First Trade Center attack was 25 years ago today

New York — In a room in the 9/11 museum, there are a police captain’s poignant notes and a flashlight that illuminated the way to safety. Nearby, a letter from a trapped man tells his family, “I love you very much . ... Do wonderful things in your life.”

The artifacts aren’t from Sept 11, 2001. They are reminders of a terror attack that foreshadowed it: the deadly World Trade Center bombing, 25 years ago today.

That shadow fell personally on Lolita Jackson. As a young finance worker, she picked her way down 72 flights of blacked-out stairs on Feb. 26, 1993, and fled the trade center’s south tower again in 2001.

The bombing “tends to be forgotten because 9/11 was such a cataclysmic event,” she says, but the blast has its own place in the lives and memories of an estimated 50,000 people who were in the twin towers that snowy afternoon.

The explosion killed six people, injured more than 1,000, manifested the growing terror threat from Islamic extremism and led to safety improvements credited with helping some people survive Sept. 11.

It “was, in many respects, a precursor to 9/11,” says museum President Alice Greenwald.

A bomb exploded in a rented van in a basement parking garage shortly after noon, causing a crater several stories deep and a boom felt many floors above.

The blast killed visitor John DiGiovanni and five people who worked at the trade center — Robert Kirkpatrick, Stephen Knapp, William Macko, Wilfredo Mercado and Monica Rodriguez Smith. Smith was pregnant.

Power was knocked out and pipes were severed, flooding backup generators. Elevators got stuck. A group of kindergartners was stranded for hours on an observation deck. Other people were trapped in the debris-filled garage. Police helicopters plucked nearly two dozen people, some disabled, from rooftops.

Some office workers broke out windows to try to clear smoke while awaiting help. Others made their way down, emerging coated in soot.

Jackson didn’t feel fearful at first. What was terrifying was the 2 1/2-hour trek down the pitch-dark, crowded, smoky stairs, wondering what she would see at the bottom.

“You didn’t know what was going to happen,” recalls Jackson, who now works in city government.