Devastation, destruction and disbelief still resonate with many municipal bond professionals 15 years after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks that killed 2,753 people in New York City.
John Farawell, executive vice president and manager of municipal trading at Roosevelt & Cross, remembers watching in disbelief from his office as the drama unfolded six blocks away at the World Trade Center while he worked on a bid-wanted with Cantor Fitzgerald.
"I didn't know what it was," he recalled in an interview a week before the 15th anniversary. "Then the second plane flew right by our window and crashed."
Emergency responders thwarted Farawell's attempts to walk through the Holland Tunnel with his co-workers.
"People who were in the Trade Center were burned and damaged," said Farawell. "Their clothes were burned. It was just shocking for everybody."
Those images prompted an eagerness to get home to children and families. "There was such a relief, but for others there was not such relief," he said.
The attacks rocked the municipal bond market to the core, given the industry professionals who died. "The muni business was devastated like so many businesses," he said of investment bank Cantor Fitzgerald, a tenant in the World Trade Center that lost 658 employees, including 26 members of the municipal staff of the brokerage.
"We all lost a lot of friends that day," Farawell said last week.
The daily grind was far from people's minds that day and immediately after, said Roosevelt & Cross president Dominick Antonelli.
"We didn't care if the market was up or down – that was so far removed from what the real problem was," Antonelli said a week before the anniversary from his office at 55 Broadway, where his firm moved 10 years ago.
Antonelli recalled the massive emergency response dispatched to the World Trade Center, which prevented him driving to the Weehawken ferry in New Jersey to get to his office at 20 Exchange Place near what soon became Ground Zero.
"It looked like a small helicopter, it didn't look like a plane," he remembers thinking at first glance from across the Hudson River.
When he made it downtown two days later, he helped a restaurateur friend serve sandwiches to rescue workers and became part of the human chain of volunteers that worked effortlessly to restore and recover.
Antonelli remembers walking through the debris and dust-filled streets in disbelief – and more than a month later found out close friends were among those lost to the terrorist act. "Some people who weren't here don't realize what a tragedy it was," he said.
Dick Larkin, working for Fitch Ratings at the time, saw the first plane hit on television.
"When I finally got through to my boss, Frank Rizzo at Fitch, he saw immediately the second plane hit, and he advised me to stay away from anywhere near Manhattan," said Larkin, now the credit analysis director at Stoever Glass & Co. in Boca Raton, Fla. "In his words, 'this is war.' Then he hung up and took an eight-hour walk-hitchhike home."
Fitch closed for a week, said Larkin, although it tried to operate through email and Internet.
"When we finally re-opened, it took me a year before I could walk up to the towers," said Larkin, whose office overlooked the end of the Hudson River as well as New York Bay leading to the Verrazano Bridge.
"I can't tell you how many times I was at my office, and would look out at the south harbor where the second plane drove to destroy the second tower. It was the single-most important reason that caused me to leave Fitch and seek employment in New Jersey, when I landed a position with JB Hanauer."
The memory of 9/11 was somber to Lebenthal & Co. president Alexandra Lebenthal given its loss of life, yet the striking recollection triggered flashbacks to her childhood.
"When the World Trade Center was being built, my dad used to take my sister and me to watch the building because it was built by bonds," she said of her father and municipal bond guru Jim Lebenthal, mostly recently chairman emeritus of Lebenthal & Co. before his death in 2014.
When she heard the north tower collapsed, she recalled those days in 1972 seeing the subways running near where the foundation was just being poured.
"I remember thinking that when the foundation went down, I will actually see that same image again," she said.
The firm's trading desk at 120 Broadway overlooked the World Trade Center, so the municipal professionals there heard the loud noise and saw the north tower explosion, she said.
Although she herself was in Midtown when the building collapsed, she recalled learning about the importance of bonds to the city's infrastructure as a child – and how the towers represented the world in which she grew up.
"Dad did a commercial on the World Trade Center, so I remember the poignancy of that as well," she said.
It took a week to return to the office, but when she did, the images were frightening.
"I remember getting out at Fulton Street conscious that I had to cross the street and look down and see the rubble," she recalled. "And not being prepared when I actually saw part of the building that stuck up like a claw … it just stuck out like a monster; it was just awful."
The attacks put many people in survival mode that day.
Howard Cure, now the director of municipal bond research for Evercore Wealth Management, worked then at Financial Guaranty Insurance Co. at 115 Broadway, across from Liberty Park -- now Zuccotti Park. It was the closest building to Ground Zero that sustained no significant damage.
His daughter was in preschool at nearby Trinity Church.
"I had to get her out of the school," he said. "When the second tower went down, I grabbed my daughter and we went on the subway. Thinking back, it might not have been the smartest decision, but it worked."
According to Bond Buyer online editor, Gary Siegel, it took a while for the magnitude set in.
"As the 'early man' on the news desk, I was alone when the first plane hit the World Trade Center," said Siegel. "At first there was calmness … everyone assumed it was an accident and little information was being disseminated about the plane."
The Bond Buyer then and now operates from One State Street Plaza, at Manhattan's southern tip.
"I was able to watch the scene through a window across the office from my desk. The televisions were on. I tried to keep up with events, sending headlines, some confirmed reports, some not. Emergency vehicle sirens screamed. When the second plane hit [my building rocked], it was obvious that this was no accident."
While phone service was spotty at best, family members reached Siegel and asked why he was still in the office.
"We had been told not to leave the building, or our floor. Really, there was no place to go. Working at the southern tip of Manhattan, going south was not an option and the burning towers north of me made that direction impossible."
People evacuated the floor after the first tower fell, said Siegel. "When we got to the lobby, it looked like night outside. We were standing in the small, hot lobby until we were told to go to a lower level, where the air conditioning was working and there were seats and facilities."
"By mid-afternoon the Staten Island ferry was running again and our work day was over. We were given T-shirts and told that before going out we should wet them and use them to cover our faces. It looked like it has snowed … about two inches of white powder covered the street."
Others also remembered trying to operate as best they could.
"I was essentially answering phones and playing defense that day for New York office," said Peter Block, managing director at Ramirez & Co., who was then working for Standard & Poor's in its new San Francisco office.
"I recall telling people that we would get their ratings as soon as we were back up and running. But, because that day was so surreal, it was hard to imagine when that time would be," Block said.
Only the San Francisco, Chicago and Boston offices were operating that day.
"I don't recall phones working in the New York office, so I didn't speak to anyone. The only communication was email telling us to go to the office and cover for New York."
Ronnie Lowenstein, president of the Independent Budget Office watchdog organization, was in her office with colleagues just east of Ground Zero.
"We had the TV set on and we had all kinds of misinformation. There was a massive amount of confusion. No one knew what was going on. … We finally ran into Brooklyn."
Jerry Kremer, the former chairman of the state General Assembly's House, Ways and Means Committee, went to the polls on mayoral primary day.
"I walked in to vote at 88th Street and Diana Taylor, Mayor [Michael] Bloomberg's longtime girlfriend, was coming out of the booth. She said: 'Did you hear what happened?' "
Kremer and Taylor also first thought it was an accident, not terrorism. They would soon find out otherwise. "I was driving on the FDR Drive headed to Brooklyn, to the appellate court," said Kremer. "I was on the drive when I saw the second plane hit. I pulled over to a side street and repeated.
"The town went into immediate gridlock. The panic set off people going uptown as quickly as they could. It took me three hours to go from 19th Street to East 90th Street, where I lived."
Fifteen years later, many are still numb.
"Obviously it was a shock that we would experience such an attack on our homeland," said Scott Frantz, a Connecticut state senator and the president of Greenwich private equity firm Haebler Capital. "It was a big blow. We're still in a bit of shock."
Antonelli called the ordeal "the most horrible experience ever – worse than a war because it made no sense; you can rationalize some things, but to me this was unacceptable. … I know some people who lost their children, and they still haven't gotten over it."
Even living and working 1,300 miles away can't help Larkin escape the memory.
"It still haunts me, anytime I need to attend meetings in Manhattan."
