On September 11, 2001, millions of Americans nationwide watched their television screens in horror as terrorists attacked the World Trade Center in New York City.
Marilu Wallace witnessed the events firsthand while standing in her Brooklyn neighborhood.
Wallace said she had just walked her children to school for the day and had taken a detour to talk to some friends who worked on Union Street near the Gowanis Canal.
“As I was walking toward the bridge, I saw this big smoke coming out of the top of the World Trade Center…so to the bridge guy I said, ‘What was that?’ and he said, ‘Well, they’re saying on the radio that it was a small plane that ran into the World Trade Center tower.’”
Wallace and her friend did not realize it at the time, but they were looking at the aftermath of a hijacked American Airlines flight that crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center just before 9 a.m.
The next few moments are some that Wallace said still haunt her to this day.
“I saw this really dark, sinister-looking plane coming and everybody was like, ‘What is that?’…then the plane got closer to the building and banked and then there was that gigantic explosion,” said Wallace. “Within seconds, really, there was paper and charred stuff flying through the air that had gone all the way across the harbor, into Brooklyn from the World Trade Center.”
The second hijacked plane, United Airlines Flight 175, struck the south tower of the World Trade Center less than 20 minutes after the first plane, according to History.com.
Hundreds of people were killed instantly inside both towers upon impact from the planes. Hundreds more were trapped in the floors above.
Wallace’s initial thought of an enemy attack was confirmed only moments later when reports came across the radio that the Pentagon had been attacked, as well.
“I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, we’re being attacked.’ Then on the radio they started talking about the Pentagon being attacked, so then everybody was convinced that there was some really sinister thing going on,” said Wallace.
Wallace said she rushed back to her children’s school to bring them home, all the while trying to shield them from the horrific scene that lay just across the harbor.
“They were like eight and ten years old, and I was like, ‘Don’t look over there, don’t look over there,’” Wallace said. “And when we got home to Carroll Gardens on Court Street, there was charred paper all over the place…I got home and everybody in the neighborhood was in shock.”
Despite the flow of news reports coming in, Wallace said there was still a lot of confusion about what was happening, as well as fear for the worst.
“I felt like this was no accident…I was imagining that there were going to be forces of people coming and landing and coming through the neighborhood. Nobody knew who it was,” said Wallace. “The worst catastrophic things came through my mind.”
Like many millions of Americans, Wallace watched the news in horror as the Twin Towers collapsed, the south tower just before 10 a.m. and the north tower less than 30 minutes later.
In addition to the planes hijacked and crashed into the World Trade Center and Pentagon, a fourth hijacked plane, United Flight 93 crashed into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. In a heroic effort to stop the plane, passengers on board attempted to reclaim the flight from the hijackers.
Sadly, all 44 passengers were killed in the crash. The intended target of the plane is still unknown, although common theories are that it was bound for the White House, U.S. Capitol or Camp David.
A total of 2,977 people were killed in the 9/11 attacks. Of that figure, 2,763 deaths were from the attacks on the World Trade Center alone.
Wallace said the neighborhood she lived in at the time, Carroll Gardens, lost one of their own in the north tower.
Giovanna Gambale, known to her friends as Gennie, worked for eSpeed, a subsidiary of Cantor Fitzgerald on the 105th floor of the north tower. While Gambale’s body was never recovered, according to the 9/11 Memorial Museum website, her wallet was recovered in the rubble by a New York Police officer roughly two weeks after the attacks.
The wallet was later donated to the museum by Gambale’s parents in her memory.
“Once we found out Giovanna Gambale had not been found alive, there was a vigil from the neighborhood because everybody knew that family,” said Wallace. “The grandparents lived down the street, I worked for them doing a garden for them…her mother worked at the school my kids went to and her father had grown up in the neighborhood, so everyone knew Giovanna.”
Wallace said that Gambale’s parents showed strength in the coming weeks as they held a memorial service for their daughter. A garden was also planted in the neighborhood in Gambale’s memory, which Wallace said she had a hand in constructing.
However, Gambale’s family eventually moved from the neighborhood they had known for so long, due to immense grief.
“I talked to her father when he got Gennie’s death certificate and it said homicide on it. And I thought, that’s exactly what that was, it was a homicide,” said Wallace. “Then I was talking to him after they caught [Osama] bin Laden, and his health was failing. His doctor actually told him that he had a broken heart.”
In time, news would spread that the attacks were carried out by 19 Islamic terrorists. The terrorists were associated with Saudi fugitive Osama bin Laden’s terrorist organization al Qaeda.
Wallace said the news resulted in prejudice and even some violence toward New York residents and businesses with ties to the Middle East.
Meanwhile, the FBI was directing its suspicion toward one of Wallace’s neighbors. Three days after the September 11 attacks, FBI agents showed up at Wallace’s door asking if she had ever seen any of her neighbor’s mail.
“They had gone on a vacation and they wanted me to pick up their mail…[the agents] asked if I had ever seen anything from an aeronautics school and I’m like, ‘Oh my God, yep, as a matter of fact last summer there was something from an aeronautics school in Florida, and he also was talking about studying to be a pilot,’ and he was Egyptian,” said Wallace.
She said the agents told her they already knew about the pilot school but confirmed it with her account. They asked her a couple more questions about her neighbor’s whereabouts and his girlfriend, then left without another word.
“I was petrified, I was like, ‘Oh my God, is this guy connected to this?’”
Wallace said her neighbor was cleared by the FBI sometime later, but the experience still shook her.
Wallace stayed in Brooklyn until 2015, at which point she returned to Georgia where she grew up. Nowadays you can find her each week lending a hand at the Gainesville Farmer’s Market.
While she may not look like a New Yorker in her signature overalls, the scenes she witnessed during the 9/11 attacks travel with her no matter where she goes.
“When I see pictures of it, I’m like, ‘Okay, did I see that or is that a picture of it,’…then you realize you did see that,” said Wallace. “Sometimes I wonder why did I see it… and in 20 years, you don’t forget.”
However, there is another thought that comes to mind when Wallace reflects on the attacks: the courage of the people of New York in the time that followed.
“The thing that’s good about New York is people on the street and at work, they talk about things,” said Wallace. “It was therapeutic, I think, for people to talk about it, as horrible as it was. I think that’s what made people get through stuff, really experiencing the aftermath, going to memorials, talking to people who had lost people, that was very important for people to survive.”
