On Sept. 11, 2001, I woke up late. It was minutes before nine in the morning, and the first plane had already hit the North Tower. I was sleeping on my friend’s couch in his apartment on the corner of West 11th Street and 7th Avenue South, in the Village. A few days earlier I had given up my own apartment. I was moving to Paris on the 18th to start graduate school, and I was spending those last days in the city saying goodbye to friends and wrapping up five years of my life in New York.
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I turned on the television. While I was still trying to make sense of what I was seeing, the second plane hit the South Tower live on air. There wasn’t any doubt: This was not an accident.
I went outside. From 7th Avenue you could see the Twin Towers smoking in the distance. I watched from the sidewalk as they fell, unable to fully take it in. My friend’s building was diagonally across from St. Vincent’s Hospital, the nearest level I trauma center to the World Trade Center. The avenue had been closed to give ambulances a clear path. But one of the most haunting memories of that day is this: Almost no ambulances came. I figured it out later. There were almost no injured because the people who couldn’t get out didn’t get out.
I knew that place. For two of my five years in New York, my daily routine was to get off at the World Trade Center subway station and walk to the office at One World Financial Center, right across from the Towers. I hadn’t worked there in months, but when they came down, something familiar came down with them.
In Manhattan we couldn’t get Fox News — Time Warner Cable deliberately kept it off the air back then so it wouldn’t compete with CNN — so it was Aaron Brown, Wolf Blitzer and Judy Woodruff, all day, all week.
The subway was down and the city moved on foot. Thousands of people walking in silence, almost like sleepwalkers. On bus stops, posters with photos of missing people kept going up. The ones I saw every day were outside St. Vincent’s, where the Wall of Hope and Remembrance had started taking shape — photos, candles, flowers, handwritten notes. I slept across from that wall the entire first week.
On Sept. 18 I took a cab to Newark. Four hours to get out of Manhattan. At the Lincoln Tunnel, authorities were checking the trunk of every car. I flew to Paris and started school. New York stayed behind, though never entirely.
Those five years had been something else. I came to New York straight out of college, found my first jobs, and had a front-row seat to one of the most remarkable stretches the city had seen in decades. The New York of the late ’90s was unrecognizable from the one of just 10 years earlier: Rudy Giuliani had transformed not just Times Square but much of the city, crime was in free fall, the tech boom was filling offices and restaurants.
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In Washington, Bill Clinton had built his presidency on an explicit break from the left that had driven the Democrat Party to its worst defeats in the ’70s — the Third Way, welfare reform, a balanced budget hammered out with Newt Gingrich’s Republican majority in Congress. It felt like the optimism of the post-Cold War moment had finally become actual policy. Like the West had won and better days were ahead.
Something broke after the November 2000 election. The country ended up split down the middle, a constitutional crisis settled by the Supreme Court. Less than a year later came 9/11, and with it the end of that whole era. Polarization moved in and never left. Bush divided the country over Iraq. Obama arrived promising to heal the country and instead presided over its most bitter cultural fracturing in decades. The party that had governed from the center drifted away from it, eventually leading a cultural turn that pulled all of American politics toward political correctness, open borders, and spending without limits.
The city that Muslim fanatics attacked in 2001 was open and plural — the most successful in the Western world at turning wave after wave of immigrants into New Yorkers. That’s what they hated. They didn’t pull it off. But today’s city is a different place. In 25 years, the Muslim population has grown enormously. There are now more Muslims in New York than Italians or Irish — two communities that for generations shaped the character of its neighborhoods and its politics. That’s what you get from decades of mass immigration with no thought given to who’s coming or why.
A city like that produces politics like that. In January 2026, New York elected its first Muslim mayor. Zohran Mamdani, a 34-year-old socialist, comes straight out of that shift — someone whose worldview has little in common with the entrepreneurial, no-nonsense city I knew. During his campaign he refused to condemn the phrase “Globalize the intifada” when pressed directly — multiple times, on multiple occasions. He endorsed and associated with figures who have minimized the Sept. 11 attacks. And on Friday, Sept. 5, while signing an executive order to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the attacks, he handed the ceremonial pen to his chief counsel, Ramzi Kassem — a lawyer who once represented an al-Qaida operative with connections to the Pentagon attack and who has reportedly said that Sept. 11 “inspired” him, not to fight terrorism, but to defend terrorists.
Today marks 25 years. More than 100,000 people have signed a petition to keep Mamdani out of the official commemoration ceremonies. It speaks for itself.
That September morning, standing on 7th Avenue watching the Towers burn in the distance, nobody could have told me that 25 years later the city would elect someone like that to run it. New York always had the ability to surprise me. Not always for the better.
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This article was first published in Spanish on ElEspañol.com.