A North Carolina Visitor’s Changed Breakfast Plans Kept Her Away From Ground Zero on 9/11

On the morning of September 11, 2001, a woman visiting New York City from North Carolina came within roughly a half hour of walking into the shadow of the World Trade Center. A last-minute change to a breakfast plan is the only reason she didn’t.

She and a friend from Florida had traveled to New York City earlier that year for a soap opera convention, staying at a hotel two blocks from Times Square. It was her first trip north of Virginia. The two had planned to fly home on the afternoon of September 11 and had already checked out of their hotel, though staff let them leave their luggage behind until it was time to head to the airport.

The original plan was to meet a New York friend for breakfast that morning, but a scheduling change pushed the meeting to lunch instead. With the morning suddenly free, the two women went sightseeing, stopping at Rockefeller Center sometime between 8:30 and 8:45 a.m. They then walked back to a restaurant called Roxy Delicatessen, where they’d eaten cheesecake the day before.

On the way, they passed an electronic news ticker on a building reporting that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. She assumed it was likely an accident. About half an hour after they sat down at Roxy, a man walked in and shouted that the Pentagon had been hit. Diners largely ignored him and kept eating.

Around the same time, she noticed a voicemail waiting on her phone but couldn’t connect the call. After finishing breakfast, the two stepped outside into the sound of fire trucks racing past. Still unable to reach her voicemail, they walked to a nearby Marriott Hotel to use the pay phones on an upper floor, only to find long lines forming for phones that, until that morning, almost no one bothered to use.

It was there that her friend returned from checking on the news and told her to sit down. “We’re under attack,” she said. Planes had hit both towers and the Pentagon. It was around 10 a.m. The South Tower had just collapsed, and United Flight 93 was still minutes from crashing into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

The two sat trying to absorb what was happening, aware that their original breakfast plan would have put them close to the towers that morning. She got in line for a pay phone to call her mother in North Carolina, correctly guessing the earlier voicemail had been her checking in. Her mother had a television on at her office and was watching the coverage unfold. The two prayed together on the call before hanging up.

The women returned to their hotel, which found them a room, and spent the rest of the day watching unfiltered television footage of the attacks, including people jumping from the towers. They eventually reached the New York friend they were supposed to have lunch with and confirmed he was safe.

With air travel grounded, they decided against waiting it out and instead drove out of the city in the early morning hours of Friday, September 14.

Each anniversary since, she has described carrying survivor’s guilt, a concept she says she hadn’t fully understood until that year, tied to how narrowly a routine schedule change kept her and her friend away from what would become known as Ground Zero.