A time to remember

At 180 Greenwich Street, the rush of falling water fills the air. Dana Tamuccio paces along the bronze panels framing the footprints of the north and south towers of the World Trade Center, which stood here for three decades before collapsing in a fiery inferno on Sept. 11, 2001.

It’s still hard for Tamuccio to think about that day, even 25 years later. Some memories always ache no matter how much time passes. As she walks, Tamuccio reaches out to run her fingers over specific names emblazoned on the wall, greeting them like old friends.

Many of them were old friends. Others are people whose stories she only learned years after 9/11. People who worked in the twin towers for years, and people visiting for the first time. People who weren’t supposed to come in to work that day, but did. Nearly 3,000 are listed here.

But one name stands out: Michael Andrew Tamuccio.

Dana’s brother, Mike.

She pauses at the inscription. Before turning to go, Tamuccio reaches down, dips her fingers in the water, and gently splashes the letters—a tender and almost venerative gesture.

For Tamuccio, this is sacred ground. It’s Mike’s final resting place and the final resting place for about 1,100 people whose remains were never recovered from the wreckage of the World Trade Center. But for almost two decades, she couldn’t bring herself to come here. She hardly spoke about what happened. When she saw tourists heading to the memorial site, it filled her with rage. They seemed strangely gleeful about visiting the place her brother died, as if it were a haunted house or some other morbid attraction.

But today, Tamuccio does come back. She does talk about that day. In fact, she spends hours leading complete strangers on tours of the site—walking them through one of the worst days of her life. Again. And again. And again.

It can be exhausting and emotionally draining. But Tamuccio does it because she wants to keep her brother’s memory alive and shape the narrative for the next generation of Americans who don’t remember that day—helping them reclaim a sense of reverence in a culture drowning in lies, noise, and distractions.

BY ALL ACCOUNTS, Sept. 11, 2001, dawned a gorgeous autumn day. It was the last sort of day on which anyone slumbering in New York City in the gray hours of dawn would have imagined dying in a hellish and premeditated attack. The unblinking blue sky gave not a hint of the horrors to come.

On that September morning, Mike Tamuccio was hard at work in his office on the 93rd floor of the north tower.

For both Mike and Dana Tamuccio, finance was in their blood. Their dad spent decades working as a floor broker for the New York Stock Exchange, and he raised his Italian American family in Manhattan and Brooklyn in the 1970s and ’80s.

Mike was the oldest, five years ahead of Dana. Their brother, Jimmy, was between them. Five years was a pretty big age gap when Dana was little, so they didn’t do a lot together back then. But they played roller hockey in the streets, and Mike tried to convince their parents to let Dana try out for ice hockey with the boys—to no avail.

But that was the exception. Usually, whatever Mike set his mind to, he accomplished. He was an Eagle Scout and captain of the hockey team. He graduated from Fordham University in 1985, completing his degree program in three years. “Everything he did was with intensity,” Dana said. It was a decidedly Wall Street trait, she added.

So, when Mike landed at the American Stock Exchange, it seemed like a perfect fit. He started working there just months before Black Monday, the massive stock market crash of October 1987. The experience terrified most people, Dana said. But not Mike. “He was energized by it,” she said. He framed the cover of the New York Daily News story on the crash and hung it by his desk as a reminder “that these things happen.”

Later, Mike started as vice president of equities trading at Fred Alger Management, headquartered at the World Trade Center. “He was very excited about working in those towers,” Dana said. Mike’s office had a breathtaking view looking north. He bought a high-powered telescope and trained it on his house in Westchester County. “No one’s gonna rob me while I’m at work,” he told his sister.

It was one of the funniest—and most Mike—things Dana had ever heard.

Something about the twin towers suited Mike perfectly. “It’s hard to describe because they’re just buildings, but they were part of our psyche,” Dana said. They were in every movie featuring New York City and in the background of every news shot. People tightroped them, parachuted off them, and scaled them.

“That’s just sort of the New York imagination,” Dana said. Crossing boundaries. Ascending new heights. Conquering fears.

Mike was a lot like those towers. All about the big idea. Strong, successful, and seemingly invincible.

So, when Dana Tamuccio was driving to her job in New Jersey and heard a report come over the radio that some kind of plane had crashed into the World Trade Center, her first thought was for the passengers. “God help those people on the plane and whoever’s at the impact site,” she thought.

When she arrived at her workplace, one of her co-workers met her at the meeting room door. He had a strange look on his face.

“What’s going on?” she asked.

The man led her inside and showed her the TV screen. Tamuccio’s knees buckled. The north tower was engulfed in flames.

Seventeen minutes later, a second Boeing 767 struck the south tower. That was when realization struck Tamuccio, too. This wasn’t an accident. And Mike was gone. “Something deep in my soul just said, ‘Oh my God, he’s not here anymore,’” she said. “And then I didn’t know what to do, because he’s my big brother. He’s the one I needed.”

THE 9/11 TERRORIST ATTACKS are still a singularity in modern history. On that day, 2,977 people from over 90 countries died in New York, Arlington, Va., and Pennsylvania. Over 400 of them were police and firefighters who rushed to the twin towers in a desperate bid to save those inside.

Nothing on that scale has happened before or since. By comparison, Statista reports the second-­largest terrorist attack since 1970—carried out by ISIL fighters in Tikrit, Iraq, in 2014—left an estimated 1,700 people dead.

It was a day that shattered America’s sense of security and indelibly altered the national psyche. Even two decades after the fact, over 90% of people who were at least 10 years old on 9/11 told the Pew Research Center they still remembered exactly where they were on that day.

Certain scenes from those hellish 24 hours are seared into Dana Tamuccio’s memory. But there are other moments from 9/11 and its aftermath that are just black holes—events she can’t remember even though people tell her she was there. She’s come to recognize these blanks as a symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Over the next few years, Tamuccio threw her energy into trying to help her parents cope with Mike’s death. “I just ignored myself, which is a very Italian American trait,” she said. In 2003, Tamuccio went to ground zero with her parents. At the time, no memorial existed—just a pit in the earth. Tamuccio had a pit in her stomach, too, as she woke up anticipating the visit. But the trip itself eludes her memory. She only recalls having dinner with her parents afterward.

After that, Tamuccio stopped going. It was just too difficult. “It felt like we were walking on the people we never found,” she said. Tamuccio stopped talking about 9/11, too. After a while, she felt like her friends just didn’t want to hear about it anymore.

She felt invisible.

Sometimes, Tamuccio would steal away to a park in southern Manhattan where the Koenig Sphere—a 25-ton sculpture damaged but not destroyed by the 9/11 attacks—had been relocated. An eternal flame flickered at its base. There, it was quiet, and she didn’t have to battle crowds or compete with tourists.

But mostly, Tamuccio tried to push those memories as far out of her mind as possible. She wanted desperately to forget and to escape.

ISRAELI AMERICAN ARCHITECT Michael Arad witnessed the 9/11 attacks from his rooftop apartment in Manhattan’s East Village neighborhood. His wife worked on Broad Street, less than a mile from the World Trade Center. He rushed over to find her walking north on Water Street as the south tower fell.

About a month later, Arad was still wrestling with what he’d witnessed. “I felt compelled to try and respond in some way to the emotions that I felt,” he later shared during a TEDxWall Street event in 2013. “And, as a designer, I began to sketch.”

On a yellow sheet of paper, Arad outlined his vision. Two square voids in the Hudson River. Water cascading down into them, but never filling them up. It was a design intended to convey a sense of ongoing absence.

Arad spent the next year developing the concept. He used his free time to create a small fountain modeling his design and photographed it on the same rooftop where he had watched the towers burn. After that, Arad set his project aside.

A year later, in April 2003, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation announced a design competition for a memorial to stand at ground zero. Arad collaborated with landscape architect Peter Walker to submit a revised version of his design, titled Reflecting Absence. In it, he proposed taking the voids from his original sketch and positioning them in the footprints of the twin towers.

Arad’s design won. Six years later, the National Septempter 11 Memorial & Museum opened on the attack’s 10-year anniversary.

But Tamuccio didn’t go to the dedication ceremony. She felt there was just no way a memorial could do justice to the gravity of what had transpired. For almost 10 years, she avoided the place.

Then, the COVID-19 pandemic hit. The ensuing shutdowns created just enough space and breathing room in Tamuccio’s life for her to start noticing more of what was going on inside her. For the first time, she realized she still carried a lot of unresolved emotional pain from 9/11.

“All right, I have to face this head-on,” she thought. “I have to deal with this.”

She ordered a bunch of books from Amazon, including 102 Minutes, the deeply reported account of 9/11 penned by New York Times reporters Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn. Tamuccio found the book harrowing and upsetting—it unearthed memories she had tried so hard to put behind her. She kept reading anyway. She felt like she needed to go back and face what had happened.

But there was still one place she didn’t want to face: the Sept. 11 memorial.

Tamuccio felt angry enough just seeing tourists on the train headed down to the World Trade Center as if it were some sort of circus. She was afraid if she found herself next to someone like that, she might explode.

That was when the pandemic afforded her another unexpected opportunity. On March 13, 2020, the memorial temporarily closed and remained shut down for the next six months. The crowds dwindled and the streets emptied.

In the unexpected stillness, after nearly 20 years, Tamuccio decided to return to the World Trade Center. She rose early and went alone, fully expecting to hate it. What she encountered astounded her. “I just didn’t think you could get this thing right,” Tamuccio said. “But it was perfect.”

The memorial itself wasn’t directly accessible. But she could still see it from a distance, and she could hear it—the rush of the twin waterfalls cascading 30 feet down and then each pouring into a central void.

The design resonated with something deep in Tamuccio’s own heart: a void, left by her brother’s death. It was a profound absence the memorial didn’t seem to negate or explain away. It simply acknowledged it. Somehow, it felt like holding space for all the people whose remains were never recovered.

“They’re honoring our people the right way,” Tamuccio thought. Tears ran down her face, and she felt something inside her release its grip.

IN 2022, TAMUCCIO SAW an ad for a Yankee Stadium tour guide. She and Mike had always loved going to baseball games together, and she decided to apply. “I like to think Mike tapped the guy on the shoulder, got me that job,” she said. That was the start of a new trajectory for Tamuccio. About a year later, she joined another company leading Wall Street tours.

But when the company asked her to do 9/11 tours, her first reaction was “No, I can’t do it.” Even though she’d started healing, she didn’t feel ready for anything like that. “If I have to talk about my brother, I’m just gonna cry the whole time,” she thought. Besides, the whole concept felt offensive to her.

But the more she thought about it, the more she wondered what other tour guides were telling people about 9/11.

Eventually, Tamuccio decided to shadow a few to find out. Some of the tours were every bit as upsetting as she expected. Once, she even overheard a tour guide cheerfully describing the attacks as “a carnival of death.”

Others, though, seemed to strike the right tone—one of respect and reverence. Tamuccio realized if she led her own tour, she could control the narrative.

She decided to give it a try. But for the first few weeks, she didn’t talk at all about Mike. She was afraid she might break down.

Then, slowly, she started talking more and more about her brother. And it was strangely cathartic. “This is what I’ve needed for the last 25 years—to actually talk about this,” she realized.

The more Tamuccio shared her own story, the more people on her tours started opening up about their own 9/11 experiences. One woman was from New Jersey and had lost a schoolmate at the World Trade Center. The tour was the first time the woman had visited the Sept. 11 memorial, and it was an emotional experience for her.

As Tamuccio comforted the woman, it dawned on her how many people are just now visiting the site for the first time, even 25 years later. She realized even people who didn’t escape the twin towers themselves or lose a loved one might have trauma from that day. “Those of us that remained in New York, we all have our own levels of PTSD,” she said.

In June 2024, Tamuccio launched her own tour company, Vibe NYC Tours. Tamuccio said the vast majority of people who come on her tours come for the right reasons. But every once in a while, she gets someone who wants to spout off about conspiracy theories. Some of the most common are anti-Semitic.

“Oh, the Jewish people did this, right?” people will say to her.

“No, they didn’t,” Tamuccio replies. “I’m going to show you my friends who were Jews.” Then, she shows them the names of some of the Jewish victims listed on the Sept. 11 memorial.

Lots of parents bring their teenagers on Tamuccio’s tour as a way to give them a window into 9/11. They were born years after the event and only experience it through other people’s memories and curated accounts in textbooks, museums, and social media. And often, accounts circulated online are steeped in skepticism and triviality. “The internet is telling them all kinds of things,” Tamuccio said.

Conspiracy theories about what happened on 9/11 started emerging immediately after the attacks, but now the internet gives a much bigger platform to people looking to spread misinformation. And while robust data is lacking, polls signal some concerning trends. One 2013 YouGov poll found almost 40% of Americans harbored doubts about the official account of 9/11. Ten percent said they didn’t believe it at all.

A more recent Manhattan Institute survey of Republican voters reported about 40% believe the 9/11 attacks were “likely orchestrated or permitted by U.S. government actors.” For Tamuccio, the most meaningful days are when she hears from parents after the tour. “I never thought my 14-year-old boy would ever disavow the conspiracy theories,” one parent emailed her. “But you changed his mind.”

TAMUCCIO STILL ENCOUNTERS a lot of ignorance from visitors to the Sept. 11 memorial site. Sometimes, she sees people lying across the list of names to take selfies. Often, tourists simply fail to notice when they are blocking someone from accessing a loved one’s name. “It doesn’t occur to people that there could be a family member or a survivor standing right next to them,” Tamuccio said.

Because 9/11 was 25 years ago, people don’t always realize how many family members and survivors are still around, she said: “There’s a lot of us.”

When Tamuccio visits the section of the Sept. 11 memorial dedicated to first responders, she almost always runs into someone visiting a colleague who died. Often, they come by themselves. Tamuccio identifies them by their noticeably emotional reaction to the site. Sometimes, she talks to them if they seem open to it.

“On days like that, it does feel like healing, because you’re with other people who get it,” Tamuccio said.

Tamuccio doesn’t think the grief will ever disappear, but she’s learned to carry it better. “Instead of letting it lock me down, I live with it,” she said. “I exist with it.”

Tamuccio’s grateful for the chance to keep talking about Mike and to keep his memory alive. And she encourages people to share their own stories from that day. “I also think that there’s a lot of heroes we never heard about, because nobody lived to tell the story,” Tamuccio said. “I think my brother was one of them.”