We weren’t stopped because we were carrying these bottles of water and handing them out to people.
We eventually did get to Ground Zero, and there were no civilians there. It was military personnel, EMTs and emergency vehicles with stretchers lined up.
I remember there being no bodies, just people in these emergency vehicles waiting. The rubble and the destruction were beyond anything I had ever seen in my life.
I mean, literally, we got to Ground Zero. I was staring into the pit where all the twisted metal and everything was. I remember asking an EMT if it was dangerous where we were, and he said, ‘Yeah, any one of these buildings around us could collapse at any minute.’
Then we started heading back from there.
It was just a surreal, unreal experience — with papers, dust and destruction — and I’ll remember it for the rest of my life.”