After terrorists attacked the World Trade Center in 2001, killing about 2,700 New Yorkers, WNYC reporters hit the streets with their microphones to cover the aftermath.
Young audio journalists in WNYC’s Radio Rookies also made audio essays as a way of processing the 9/11 attacks.
Three New Yorkers who shared their experiences in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 listened back to those recordings and shared their reflections 25 years later. They recalled a mix of fear and healing, isolation and solidarity in a grieving yet resilient city.
Joshua Raskin
Joshua Raskin was teaching social studies at Booker T. Washington Middle School on the Upper West Side when someone in the hallway called out that an airplane had crashed into the World Trade Center, he said. The Twin Towers collapsed shortly afterward. He remembers his supervisors giving instructions not to turn on the TV or the radio, to try to shield the students from what was happening. Before long, he said, parents started rushing in to pick up their kids.
When school let out, Raskin decided to ride his bike as far south as he could. He made it to West Fourth Street, where officials redirected him to Chelsea Piers, he said. There, Raskin said, he helped set up a triage center for injured people, in case the city’s hospitals were overwhelmed with patients. But as he realized the extent of the destruction, he said, it was hard to imagine there were many survivors in need of treatment.
“ There were all these doctors and nurses just sort of sitting there, and it came to my head at a certain point, there's probably not a lot of people that need to get patched up,” he said. “Most people made it out or didn't make it out.”
Joshua Raskin, right, and his mother, Andrea, volunteered together after 9/11.
Raskin went back to Chelsea Piers the next day and found the fitness center had transformed into a hub for volunteers helping with the recovery. He was assigned to coordinate mental health professionals and religious leaders who were counseling first responders and people with missing or dead loved ones.
“ We tell them to try to stay calm,” he told then-WNYC reporter Andrea Bernstein at the time.
He said it was hard to reassure people who feared their loved ones might be buried in the rubble.
“But we just try to make them as comfortable as they can with the situation that we have,” he said at the time.
Raskin helped with the recovery efforts for several days, even after his students returned to school. When Bernstein asked why he was missing work to volunteer, he said he “just wanted to help.”
“ I live in this city, and just, I couldn't stand not being a part of this and not helping,” he said.
Raskin still lives in the same Upper West Side apartment as he did in September 2001. As he listened back to the recording during a recent interview in his living room, he said it transported him back to a time when he was able to cope with the upsetting things happening around him by holding people’s hands and helping them to heal.
Joshua Raskin holds a canister filled with dust he collected from Ground Zero after 9/11.
Raskin recalled the connection he felt among fellow New Yorkers in the days after the attack, when strangers approached him on the subway and asked about the silver piece of duct tape on his shirt that marked him as a volunteer.
“They'd say, ‘Can I, can I come tomorrow?’ And I'd say, ‘Of course. Here's my number,’" Raskin said.
It’s the same cohesive spirit he felt this past summer, when the New York Knicks won the NBA championship — though the underlying reason for the city’s unity was decidedly different, he said. A Knicks duffel bag he was gifted 25 years before the historic finals run is filled with mementos from the few days he spent volunteering after 9/11: a Hazmat suit, a hard hat, a protective mask, newspapers and magazines. There’s also a small, black canister filled with dust from Ground Zero.
“I was a schoolteacher. I didn't have an actual credential to be helpful,” Raskin said. “But I thought of myself as someone that was good at counseling people and good at crisis management, and I just figured I could have a role in this.”
Nahima Ahmed
About a week after 9/11, many students across New York City were back in school. But in an interview on the street, 15-year-old Nahima Ahmed told then-WNYC reporter Marianne McCune that her parents were nervous for her to go back.
Nahima Ahmed, left, poses for a photo at the Museum of Natural History when she was a teen.
“They’re worried that someone might try to attack me or something, because I know people who have been attacked,” she said.
Ahmed was wearing a hijab, which visibly marked her as a Muslim at a time when Islamophobia was coursing through the city.
“I’ve heard people say, ‘Why don’t you go back to your country? Stop doing all these horrible things to people,’” she told the reporter.
The teen said she understood why they treated her that way.
“Everyone has a way of dealing with anger,” Ahmed said, her voice catching as she apologized for crying. “Everyone has a way of dealing with stuff. And if this is how they want to do it, let them. If it makes their lives a little easier, let them.”
When Ahmed listened back to the recording 25 years later, she related to the teen on the other end of the microphone.
“That girl is still me,” she said in a recent interview. “In so many ways I recognize myself as wanting to connect with the ‘why’ of people, and I think understanding the anger is what really struck me when I re-listened to that interview.”
Ahmed grew up among the Bangladeshi diaspora on the Lower East Side. Her parents immigrated with her two oldest sisters in 1981. She was born in the city.
She said she started wearing a hijab at age 12, when she was being bullied in school for a medical condition that made her grow excessive facial hair. Wearing a headscarf allowed her to protect herself, she said.
“If I can wrap myself in God's love, I don't need anybody else,” she said.
But after 9/11, she started to hear more and more stories about verbal and physical attacks against her Muslim friends and family. She wondered if she would be next.
Ahmed remembers riding the elevator one day at the Delancey Street subway station when she noticed a man who kept looking back at her.
“ And then all of a sudden, MetroCards start flying at me, like, around the other people, and just towards my head,” she said.
It wasn’t a punch or a slap. But it still left a mark.
Ahmed said she tried to stop caring after that — to suppress her pain and anger, to seem non-threatening.
“I had to figure out very quickly, is this person curious, concerned or dangerous,” she said.
She also had to change her facial expressions.
“I had to learn to keep my dimpled face, so I just look approachable. I look friendly. I look happy. I don't look like one of those, you know, one of those type,” she said.
Nahima Ahmed stands by a street sign for Lower Manhattan in August 2026.
As someone who wears a symbol of her religion, Ahmed said it feels like she’s expected to represent 2 billion other people. Loved ones have asked her over the years whether she would rather just ditch her headscarf and avoid the scrutiny.
Her answer has always been no.
“I don't give in to bullies. I'm not going to let somebody else's bigotry, somebody else's stupidity dictate how I live my life,” she said. “I stand my ground. I'm a tree, and I am planted, and if you have a problem, you can walk around me.”
Ahmed sometimes struggles with her faith, she said. She’s politically progressive, and there are aspects of Islam she disagrees with. She considers herself more spiritual than religious. But she said she still loves being Muslim.
“ You can only love something if you can see the faults in it,” she said.
Janelle Lewis
Janelle Lewis was a 21-year-old participant in WNYC’s Radio Rookies program and an intern for "The Brian Lehrer Show" when she filed an audio essay about a month after 9/11. In it, she recalled watching the World Trade Center burn on TV. She was a few months pregnant at the time.
“September 11th brought out the chicken in me,” she said in her essay. “They say you have nothing to fear but fear itself, but my behind is scared of everything.”
In her audio essay, Lewis recalled rubbing her stomach as if to comfort her unborn child. She said she got nervous going into Manhattan after the planes crashed into the Twin Towers.
Janelle Lewis poses while pregnant with her daughter.
“ I see the faces of the city, regular day-to-day business people. I look at them and imagine them in panic, dirty, running and jumping. The people, my God, jumping,” she said in the audio essay, referring to the people who jumped out of the Twin Towers before the skyscrapers collapsed.
Before 9/11, Lewis worried about labor, or a miscarriage. After the attacks, she worried about life itself.
“Before, I was afraid of bringing up my child in my neighborhood, but now I'm afraid of bringing up my child in this world,” she said in her essay. “Will I give birth in a hospital after enjoying a beautiful baby shower, or will I be on the ground in a fallout shelter delivering my own child?”
She wondered if her baby would get to enjoy the city she loved.
“I’m absolutely terrified,” she said.
Lewis, now 46, gasped and choked back tears as she listened to the recording in the same East Flatbush home where she has lived almost her entire life. She said she didn’t remember how afraid she had been.
“I’m glad I was able to capture what I felt at the time and who I was at the time,” she said.
Lewis does remember feeling hyper-alert in those early days. She doesn’t know when her fear faded. She said she must have found a way to adapt, just like other New Yorkers.
Janelle Lewis, left, and her daughter, Jandora Lewis.
“ You just keep moving onto the next thing, onto the next phase of life,” she said. “After that I actually became a mom, so my main focus was raising that kid and dealing with all the ups and downs that came with motherhood.”
Now, Lewis’ daughter Jandora is 24 and lives with her mom. Jandora Lewis said she doesn’t think about 9/11 often. She’s focused on other issues.
“ Things that are happening with Palestine or Sudan, and just even things that are happening currently with the White House and immigration,” she said.
Jandora Lewis said it’s sad that innocent people lost their lives on September 11th over a conflict they had nothing to do with. But she also wishes Americans had more empathy for people in war zones around the world after we were attacked here.
“The world is just such a messed up state right now, so it’s just really hard for me to have pity about a lot of things,” she said. “And I guess because it didn’t physically impact me, maybe that’s why I don’t feel a type of way.”
Janelle Lewis sits on the stoop at her home in East Flatbush in August 2026.
Janelle Lewis said she agrees with a lot of her daughter’s thoughts. She’s overwhelmed by the current state of the world, too.
But 9/11 wasn’t just a passage in a history textbook for Lewis. It was her life — at a time when her whole world was already on the brink of change.
“Living through a tragedy like 9/11 puts life into perspective,” she said. “You don't know what today will, or tomorrow will bring. You don't know if today or tomorrow is your last day. You really don't know. So I am a person that really likes to enjoy my life, enjoy myself. I'm very much open to my children being the same way.”
Lewis said she tries to protect her daughter and her younger son from the worry she felt back then. She was able to move forward from it. She said that’s a blessing.
