External Losses
The Homes That Did Not Survive 9/11
While we remember the 9/11 attacks in Manhattan for the fall of the two towers, we often forget the far more extensive damage that was inflicted on other neighbouring buildings.
These include:
- The Marriott Hotel — where at least fifty people were killed when the South Tower collapsed
- Saint Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church — where not only a religious institute, but also a museum housing Christian relics and artifacts, including those belonging to the historical Nicholas of Myra, was lost
- The Deutsche Bank Building in lower Manhattan — which was left irreparably damaged, condemned, and demolished in 2011
In total, at least fifty-six buildings in New York City suffered physical damage beyond merely having windows shattered from soundwaves caused by hundreds of thousands of tons of steel crashing to earth, or the dust cloud that engulfed nearly the entire area, with eight of these buildings collapsing, and another ten being declared unsalvageable and later destroyed by a demolition team.
Even though many associate 9/11 with the destruction of the business sector in New York and the military sector in Washington D.C., what is less talked about is the physical toll it took in the residential sector, with estimates suggesting that at least 3,000 apartment units, condos, and houses, — the equivalent of one for every person killed immediately — representing some 25,000 New Yorkers were immediately destroyed or left permanently uninhabitable.
Besides the apartment units and residential homes that were damaged or destroyed, thousands of other private dwellings were left without power after the force of the collapsing towers shattered the city’s infrastructure, including its power grid.
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Consequently, tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers were temporarily left without power, with the most impacted being left without electricty until just before Christmas of that year — nearly coinciding with the approximate time that the last fire at Ground Zero was extinguished.
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