Frozen zone - or Twilight Zone?
By Demetria Lucas

At 8:52 on September 11, most of the New York University students living in The Exchange, an apartment building located at 25 Broad Street, five blocks from the World Trade Center, were still sleeping comfortably. A minute later, there was a window-rattling boom. On the 11th floor, Michigan native Ayivi Anderson, a graduate student majoring in dramatic writing, was shaken from his sleep. He assumed it was thunder. Twelfth-floor resident Rita Smith awoke to the sound of people screaming in the street. A graduate psychology major, she had just relocated to Manhattan from California three weeks earlier. She woke her roommate, and together they decided it was only the usual hubbub in front of the New York Stock Exchange, just down the block. Meanwhile, down the hall, Dahilia Bothwell, a graduate food services and management major from Arizona, heard the noise and thought a neighbor had slammed the door. She went back to sleep. The only resident who thought something was wrong, it seemed, was Ines Fialho-Brandao. The second-year Middle Eastern Studies student had been in Madrid, once, when a car bomb exploded. Loud bangs and shaking windows were a bad sign, she knew.

Shortly after the attacks began, the NYU Housing and Press Offices created special telephone lines and e-mail addresses and updated its homepage, all in an effort to keep students informed. Residents of the Ocean Law School, Cliff Street, John Street, Lafayette, Broom, and NYU at The Seaport dorms were directed to the university’s recreation center, Coles, or to other dormitories located above 14th Street. "The situation being what it was, I thought NYU did an excellent job," said Krystal Jones, a Cliff Street resident.

But while the residents of other downtown dorms were being evacuated and cared for, the 96 mostly out-of-state graduate students living closest to the World Trade Center disappeared into a virtual Twilight Zone. Terrified and alone, many of The Exchange residents had lived in the city less than a month and had no idea where to go or who to contact, other than NYU. In their time of need, they looked to their school to provide answers-and found none.

By noon, when the other downtown dorms were being evacuated, no one from NYU had arrived at The Exchange. The updated website made no mention of the dorm, and when the residents called the information hotline listed on the NYU homepage, university operators told them their building wasn’t on the list of evacuated dorms. Unable to return home, Exchange residents who had been on campus when the attack took place scanned the posted signs telling evacuated students where to go, only to discover that The Exchange wasn’t listed. Even when they arrived at Coles, university staffers hadn’t heard of their dorm. Everywhere the confused residents looked for help, it seemed, they ran into a blank wall.

"I was working quickly and from memory, without notes," explained John Beckman, in an e-mail interview. The senior vice-president for external affairs in NYU’s Press Office, Beckman helped write the statements that were sent to the NYU community. "If there were instances in which The Exchange was not mentioned," wrote Beckman, "it was not because it was not discussed. […] I may have forgotten to include it [in a memo] and that mistake may have been compounded as the text was sent more widely."

What the angry and baffled residents of The Exchange didn’t know was that although they had been inadvertently left off the NYU website, posters, and staff memos, they were never really forgotten. The university Housing Office had attempted to contact the dorm several times on Tuesday morning, but the phone lines in lower Manhattan were out, damaged by the collapse of the twin towers. Two security officers were sent from the Protection Office to evacuate The Exchange around 11 a.m., shortly before the North Tower collapsed, but had gotten lost in the smoke and debris when it fell. However, the following day, Protection Office personnel were able to reach the building and evacuate students, according to Beckman.

Nonetheless, when NYU security walked from apartment to apartment on 10 a.m. Wednesday, looking for students to evacuate, they were 21 hours too late. Many of The Exchange’s panicked residents had fled their ash-covered neighborhood the day before.

Unable to find any information about their residence on the NYU website and told by an operator at the Protection Office that The Exchange was not on the list of evacuated residences, Rita Smith and Dahilia Bothwell didn’t know where to go. What they did know was that staying in the dorm was not an option. Two hours after the towers had collapsed, the hallways were thick with smoke and the nauseating stench of burnt metal permeated the building. Ferries were leaving for New Jersey, the building concierge told them. Another resident, graduate student Sheryl Greenberg, offered Bothwell emergency lodgings with her family in Marlboro, New Jersey. Smith opted for an unexpected visit to her grandparents, who also lived in New Jersey, in Saddlebrook. Six hours later, the remote suburban communities to which they traveled were a welcome relief from the urban inferno they had fled. "I felt like a refugee," Bothwell later recalled. "I [came] to New York to get my master’s [degree], and all I had was the clothes on my back and a toothbrush."

Ayivi Anderson remained in his apartment Tuesday night. While Mayor Giuliani repeatedly called for the evacuation of all buildings below Canal Street (the city did not officially evacuate the residences until Friday, two days after NYU first tried to evacuate Exchange students), Anderson stayed put. Like the building’s other residents, he had spoken to the Protection Office and was told that the building had not been evacuated. Although his gas and hot water weren’t working, he stayed in his apartment because he didn’t know that there was anywhere else to go. He watched television, then slept, until an NYU security officer knocking on his door awakened him Wednesday morning.

Safe, secure, and reunited in the Park Central hotel in midtown Manhattan, where NYU temporarily housed evacuated residents, a small gathering of Exchange residents met at the lobby bar, on September 19th, to discuss the tragedy that had devastated the city. When the conversation turned to their dorm’s absence from NYU information sources, some students dismissed it as human error, an honest mistake by panicked university officials; others remained baffled by NYU’s handling of the crisis.

Of the residents at the bar that Wednesday, only two contacted the university to voice complaints. Robin Ford, a master’s candidate studying humanities and social thought, said she wrote a frustrated e-mail to the Housing Office on Friday morning to make them aware of the confusion their neglect of The Exchange had caused. "I [wrote that] this was a tragedy and it would be nice to be included in the information," she wrote. When she checked the NYU website the following day, it had been revised to include the dorm. Ines Fialho-Brandao contacted the Central Housing Office September 12.

In an attempt to address student concerns, Tom Ellett, the vice president for Student Affairs and Services, went to The Exchange on Sunday, September 23, after the students were readmitted. "It was a mistake," said Ellett, in response to the students’ complaints that they had been forgotten. "A human error. It won’t happen again."

Still, Dahilia Bothwell has a hard time forgetting the events of September 11, when the twin towers crashed to the ground and she and her fellow dorm residents slipped into a blind spot on NYU’s radar screen-a Twilight Zone of administrative oversight-for 24 hours-. "[NYU is] a professional organization," she said. "You’re supposed to have a list of everybody you’re responsible for. They forgot, like, 100 students. That’s a big deal in the middle of a crisis."

 

Demetria Lucas is a third-semester graduate student in magazine journalism. Her work has been published in Vibe Magazine and The Amsterdam News.