My September 11th: Doug Imbruce

Pictured: the view from my office, missing the Towers.

I’ve always wanted an office with a beautiful view. Looking out my window today, I see the sun reflecting off New York’s intricate cityscape – admiring the grand buildings (old and new) of the financial district, astonished that I’ve got front-row access to the great machine that turns the engines of commerce… astonished that I’ve fulfilled my childhood dream of building several successful companies in this fine city… and ultimately shocked at the hole still gaping in our cityscape where the Twin Towers used to be.

Today is the day I hate my view.

The offices of theU.net, the parent company of collegeOTR, are located only several blocks from Ground Zero. We’re close enough that on September 10th, 2001, we would’ve seen the shadows of the professionals going about their jobs reflected in the deep abyss of the Twin Tower’s windows – which is to say that on September 11th, the front-row access and view I so admire would’ve brought us to the precipice of tragedy.
 

When the towers fell, I was further uptown, both in mind and spirit. A naïve college Freshman, I was doing my best to shut myself off from the world and study for a quiz (the first of my college career) early on the morning of September 11th, 2001, excited to start my first semester at Columbia. When my dorm phone kept ringing (this was before ubiquitous cell coverage fully eclipsed land lines), I thought it might be my parents, eager to see how my first week at school was going.

So, I ignored it.

But the phone kept ringing. When I picked up, my brother’s voice screamed back at me – the trading floor behind him seemed more abuzz with noise than usual, a nervous energy in the air.

I thought: Did the stock market crash?  If only we had been so lucky.

“Have you been outside?,” Greg asked,

“No,” I responded. “I’ve been studying”.

“Look outside… Downtown,” Greg replied.

I thought it was strange when my brother didn’t chide me for studying so early – he was always encouraging me to enjoy my college years instead of focusing only on academic achievement. “The real world”, Greg said, “is where things happen”.

So, with caution, I walked into the hallway, and as I looked through the small window facing downtown from the 14th floor of Columbia’s John Jay dorm, for the first time in my life, the real world – that one where you don’t always get a perfect score on every test if you study hard, where life isn’t fair and sometimes bad things happen to good people – finally came crashing into my life.

I could see one of the Twin Towers was on fire.

My mind raced – after a million thoughts, turning only to the office workers … the young professionals living the American Dream… probably some Columbia graduates just like me who had managed to ace interviews and win coveted jobs as top-tier investment bankers (one of the paths many of my friends hoped to pursue)… all trapped inside, burning.

And then, as I raced back into my dorm room and picked up the phone to ask my brother what I should do, all I heard was screaming.

Oh my God. Oh my God.

The second plane had hit.

It wasn’t a fire – it was an attack.

In a moment, the world had changed.

Walking around campus, I exchanged glances with my fellow Freshman – all of us had recently moved to New York City and were just coming to terms with what it meant to assume the identity of a New Yorker. Were we supposed to be flashy like Donald Trump? Vulgar like Howard Stern? Funny like Jerry Seinfeld? At orientation, they didn’t tell us our first real test would be to survive a terrorist attack.

See, at first, the City had emboldened us. Unlike our friends who retreated to pastoral campuses with acres of greenery, many of us had eschewed a far, far more comfortable environment for the unique challenge of living in NYC. When we decided to enroll, we asked for what the Columbia recruiter promised when she visited my high school: “Tough love”.

But at that moment, watching the Towers fall, the tough part didn’t seem so attractive anymore. We were no longer the “leading minds of our generation”, as Dean Quigley had called us at orientation. We were scared children – who in an instant, became adults.

9/11 took so much away. But for a generation, and for me, it ushered in the real world… the one my brother always talked about. After a few weeks, the mood on campus began to recover, and my fellow Freshman and I grew hyper aware of the world outside of test scores and internships – hyper sensitive to foreign policy… to America’s position in international affairs… to a President who stayed seated after receiving news of the worst attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor.  To the unnecessary sacrifice of human life.

9/11 stole from us. It stole the trivial (a hole in the beautiful view) and the deeply tragic. It was the day the real world became unavoidable - and also the day my generation learned to manage it… or at least fight back tears and in the first of many role reversals that mark the true path to adulthood, tell our worried parents it was all going to be OK.

It was also the day I decided to become an entrepreneur.

When I was a high school student growing up in suburban Connecticut, I asked a mentor of mine why he lived in New York City. He told me: “New York is the capital of the world. If I was living in Roman times, I would’ve lived in Rome. In modern times, there’s no place to be but NYC.”

Still true – and no attack will ever change that.