The terror attacks 17 years ago
killed nearly 3,000 people and forever altered the lives of uncounted others in New York, Washington, D.C., Pennsylvania and across the country.
ORK»On 9/11, Stephen Feuerman saw the World Trade NE WY center aflame through the window of his Empire State Building off ice and watched, transf ixed, as a second f ireball burst from the twin towers.
He ran through the 78th floor urging everyone to get out, thinking their skyscraper could be next. With transit hubs shut down, he couldn’t get home to his family in suburban Westchester for hours.
Shaken by the experience, the apparel broker, his wife and their two small children moved within four months to a gracious South Florida suburb they figured would be safer than New York.
So it was until this past Valentine’s Day, when mass violence tore into Parkland, Fla., too.
“There really is no safe place,” said Feuerman, whose children survived but lost friends in the massacre that killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
He still feels the family made a good move after 9/11, and he feels all the more attached to Parkland since the shooting plunged him into a whirlwind of events and advocacy on school safety and other issues.
“We’ve had a good life here,” he said. “And again, this could have happened anywhere.”
The Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks prompted the Feuermans and an uncounted number of others to move quietly away from their lives near the hijackedplane strikes that killed nearly 3,000 people in New York, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field.
Some sought safety. Some placed a new importance on living near family. Others reevaluated what they wanted from life.
“We try to echo some of what we loved”
Heather and Tom LaGarde loved New Yorkanddidn’twanttoleave,evenaftershe watched the twin towers burn from their rooftop on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
But over time, “we were very unmoored by 9/11,” Heather said. “Even though I wasn’t physically harmed, just to see it that close changes your perspective . ... Your priorities change.”
It felt harder and harder to stay in New York. Their nonprofit work — hers in human rights, his running a roller basketball program for neighborhood kids he’d founded after playing for the Denver Nuggets andotherNBAteams—dependedonfundraising that lagged in the rocky economy after the attacks. Friends moved away.
At first, the ramshackle North Carolina farm they spotted online in 2002 was only going to be an occasional getaway. But in 2004, the LaGardes moved into the farm near smalltown Saxapahaw with two children, a few months’ consulting work for Heather and no plan beyond that.
Having no plan evolved into starting an architectural salvage company; a popular free music series and farmers’ market; a humanitarian innovation conference; and the Haw River Ballroom, a music venue in an old mill the couple helped renovate.
“We try to echo some of what we loved” in New York, Heather said, “but living in an easier, simpler, more natural place.”
“Freedom, my country, my home”
Georgios Takos rides through northern Wyoming in the Greek Station, his food truck, with a souvenir New York license plate on the wall. It’s a reminder of the place he once thought would bring his American dream to life.
Growing up in Greece’s northern Kastoria region, Takos longed to live in the America he saw in movies. He was elated to gettoNewYorkCityin1986.
There were tears in his eyes as he left 15 years later, days after 9/11 shattered his sense of safety and the city. He headed for restaurant work in Arizona, then California, where he met his wife, Karine, a teacher.
On a visit to her home state of Montana, he found the wideopen America he’d imagined. The couple moved to nearby Powell, Wyo.
Takos still appreciates what New York taught him about working hard.
But by leaving it, “I now have found what I was looking for,” he said. “Freedom, my country, my home!”