'And then I saw the second plane go in'

In our lifetime, few events stay with us forever. Events that shifted the foundations of society so bluntly that we felt the ripple there and then, be it the first man on the moon, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Omagh Bombing or 9/11. Hearing the news on the radio, seeing it on black and white TV or reading internet pages, we knew the world was set to change - even though we were not at the scene itself. Not so for Fintan Cronin and his late wife Phyllis. They were among the last visitors let up the South Tower on September 10, 2001.

“It was our anniversary trip to New York,” 85-year-old Fintan recalls. On Sunday September 9, they joined friends from Ballyjamesduff who ran Farrell’s Pub in the city. Together with other Cavan expats, they watched the All-Ireland Hurling Final between Tipperary and Galway. “The hospitality shown by the Farrell family was second to none,” he remembers fondly.

Members of the Farrell family own a pub a few doors down from Fintan’s Ballyjamesduff business, Cronin’s Newsagents. The Irish community reconnected.

The next day, the couple made their way down to the Twin Towers. From the hotel where they were staying, close to Times Square, in Midtown Manhattan, they would just follow the straight street all the way down - the towers always in sight. Their tickets were stamped 9:48am and they zoomed up to the 107th floor in 58 seconds. The “Top of the World” Trade Center Observation Deck on the South Tower was a popular tourist attraction with an indoor area and open-air rooftop viewing platform, which offered 360-degree panoramic views of New York City, New Jersey, and beyond, drawing millions of visitors from their opening in 1975 until September 2001.

“We spent about an hour up there to take in the views,” Fintan says. “Then we decided to take the stairs going down. And we got to see all different shops. Phyllis loved the shops, but we didn’t go in.” After about an hour and more than 2,000 steps, they exited the building. “We were taking in everything, when we got down, it was a beautiful day, and a lot of the workers were on their lunch break. We admired it, and agreed it was a beautiful place to work in.”

Tired, but happy, they returned to their hotel.

The next morning, Phyllis wanted to go back: “We had our breakfast and she said ‘I’d like to go back to the towers. I’d like to go to see the shops.’ I said ‘certainly’, let’s do it.” With the intention of going to the Twin Towers, they left their hotel just after 8am. A few minutes into their stroll Phyllis spotted a Macy’s - “She’d never been to one.”

So Fintan sat down on a bench in Herald Square close to the entrance, while she entered the fashion outlet.

Then the mood around him changed: “I saw commotion in the gardens in Herald Square, you know. And then just before nine Phyllis landed back beside me. I said: ‘Well, what’s wrong?’ And she said: ‘They sent us out.’

“And then we saw the Tower, all on fire. And then I saw the second plane go in.”

It was 9:03am. Trying to make sense of the events, they continued to walk towards the towers. They were stopped at a barrier not long after at 25th street, more than four kilometres from the site. Fintan recalls the atmosphere as chaotic and deeply shocking. Everyone was handed masks to deal with dust and he remembers seeing the streets eerily empty later that evening. “Not a car in sight,” he says.

It was a stark difference to the previous days. Cars honking, loud chatter and singing in the pub, the hustle and bustle on the streets. Now, even the flashy iconic digital billboards were silent. A photo shows Fintan alone on Times Square.

Their hotel was beside a fire station. He vividly remembers the fire fighters coming back “covered in white, crying”. They had lost 17 men that day - four of them Irish. The fire station quickly became a place of mourning. Photographs of the fire personnel who had died were already being displayed that evening.

One of the firefighters handed Fintan a rock the size of a sliotar, part of the debris from the hellish scene.

It wasn’t until the next morning that Fintan was able to call his brother, who was expecting them in Cleveland, Ohio, for a visit. Their six children also had been desperately waiting to hear from them. In 2001, mobile phones and data roaming weren’t readily available, so they were relieved to finally reach them on the hotel’s landline.

As all flights were cancelled, Fintan and Phyllis caught a Greyhound bus to embark on a nine-hour journey to Cleveland. A few days later they were able to board their planned flight back to Ireland.

As a newsagent, Fintan had understood the significance of the moment and not only brought back many different papers depicting the horrifying aftermath and the impact, but also the rock from the rubble of one of the towers.

He keeps it beside a fragment of the Berlin Wall.