9/11, Ten Years Later: From Tragedy Comes Inspiration

It was a typical workday for Linda Braun, but a busy one.

With the grand opening of the Ritz Carlton New York Battery Park a month away, Braun was in her office about 8 a.m. The Wauwatosa native had moved to New York from Atlanta about five months earlier to take a job as the luxury hotel's director of sales.

The morning turned unusual about 45 minutes later when coworkers got calls that the World Trade Center was on fire. They peered out their skyrise windows and could see flames and billowing smoke from the north tower a couple blocks away.

Braun was startled but went back to work.

"I just thought, 'Well, the firemen will come and put it out,'" she said.

More calls came and minutes later Braun felt a dramatic noise, "a very low, deep thump like a bass with a different dimension to it."

A hotel engineer started pounding on the metal fire door to her office, screaming at staff to get out, and the building's fire alarms sounded.

"It was an unbelievable sensory experience," she said. "I yelled to all the staff, 'Grab your purses and run!'"

Outside, the hotel's public relations director had been walking to the hotel at 9 a.m. and saw the low-flying second plane strike the south tower.

Employees scattered in Battery Park and made sure everyone was safe. "People were running from the World Trade Center down to us," Braun said. "We were consoling them."

Most haunting was seeing people jumping from the burning floors. "It looked almost like a four-point star falling from the sky," she said. "It was people cartwheeling head over heels. It was terrible."

Fleeing home

While seasoned New Yorkers weren't pulled away from the unfolding drama, Braun felt "incredibly unsafe" and desperately wanted to get to her Central Park West apartment. Some coworkers protested, saying they should all stay together, but Braun said she was walking home. Others came with her.

Those who didn't evacuate ended up getting covered in ash after the towers collapsed.

Braun's cell phone wasn't working so she couldn't call her husband. The radios on passing cars gave some information, albeit not always accurate. "We heard the White House had been hit, the Statue of Liberty, the Pentagon," she said. No one knew what was going on.

As a crowd of people headed up the east side of Manhattan, "it was like being in a war zone without being in a war. It was so surreal, like an action film." There were moments of panic when someone would start running, Braun said, "even a block behind you, and the crowd would start surging. Smartly, some one would say, 'Everybody slow down.' It was a like a herd mentality. Panic was part of the experience."

She heard Times Square was a target. Her husband worked there.

It took Braun four hours in high heels to get home. One woman ran into a store and bought flipflops after tiring of walking and running in heels.

The streets near Braun's 59th and Columbus apartment were shut down to facilitate ambulance arrivals to a hospital located there. "But the hardest part was no one came. There were no sirens," she said.

"The toughest-looking men were asking, 'Where can we give blood?'"

Braun's husband got home shortly thereafter.

Coping with shock, anxiety

The next few days were rough. Braun was in shock and stayed in bed. Mayor Rudy Giuliani "really helped me with his talk about the strength of New Yorkers and how we're all going to get through it."

After two weeks hotel staff was allowed to return to retrieve personal belongings. "The creepiest part was when I walked back into my office, all the computer screens were on, my chair was pushed back, my Diet Coke was half empty. Everything was in mid-action, frozen in time."

Employees returned to work but at another hotel, further uptown. About four to six weeks after 9/11, they returned to work at the Battery Park hotel.

The Ritz hired as many people as possible from a sister Marriott-owned hotel that had been located in the World Trade Center — housekeepers, cooks, executives. "They needed the income so as a sales department this was a way to help them and help the recovery effort," Braun said.

Those survivors told devastating stories about horrific images they saw and it was common for people to be crying at work. "Everybody just looked shell-shocked,"  she said.

Braun said she was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder but was able to return to work fairly easily. Other coworkers took extended leaves of absence or asked to transfer to other hotels out of Manhattan.

Inspiration out of tragedy

But there were uplifting memories, too. Braun remembers being in an Irish pub with her husband when a group of firefighters walked by, full of ash from working at Ground Zero. Someone called to them to come in and they'd get free drinks. "The entire bar gave a standing ovation. They had free drinks all night. I'm sure they met a few girlfriends."

Braun remembers how united the country was. Politicians and religious leaders came together.

The hotel opened in early 2012. After months of recovery, the odor of burnt metal, flesh and oil — and the dust — went away. But on the one-year anniversary, Braun came up from the subway to walk to the hotel "and the smell was back, just for that one day. It was odd. There was a weird wind that was flying through that day."

Shortly after that, Braun and her husband moved to West Palm Beach, FL. About five years ago they moved back to Wisconsin, settling in Brookfield.

Braun, a marketing and sales consultant, runs WisconsinWags.com, a with news, events and community forums, plus a Facebook page.

It hurts to remember her 9/11 experiences, which she doesn't talk about with people. She doesn't like to look at images. If talk about it comes on the radio, she switches the station.

"People who know me very well here don't know it's such a big part of my overall experience in life," she said.

But Braun said she felt compelled to tell her story to remind people what happened that day and try to regain "that spirit where people pulled together and were thinking of our country as one.

"It's about sticking together and remembering what others have gone through and being a good neighbor in a crisis," she said. "It's about paying tribute, especially to the firefighters. It's really extraordinary what they did."