Twenty-three years ago, on Monday, Sept. 10, 2001, Mark Shore stepped off the PATH train that ran from his home in Hoboken, New Jersey, to the base of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan. Shore was giving his friend Joe, who was visiting from Chicago, a tour of his office building. At the time, Shore, a native of Evanston and ETHS alumnus, worked for Morgan Stanley on the 62nd floor of the South Tower of the World Trade Center complex.
Shore took Joe to his 62nd-floor corner office, overlooking most of Manhattan and Brooklyn. A corner office like his was uncommon for someone in his position at the time. “I don’t know how much longer I’m going to have it,” Shore recalled telling Joe that day, figuring soon someone would relocate him to a different, less spectacular office. A few minutes later, Joe left the World Trade Center for a business meeting of his own and Shore got to work for the day. He left the building that evening like he would any normal Monday. Unbeknownst to him, he wouldn’t have his office for much longer — but not for the reason he thought.
As the story told so many times by countless people goes, it was a quiet and clear September day when the sun rose over New York on Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001. Shore, along with tens of thousands of people working in lower Manhattan, made their way to their office, earlier than most, but for him, not unusually early. It was around 7:30 a.m., Shore recalled, when he got into the office on the 62nd floor. Around the same time, around 190 miles north of New York in Boston, American Airlines flight 11 was preparing to take off en route to Los Angeles.
About an hour and a half later, a little before 8:45 a.m., Shore stepped away from his desk and made his way to the restroom. Just a few moments after that, at 8:46 a.m., flight 11 smashed into the 93rd floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Hundreds of people were killed instantly. Shore said he had no idea what had happened. He didn’t hear it. He didn’t see it. He didn’t feel it. But as he made his way back to his desk, he noticed groups of people quickly hustling away from their desks towards the stairwells. His manager, who Shore recalled was pale in the face, was yelling at people to leave the office. He had watched the plane crash into the adjacent building just moments earlier.
So Shore did. Leaving his keys, phone and wallet behind, he and his colleagues made their way down the long and increasingly crowded stairwell. At some point before 9 a.m., the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owned and operated the towers, came on the loudspeakers and told people to return to their offices. The South Tower was secure, Shore remembered them saying. But he was hesitant, and so were his colleagues. “I’d rather get out,” Shore remembered thinking. “If everything’s fine I could always come back.” Moments later, at 9:03 a.m., United Airlines Flight 175 crashed into the 77 through 85 floors of the South Tower, instantly killing everyone on board and hundreds more on the floors just above his.
Shore said he doesn’t remember feeling or hearing anything when the plane struck the tower. He was too focused on getting out of the building. By the time he and his colleagues reached the mezzanine, he could finally see outside where a patio connected the two buildings. Debris was falling from the sky and smoke began filling the stairwell. He covered his face with his hand. Finally, Shore and his colleagues, a group of about 10 to 15 people, got out of the building. Firefighters were running past him into the building and police officers were directing people away from the towers. “Keep moving!” they yelled. “Don’t stop, don’t look up.” But Shore stopped, he said. And he looked up. And for the first time, he saw smoke billowing out of both towers, not just the North Tower, which by then he knew had been hit by a plane.
“Are we at war?” he remembered thinking as he stood there watching debris and smoke pouring out of his office building, a place he had worked since 1998 after earning an MBA at the University of Chicago. “For all practical purposes,” Shore said. “Manhattan at that point was a war zone.”
9/11: A Disaster Movie in Real Life
The only place to go at that point was north, away from the towers. Along his walk north, he saw people crowded around cars with radios turned on and standing frozen in front of storefronts watching the news on TV. “It was right out of some disaster movie,” Shore said. As he made his way towards the Hudson River, the towers still burning and still in sight, Shore and his colleague came across a child who was pointing in the direction of the towers. “One of the towers is missing,” Shore recalled the kid saying. He turned and looked for himself. “I looked and realized there was only one tower,” Shore said. A few moments before, at 9:59 a.m., the South Tower, his tower, collapsed.
Although he didn’t know any of the victims personally, 10 Morgan Stanley employees died. Eventually, Shore and his colleague made their way to the west side of Manhattan, near 34th Street and a pier where they waited for two and half hours for a ferry to Weehawken, New Jersey. From there, he walked south for about 30 or so minutes to Hoboken. But he still didn’t have his keys. They, along with his wallet and phone, were buried in the rubble in lower Manhattan. So he knocked on a friend’s door and asked if he could crash there for the night.
“That night was the first moment I could sit down and take it all in,” Shore said.
Reflecting on Life's Priorities
Over the next several days, he spent hours on the phone with friends and colleagues and people he hadn’t spoken to in years, who were calling to check in. “People started to rethink their lives,” Shore said. “I started to rethink things about my own life.” In the weeks and months that followed, like millions of Americans, Shore felt an increased sense of patriotism, at one point thinking about trying to join the CIA as an economist. “The city was coming together in a very interesting and supportive way,” he said.
He moved back to Chicago at the end of 2009 and eventually became a professor at DePaul University, his undergraduate alma mater. In July, he joined the Chicago Mercantile Exchange Group, a financial services company headquartered in downtown Chicago, where he works as an economist. The CME Group headquarters, coincidentally, is a pair of twin towers along Wacker Drive and the Chicago River. He said as the years stack up and 9/11 recedes more and more into history for so many, telling stories from that day has continued to prove important. His students at DePaul would sit with their mouths agape as he would tell them his story while applying the tragedy of that day to economics and the importance of disaster planning for financial service companies.
“If there was ever a moment I had their full attention, it was at that moment,” he said. But it seems one of his biggest takeaways from that tragic day is remembering the first responders who risked their lives “doing their job until the very last moment.” It’s a day he, like millions of Americans and people around the world, will certainly never forget.
Remembering the First Responders
The Evanston Fire and Police Departments will hold a memorial ceremony to honor those who lost their lives on 9/11 at 7:30 a.m. Wednesday at Firefighters Park at the corner of Simpson Street and Maple Avenue. Mark Shore is scheduled to participate in the event.
