At 8:46 on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, American Airlines Flight 11 struck the north face of 1 World Trade Center.
The plane’s impact sheared through the tower’s core, collapsing the stairwells and cutting the upper floors off from any route down. Five floors above the crash zone, on 101 through 105, sat the New York headquarters of Cantor Fitzgerald, the country’s dominant bond-trading firm.
Of the 960 people the company employed in the city, 658 were at their desks that morning. None of them made it out.
No single organization lost more people on American soil that day.
The firm’s chairman and chief executive, Howard Lutnick, now the U.S. secretary of commerce, was not at his desk. His 5-year-old son was starting kindergarten, and Lutnick had walked him to the classroom door.
“It was the worst of days,” Lutnick recalled in a recent interview with the Washington Examiner marking the 25th anniversary.
“We had a very close-knit firm,” Lutnick added. “We had a policy at the firm: hire your smart friends. That was the policy. So it’s OK if your brother-in-law’s really super smart, or your girlfriend is great, and we have an opening in HR — we hire, and you’d think, wow, this is a cool firm.”
That culture is what makes the arithmetic of the day so unbearable. The dead were not colleagues in the abstract; they were the people the survivors had brought through the door themselves.
“I lost my brother, Gary,” Lutnick said. “I lost my best friend, Doug. I lost my college roommate’s brother, my other best friend’s brother-in-law. It was true for me, but it was true for everybody. The security guard hired his brother-in-law, just the same. We lost many sets of brothers.”
Gary Lutnick, Howard’s younger brother, was among the missing.
Lutnick himself describes the surreal texture of that morning: The photograph outside the school with its burned-in timestamp, the walk into the classroom, the message that a plane had hit the building.
“I thought it was like a little Piper Cub — was a little too close or something,” he said. “And I went down to the building, and when you saw that giant black cloud, I was at the building engulfed in that black cloud.”
Cantor Fitzgerald’s grief was the sharpest expression of a catastrophe that reached across dozens of firms, hundreds of professions, and countless zip codes. The attacks killed 2,977 people in total: 2,753 at the World Trade Center, 184 at the Pentagon, and 40 innocent passengers and crew aboard United Flight 93 in a Pennsylvania field.
Inside the towers, the vertical geography of survival was brutally simple. In the North Tower, the floors above 92 were a mass casualty. Those below stood a better chance.
Between 1,344 and 1,426 people were on floors 92 through 110 when Flight 11 struck, and more than 800 are believed to have survived the crash itself, only to be trapped by the destruction of the stairwells.
In the South Tower, of the roughly 600 to 690 people on the impact-zone floors when United Flight 175 hit at 9:03, only 18 escaped, all of them by way of a single partly intact stairwell.
TWENTY-FIVE YEARS LATER, POLLS SHOW WHAT SEPTEMBER 11 CHANGED–AND WHAT DIDN’T
Cantor Fitzgerald’s 658 dead were the largest concentrated corporate loss, but they were not alone. The insurance and consulting giant Marsh & McLennan, whose North Tower offices on floors 93 through 100 sat directly in the path of Flight 11, lost 295 employees and 63 consultants.
Aon Corporation, on the upper floors of the South Tower, lost 176.
The investment bank Sandler O’Neill & Partners, on the 104th floor of the South Tower, lost 68 of its 171 employees, including a founding partner, Herman Sandler. Fred Alger Management, Fiduciary Trust, Keefe Bruyette & Woods, Euro Brokers, Windows on the World — the roll call of decimated firms ran down the tower’s directory floor by floor.
That civilian toll also included the worst single-day loss in American emergency services history: 343 firefighters of the New York City Fire Department, 37 officers of the Port Authority Police Department, and 23 officers of the New York Police Department, along with 11 other officers from state and federal agencies who had climbed into the towers as everyone else was trying to get out.
The pain rippled outward in a pattern of hometowns. New York City itself bore the heaviest weight, but the suburban community that lost the most residents was Middletown, New Jersey — a Monmouth County commuter town at the end of the North Jersey Coast Line, from which 37 people did not come home.
Monmouth County lost 147 residents that day.
Rockville Centre on Long Island, Glen Rock and Hoboken in New Jersey, and neighborhoods across Staten Island and Queens were emptied of firefighters, brokers, cooks, secretaries, and executives who had shared the same morning trains.
What happened in the days after has become its own chapter of the story. On Sept. 19, one week after the attack, with the firm’s trading floors gone and its future in serious doubt, Cantor Fitzgerald announced that it would distribute 25% of its profits over the next five years to the families of the employees it had lost and would pay their health insurance for a decade.
At the time, the pledge was widely ridiculed as unkeepable. By 2006, the company had distributed roughly $180 million to those families, and the Cantor Fitzgerald Relief Fund has since raised more than $300 million overall.
“What I’m most proud of is the way the company dealt with the worst of circumstances,” Lutnick said. “Took care of the families, promised to take care of the families, was ridiculed — ‘How can a company that’s destroyed take care of anybody, let alone making promises?’ But the company lived up to its promises. The most important thing in my life for all those years was the relationship I had with the families, because I always viewed the best way to show someone who died that you love them is to show love to their family, to the people that they loved.”
The firm did rebuild. Cantor Fitzgerald and its affiliates today employ more than 12,000 people across some 60 offices in 20 countries. Every Sept. 11, the trading floors of Cantor Fitzgerald and its spinoff BGC Partners donate 100% of the day’s revenue to charity. The annual Charity Day has raised on the order of $300 million since its founding.
When asked how he and his son talk about that day, Lutnick answered with something close to a smile.
WOULD THE NATION UNITE IF ANOTHER 9/11 HAPPENED TODAY?
“Well, he knows he saved my life, so he leverages that.” His son is now 30 and recently engaged.
“Twenty-five years is crazy,” Lutnick said of the time that has passed. But still, he admits that sometimes it still feels like yesterday.