Despite the passage of 10 years and a move to another part of New York, the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks are never far from financial adviser Lewis J. Altfest's mind.
One reminder came a few weeks ago, when he had to use the staircase in his Midtown office building after the earthquake in Virginia triggered an evacuation.
“I went down 24 flights of stairs and I was helping a pregnant woman — just like a pregnant woman I helped out 10 years ago” during the 9/11 evacuation, said Mr. Altfest, chief investment officer of Altfest Personal Wealth Management. “It just brought it right back.”
For Mr. Altfest and his wife, Karen, who is the principal adviser and executive vice president of client relations at the firm, painful reminders of those hours permeate their lives and work, from their efforts to see to the needs of clients and colleagues who lost loved ones in the attack, all the way down to changes they made in their daily routines.
The tragedy began at 8:46 a.m. on Sept. 11, 2001, when a commercial airliner piloted by Muslim extremists plowed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan. About 15 minutes later, a second airliner hit the South Tower.
Soon after, a third plane slammed into the western face of the Pentagon and a fourth airliner crashed in a field in Southern Pennsylvania.
More than 2,600 people died at the World Trade Center. Nearly 3,000 died in all.
Mr. Altfest was at work that morning at the company's office on John Street, just four blocks from the World Trade Center.
He and his staff fled the office, heading down the staircase and onto the street.
“I saw the smoke coming out of the building,” Mr. Altfest said. “One of my assistants said it looked like a fire inside.”
After being steered away from the disaster site, Mr. Altfest and his staff began the long walk home. Ms. Altfest, at home uptown in Manhattan, waited anxiously, fearful for their safety and unable to reach her husband or other staff members because mobile phone networks had crashed. “It was hours before they were able to find a pay phone in Chinatown — before I heard anything,” she said. “I waited three more hours just hoping they would be OK.”
For the next few weeks, the Altfests conducted business out of their weekend home in Connecticut. After the area was reopened, both went back to work, driven partly by the need to help clients who were in crisis. Now they believe they went back too soon.
LIKE 'SWALLOWING RUBBER'
“We told other people they shouldn't be downtown, but we went, and I'm not sure it was a healthy situation,” Mr. Altfest said. “It felt like you were swallowing rubber.”
Their return to the Financial District was painful in other ways, too.
“I learned where to go out of the subway so I wasn't facing [the World Trade Center site],” Ms. Altfest said. Mr. Altfest began getting off at the Brooklyn Bridge subway exit rather than the closer Fulton Street exit to avoid the sight of Ground Zero.
Ms. Altfest cringed inwardly every time a tourist asked her for directions to Ground Zero, as many did in the first years after the attacks.
Eventually, it all became too much. About four years after the attack, the Altfests relocated their office from the Financial District to Midtown.
“Part of the reason for moving was [because] it was a kind of trauma,” said Mr. Altfest. “It was like a war injury.”
They see the same effect in others.
Clients and colleagues who lost family members, in particular, “are very special to us,” said Ms. Altfest. “We are watching them get on with their lives.”
They recognized that same pain in an outstanding job candidate they met with in recent months. Although she was spectacularly qualified and the Altfests quickly offered her a job, she hesitated, and eventually turned them down. She told them that ever since the attack, in which someone close to her died, she had questioned her own drive and ambition and decided she would be better off in a less competitive job in a quieter environment.
Neither of the Altfests plan to attend the planned 10th anniversary ceremonies, and others they have talked to feel the same way.
It isn't that it will help them forget, because that will never happen, Ms. Altfest said.
“I don't think it is ever going away,” she said. “In New York, it is not going away soon.”
Email Lavonne Kuykendall at [email protected]
