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• Columnist: Paulie Gee
• Resume: Some people live to eat, I live to eat pizza, serve it in Greenpoint and help others serve it elsewhere.
• 

 

• Windows on the World is a movie starring Rene Auberjonois, Ryan Guzman, and Luna Lauren Velez. After watching the news on 9/11 with his family, Fernando travels from Mexico to New York City to find his father, an undocumented worker
• Drama
• user Ratings 8,6 of 10
• country USA
• duration 1 H 47Min
• Release date 2019

 

The Windows On The World restaurant located in the North Tower of the WTC demonstrated how life and death can sometimes be decided on a razor thin wire of chance. In rare cases, one small change to a persons circumstances can significantly change the course or outcome of an event. The details of this decision-incident can often remain completely hidden to all the individuals involved until the event is completely over. Only then does the clear picture begin to unfold. WTC North Tower – September 11th – Slim Chance Between Life and Death. In this terrible tragedy, the North Tower, also known as 1 World Trade Center had it the worst. Not only was it the first building to be hit by one of the planes, but it was also the last building to fall. It was the only building that had all its fire stairs knocked out, that meant no-one above air strike on the 92nd floor ever got out and there would be no escape for its trapped occupants, where they would forced to witness the increasing carnage around them with their own slow realization of their ultimate demise. The Hijacked Planes Strike On September 11th 2001 at 8:46:26 a. m. American Airlines Flight 11 Boeing 767 impacted the north side of the North Tower of 1 World Trade Center. The plane entered the North Tower between the 94th and 98th floors. Flight 11 was flying at a speed of 490 miles per hour at the time of impact. North Tower occupants had no clue what was about to happen and they had no chance of survival from above the impact site, because, unlike the South Tower that was hit a few minutes later, all the fire escapes were destroyed by the impact of the plane. Documented accounts of human losses that morning at the North Tower at The World Trade Center included employees from such companies as Aon Corp, Cantor Fitzgerald and Marsh & McLennan. One particular company, Risk Waters Group Ltd, A British company, was at The Windows On The World conference facility that morning, they would not normally have been there. Windows On The World – Background On This Most Famous Restaurant Windows On The World was a world famous 40, 000 square foot restaurant near the top of the North tower on the 107th Floor at 1 World Trade Center. It boasted a popular “New American” style menu and had a first class wine list that included Chateau Lafite-Rothschild 1928 for $3000. 00. The 107th floor was also occupied by “The Greatest Bar on Earth”, aka GBOE. This 13, 000 square foot happy hour bar was popular with tourists and Wall Street types alike. It was a traditional for New Yorkers to often complain about its “poor quality” and “expensive” drinks, but its location spoke volumes with amazing panoramic views of Manhattan and the tri-state area that was pretty hard to beat. The 107th floor was also occupied by Wild Blue, a romantic and quieter restaurant and bar in the space formerly occupied by Cellar in the Sky. A popular misconception is that Windows on the World was at the very top of the North tower, when in fact the top enclosed floor was the 110th floor, where CNN and some other television companies sited equipment and staff. The South tower, across the square, was home to the public glass-enclosed observatory located on the 107th floor and the world’s highest open-air deck on the 110th floor, that the tourists could visit. On the fateful day of 9/11 2001 the Windows on The World Conference Facility on the 106th floor was playing host to the Risk Waters Financial seminar. One floor above, on the 107th floor, the main restaurant and the bar were closed. Wild Blue, however was the only thing open  on that floor and was serving breakfast to a number of WTC tenants and occupants. The Risk Waters Financial Conference The Risk Waters Group would not have normally been at the World Trade Center that day. They had organized a financial technology conference that was due to run both days of Tuesday 11th and Wednesday 12th of September 2001. They had invited a number of delegates from various financial companies and vendors in New York and the United States. What distinguishes those delegates from the other victims in the WTC is that they wouldn’t normally be there and chance had a way of putting them there that morning. This, of course, is of no solace to the families left behind, but nevertheless remains a gruesome fact. The delegate’s presence at the WTC is somewhat akin to the people who died at the (alleged) job interviews at Cantor Fitzgerald on the 95th floor. People who wouldn’t have normally been there, but happenstance put them there. The Risk Waters conference was due to start at 8:00 AM with Breakfast, with the first speaker due to begin at 9:00 the precise time of the impact were 16 staff from Risk Waters and 53 delegates from various invited companies and vendors in attendance. An additional 137 delegates had been invited but had not arrived at the time of the impact or did not plan in coming after all. Following the plane impact there were reports that delegates from this conference were being moved to the 107th floor. Conflicting reports indicate that smoke was heavy at the 107th floor and all the “Windows” staff was moved to the 106th floor to join the delegates. No Survivors From Above The 92nd Floor Christine Olender, the restaurant’s assistant general manager, said via her mobile phone to 911 services “We’re getting no direction up here. We’re having a smoke condition. We have most people on the 106th floor; the 107th floor is way too smoky, ” Other people above the impact site in the North Tower included staff from Windows on the World located on the 106th and 107th floors and from other companies on various floors above and below. It is understood that the roof deck was not accessible by the staff and delegates, but this is perhaps irrelevant as they may have sought adequate refuge on the 106th floor and rooftop rescue by helicopter was not a viable option, due to the updraft caused by the burning aviation fuel It is estimated over 200 people jumped to their death, with the majority of that number being made up from the North tower, where the fire and smoke were limited to fewer floors – which made it more intense. The estimate was because “Jumper” injuries were very similar to injuries sustained by enclosed occupants and could not be clearly established following the event. The figure was arrived at by analyzing photographs of descending bodies that were taken at the scene. In the North Tower there were 1360 fatalities above the 92nd floor, which was 100% of its occupants at the contrast, the South tower had one fire escape that was passable after their impact, so in fact 350 people escaped even though they were above the point of above the 92nd floor in the North tower on that fateful day meant certain death for its occupants. No one survived. While many WTC corporations knew the risk of an attack following the 1993 bomb was high, they had accepted the risk of this occurrence and went on with their daily lives. In retrospect all the regular daily inhabitants of the WTC were a walking probability. The Risk Waters group and delegates exemplify the randomness of the event. It seems sadly ironic that the Risk Waters Group range of products and services are dedicated to risk management. Individuals of Special Note Who Died in the North Tower Liz Thompson, executive director of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Liz Thompson 61 is executive director of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC). Thompson was on what was to be the last elevator down from the 91st floor in the north tower of the World Trade Center. She was in a meeting concerning a public art commission; Liz is reported to have exited the lobby at 8:43 AM. LMCC artist in residence Michael Richards, was not so lucky, he remained on the 91st floor and perished. George Sleigh, naval architect 62-year old naval architect, George Sleigh, was in a north-facing office on the telephone to a colleague on the 91st floor. Incredibly, George witnessed the aircraft heading towards his building when it was just two to three plane lengths away. “It was quite a shock to see a large passenger plane that close to the building. Almost immediately upon me seeing it, the plane hit the building, ” he says. George works for the American Bureau of Shipping; its suite of offices was on the 91st floor, immediately to the left of the impact zone. It took George 50 minutes to descend the 91 flights to safety within a northern stairwell. He remains the highest survivor from the North Tower, no others from his floor (or above) survived Peter Field, the chairman and chief executive of Risk Waters Group Peter Field, the chairman and chief executive of Risk Waters Group, was scheduled to be at the Risk Waters conference that morning. He recalls, “I was up at about 6:30am to check my e-mail and phone the London office, intending to leave for the inaugural Waters Financial Technology Congress at the World Trade Center no later than 8:00 am. But I had trouble retrieving my e-mail and I decided to call our IT manager in London to get the problem sorted out. It was this simple act that probably saved my life. By the time I’d accessed my e-mail, I was running late, eventually leaving my hotel on the Upper West Side at about 8:10am. I ran across the road from my hotel to the 66th St. subway entrance only to find there was a long delay in the service on the 1 and 9 lines to the Cortlandt St. /World Trade Center station. Eventually, I crammed myself on to a train at around 8:25am. I thought: “I might still catch David’s opening remarks because the conference is bound to start a little late. ” Delegates always register at the last minute on the first day of conferences. David Rivers, our company’s editorial director in New York, knew more about financial technology than many in the industry and was therefore ideal to open the first Waters Congress at Windows on the World, on the 106th floor of the north tower of the World Trade Center”When Peter arrived at street level at Cortlandt St at 8:50am he found the tragedy beginning to unfold “There was a sickening smell of what I thought was gas but which I later discovered was jet fuel”. ” On the shopping concourse above the station, I remember a brief glimpse of broken glass and a cacophony of alarms before I became aware of security guards screaming at us, “Run, run for your life””. Greg Manning, Trader at Euro Brokers Greg Manning who stood, horrified, on the morning of Sept. 11 as he watched the towers burn – smoke belching, he was certain, from the 105th floor of Tower One, where his wife Lauren worked, and the 84th floor of Tower Two, where his employer, Euro Brokers, was located. Friends and family called immediately. “I could not say whether Lauren was alive, ” Greg Manning wrote in his book. “I was almost certain she was dead. ” Behind schedule that day, Greg, a Euro Brokers vice president, was to have attended the Risk Waters conference at the Windows on the World on the 106th floor of Tower One. Tony Mann, President of E-J Electric Tony Mann, president of E-J Electric, Long Island City, which had an office in Tower 2, built and maintained the World Trade Center’s entire security system. On the morning of Sept. 11, the electricians were doing routine maintenance work when the first hijacked commercial airliner slammed into Tower 1. ”Five minutes before it happened, one of our foremen was on the 107th floor, ” Mann said. “His radio wasn’t working, so he came down and was walking across the lobby when the first plane hit. He then ran down to the basement to make sure all our people got out. ” Rick Weisfeld, President of Bronx Builders For Rick Weisfeld, president of Bronx Builders, a woodworking firm, the morning was especially hard. Three of his employees were in the World Trade Center, attending an early morning meeting at Windows on the World on the 107th floor “We were renovating one of the bars there, ” Weisfeld recalled. Later, he would learn that all three, including one a key foreman and a close friend, were among the nearly 3, 000 people who were killed in the World Trade Center attacks. Architect Obdulio Ruiz-Diaz, a draftsman with Bronx Builders, was one of those men with co-workers Joshua Poptean and Manuel DaMota. Chris Morrison (34) of Zurich Scudder Investments Chris Morrison (34) of Zurich Scudder Investments, grew up on High Plain Road, Andover, New York – where his parents – Joe and Maureen – still live. Chris was a popular and successful graduate of Central Catholic High School and St. Lawrence University. He was another delegate attending the Risk Waters seminar on the 106th floor. Heather Ho, executive pastry chef at New York’s Windows on the World restaurant Heather Ho, age 32 was an executive pastry chef at New York’s Windows on the World restaurant on the 107th floor of the World Trade Center. Heather was always early for her job and worked hard. She was greatly admired for creative new ideas in the approach to traditional recipes. Her dream was to open her own pastry shop. A roommate described her as a unique and amazing person. She said she knew how to have a good time and also worked and played hard. Neil D. Levin, Executive Director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey Neil D. Levin, executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, wanted the agency’s airports to be showcases for the region, and pushed workers to develop high-tech improvements for airline passengers and time-deprived commuters. He was on the 106th floor talking with his secretary on the 67th floor of the North Tower. It is unclear why he was at the Risk Waters meeting, as it was primarily for the financial community and no other meetings were taking place on that floor that morning. His wife, Christy Ferer, an author and former television reporter said “The last time someone talked to him, he was on the 106th floor. His secretary [from his office on the 67th floor] was talking to him by phone, and as he was talking the plane hit, and they both said `Holy cow! ’ at the same time. The line went dead. Then [a co-worker] said she ran into someone who said he was on the 63rd floor, and that’s what gave me false hope. ” “He never returned home” The Final Messages To Loved Ones The final messages to the loved ones came in a variety of ways from Windows on the World. Some came via email, others by Blackberry, some managed to use land lines or mobile phones. Some accounts have faxes and others have cherished voicemail’s. By all reports the mobile phone network survived right up until the last minute because the primary transmitter was on the roof, albeit severely impaired by the volume of calls being placed throughout downtown Manhattan. When the final messages were being delivered through the various means, those who were trapped had no chance of survival, they just didn’t know it, neither did anyone else. It was assumed that they had a fighting chance, a slim opportunity to survive, surely someone would survive the dreadful tragedy. Brian Clark, a World Trade Center survivor in the 1993 and 2001 incidents said in his book “Why couldn’t there have been just one survivor from the North Tower above the impact site? – With a parachute or something, I know it sounds absurd, just so we can say one person survived” He added “Perhaps that individual would have been vilified by grieving families, or maybe it would have brought hope of man’s ability to endure however hopeless the odds”, “To see him jumping out of the building and gliding down in bright colors framed with the beautiful blue sky amid the terrible turmoil of the scene would have raised the hearts of both the trapped and the grieving families alike”, “It’s not their son, but he would have carried the spirit of all of them” “If that had been me, I can’t imagine how I would have been able to turn my back on those left behind though” With hindsight, many opportunities to avoid being caught up in this terrible tragedy existed, but who was to know such a terrible thing could happen on such a beautiful day. It seems that the odds of the event occurring remained constant and that time was the only unknown factor. This adds weight to the probability argument that, given time, everything can happen to everyone, everywhere. This single event has forever changed the way Americans live their lives, unlike any other single event in modern US history, save for Pearl Harbor and D-Day. The tenants above the 91st floor of the North Tower at the World Trade Center were: Organizations Above 91st Floor 1 WTC - North Tower Floor American Bureau of Shipping 91 Lower Manhattan Cultural Council 91 Carr Futures 92 Fred Alger Management 93 Marsh USA 93 -100 Kidder Peabody & Co. 101 Cantor Fitzgerald Securities 101-105 The Nishi-Nippon Bank Ltd. 102 Channel 4 (NBC) 104 Windows on the World Rest. 106-107 Greatest Bar on Earth 107 World Trade Club 107 Channel 5 (WNYW) 110 Channel 31 (WBIS) 110 Channel 47 (WNJU) 110 Channel 2 (WCBS) 110 Channel 11 (WPIX) 110 CNN 110.

Watch Windows on the Online HDQ full Watch Windows on the Online 123movies. YouTube. Cette chanson takes me to a wonderful place. Possibly the easiest way to understand this world and its history is to think of it like a sketchagraph which is a bit faulty cos it leaves a faint image behind each time its reset.

18 years today 9 11 19 RIP. Never Forget. Wat a lovey happy man. RIP roko. More connections on the word Camelot. Camulos was the the 'Celtic' god of war. Camuludunan was the old name for Colchester meaning fortress off the war god Camulos. According to Laurence Gardner's book Bloodline of the Holy Grail Camelod was one of the Houses of Arthurian descent which included Coel I  and II of Camulod (Colchester) and the Empress Helena mother of Constantine the Great.

That woman seemed so chill before crying. Been heading this way for a long time. Great video. Windows on the World, despite the fact that it takes place in the weeks following the 9/11 terrorist attack in New York, is a film that is urgently for our time. It is a hero's journey of a son trying to find his father in that grief-stricken landscape and the characters stand in for the millions of immigrants, legal and illegal, who contribute in their everyday lives, to the American landscape. The film seeks to counter the narrative that's all-too-prevalent in today's political and media landscape by telling a story set in America's biggest and most diverse city, at its darkest time. The script by playwright and novelist Robert Mailer Anderson (who also produced the film) is wise and completely engaging; he creates indelible characters who are ultimately inspiring and uplifting. Edward James Olmos gives what he considers to be the performance of a lifetime, and the rest of the cast is terrific as well-with a special shout-out to Glynn Turman. The direction, by Olmos's son Michael, is sure-handed, getting terrific performances from his cast, including his father, in this father-son story, and it's beautifully lensed. The music, including jazz and a title track written by Anderson, is pitch-perfect, supporting the story without getting in the way. This film should be seen by everybody-and I'm sure it will be in mainstream distribution soon, as this is a time when, although the major studios may have turned their backs on substance, terrific indie films like this one have many other possible venues. If you can't see it at a film festival, like I did, keep a keen eye out for it. Terrific and inspiring.

Windows on the World was one of the greatest restaurants New York City has ever seen. Located on the 107th floor of the World Trade Center, it offered guests soaring views of not only Manhattan, but also Brooklyn and New Jersey. Although the food couldn't always match the scenery, at its best, Windows provided guests with a sophisticated, forward-thinking dining experience unlike any other in New York City. Windows on the World vanished 12 years ago. On that horrific day, 79 employees of the restaurant lost their lives. Here, now, is a remembrance of Windows on the World, with an afterword from the restaurant's last chef and greatest champion, Michael Lomonaco: [GM Alan Lewis, chef Andrew Renee, restaurateur Joe Baum via Edible Manhattan] Windows on the World was the brainchild of visionary restaurateur Joe Baum. With the Restaurant Associates group, Baum created a string of '60s blockbusters including La Fonda Del Sol, The Forum of the Twelve Caesars, and The Four Seasons. In 1970, after parting ways with Restaurant Associates, Baum was hired by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey to help develop the restaurants at the World Trade Center. [A '70s menu for Windows via Typofile; A pamphlet for the world Trade Center Club via eBay] Baum, along with partners Michael Whitman and Dennis Sweeney, created 22 restaurants for the World Trade Center, many of which were casual operations located in the basement concourse. But the most elaborate Baum creation was Windows on the World, which occupied the 106th and 107th floors of the North Tower. The restaurateur hired architect Warren Platner to design a grand, modern space. [ Windows on the World Ephemera from Milton] Graphic designer Milton Glaser (of the I? NY and Brooklyn Brewery logos) contributed the menu artwork, dishware patterns, and logo. Barbara Kafka picked the plateware and silverware. And James Beard and Jacques Pepin helped develop the menu. The Port Authority then signed a master lease with Inhilco, a subsidiary of Hilton International, to run the World Trade Center restaurants. Baum and his team then moved to Inhilco to put their plans into action. [Kevin Zraly talking to guests in 1976 via The Nestle Library] Windows on the World opened on April 19, 1976, as a private club with 1, 500 members who paid dues based on their relationship with and proximity to the World Trade Center — WTC tenants paid $360 a year, and those who lived outside the "port district" paid just $50. But anyone could visit Windows on the World in the early days if they paid $10 in dues, plus $3 per guest. [The Hors d'Oeuvrerie via The Nestle Library] In addition to the main dining room, where a table d'hote dinner was $13. 50, Windows on the World had an Hors d'Oeuvrerie that served global small plates. [Cellar in the Sky via Baum + Whiteman] One offshoot, dubbed the Cellar in the Sky, offered an expansive wine list from young gun sommelier Kevin Zraly, plus a five-course menu of American and European fare. In a New York magazine cover story titled "The Most Spectacular Restaurant in the World, " Gael Greene describes the experience of entering the dining room: Every view is brand-new? a miracle. In the Statue of Liberty Lounge, the harbor's heroic blue sweep makes you feel like the ruler of some extraordinary universe. All the bridges of Brooklyn and Queens and Staten Island stretch across the restaurant's promenade. Even New Jersey looks good from here. Down below are all of Manhattan and helicopters and clouds. Everything to hate and fear is invisible. Pollution is but a cloud. A fire raging below Washington Square is a dream, silent, almost unreal, though you can see the arc of water licking flame. Default is a silly nightmare. There is no doggy doo. Garbage is an illusion. [Cellar in the Sky via Baum + Whiteman] Windows on the World was an immediate success. New York Times critic Mimi Sheraton describes the dining experience: Unquestionably the best thing about this place, other than the toy-town views of bridges and rivers, skylines and avenues is the menu. It represents an international crossroads of gastronomy, stylish and contemporary, and perfectly suited to this particular setting and this particular city. The restaurant quickly became a favorite hangout of high-powered businessmen, politicians, and celebrities. By the end of its first year, Windows on the World had a waiting list that was fully booked for six months straight. [The view facing west via The David Blahg] In 2001, Joe Baum's creative partner Michael Whiteman told the Times: "In a way, it was the symbol of the beginning of the turnaround of New York.. were successful because New York wanted us to be successful. It couldn't stand another heartbreaking failure. '' [The original Windows on the World crew via Suzette Howes] Joe Baum was only involved in the management of Windows on the World during its first three years in business, but the restaurant sailed along through the '80s and early '90s. During this period, the restaurant employed a number of chefs that would go on to find success on their own, including Kurt Gutenbrunner, Christian Delouvrier, Eberhard Müller, and Cyril Reynaud. The critics were not always kind to Windows on the World, but year after year, it remained one of the top-grossing restaurants in the country. On February 26, 1993, a group of terrorists detonated a bomb inside a truck that was parked below the North Tower. The bombing killed six people, and injured over a thousand. The explosion damaged storing and receiving areas used by Windows on the World, and the restaurant was forced to shutter. Hilton International gave up its lease after the bombing, and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey asked 35 restaurant groups for proposals for the Windows on the World space. [a New York article on the revamp from July 15, 1996] On May 13, 1994, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey announced that the Joseph Baum & Michael Whiteman Company had won the contract. Almost two decades after opening the restaurant, Joe Baum was back in control of Windows on the World. [Cellar in the Sky, 1996 via Baum + Whiteman] Baum and his partners tapped Hugh Hardy to create a dining room that was more colorful and whimsical than the original. Unlike the old Windows, which served Continental fare with a sharp American influence, the new restaurant offered a globetrotting menu from chef Philippe Feret. [The Greatest Bar on Earth via Skyscrapercity] The Hors d'Oeuvrerie was replaced by The Greatest Bar on Earth, a splashy space that had three bars and a menu of fun international fare. Before the reopening in summer of 1996, Baum told the Times: "When Windows first opened it was a great restaurant for New tourists came, they came mostly because New Yorkers were proud to bring them here. We want Windows to be a great restaurant for New Yorkers again. " [Windows on the World in 1996 via the Container List] Feret left Windows in May of 1997, and he was replaced by Michael Lomonaco, a chef that had earned raves at the '21' Club. A few months after he took control of the kitchen, Ruth Reichl bestowed two stars on Windows on the World. In 1999, Cellar in the Sky was replaced by Wild Blue, a cozy American restaurant, that was also overseen by Lomonaco. In his review, William Grimes wrote: "When night falls, Wild Blue feels like a plush space capsule hurtling through the cosmos. " 79 Windows of the World employees died on September 11, 2001. Michael Lomonaco was conducting an errand in the concourse of the World Trade Center when the first plane hit. The chef was evacuated from the building immediately, and witnessed the second plane hit the WTC from the street. Lomonaco then headed north and made it up to his home on the Upper East Side, where he immediately started figuring out who was working that day. 2001: Lomonaco and His Team Search for Employees: By the following week, a Windows on the World hotline was set up at the restaurant's sister establishment, Beacon, and Lomonaco and his head of human resources, Elizabeth Ortiz, began working to find the 50 employees that were unaccounted for. Lomonaco soon helped set up an relief fund called Windows of Hope, which raised over $22 million for the families of Windows workers. [A screengrab of the Windows on the World website from 2002] Windows on the World co-owner David Emil opened a Theater District restaurant in 2002 called Noche, which was staffed by several Windows employees, including Lomonaco — it closed in 2004. Some of the Windows employees opened a Noho restaurant in 2006 called Colors — it's still open, but only for parties and private events. For the past seven years, Lomonaco has been the co-owner and executive chef of Porter House in the Time Warner Center, and he recently opened Center Bar, a casual spinoff on the same floor as Porter House. The Port Authority has ruled out the possibility of putting a fine dining restaurant like Windows on the World at the top of the new World Trade Center, which is slated to open in 2014. Earlier this week, Eater interviewed Michael Lomonaco about his experiences on the 106th and 107th floors of the North Tower. Here's an extended look back: [Michael Lomonaco via Porter House] What did it mean to you to get that job at Windows on the World? Michael Lomonaco: Well I'd never been there before. I'd never worked there. I'm a native New Yorker, and I remember very clearly when Windows on the World opened. I have very clear memories of that, even the review that they did in New York magazine. But one of the key memories I had always had was Cellar in the Sky, because the original Cellar in the Sky was a prix fixe restaurant — that was pretty new to New York. And it was advertised weekly in the dining section of the Times — they advertised the menu as changed every week, or every other week. That ad always stuck in my mind, how they promoted Cellar in the Sky. It just sounded so incredible. So fast-forward to the '80s. I got out of culinary school in 1984, and Windows on the World had become this giant place that was historic, and I'd never been there. I'd never gone to the Cellar. I'd never gone to Windows. In fact, the first time that I had ever gone up there was at the reopening in 1996 when they hosted an industry night, and I went up there for an evening. I knew Joe Baum pretty well in my days at '21. ' Joe was a regular and I was introduced to him, and he was a very passionate, warm, hospitable guy. He really was magnetic, in many ways. I had some sense of what was going on there. In the early '90s, when I met Joe, it was no longer associated with us. But then in 1996, when they did the big reopening, I was still at '21' and had started doing television at the Food Network, so I was in a transitional period. [Windows on the World in 1976 via the Container List] I'd left '21' in the last quarter of '96 to film Michael's Place at the Food Network. Then in '97, I was introduced to David Emil and Joe Baum. My relationship began with them at that time, and I really had some long talks with David Emil and with Joe Baum about joining them and becoming part of their team. I was the " chef-director. " This was Joe Baum's title for me. Direct all of the chefs. We had Windows on the World, there was Cellar in the Sky, and there was the Greatest Bar on Earth, and it was all private dining on the 106th floor, so there was quite a team of people. So that, for me, in '97 when I joined them, was really very exciting. It was very exciting because it was such a historic place, it was such a beloved place, and it was really at the pinnacle of its own opportunity to reinvent itself again. And that's the opportunity I took. That was the great step forward for me — it was the chance to reinvent Windows on the World. And, in fact, we shuttered Cellar in the Sky in '98, and reopened the space as Wild Blue in '99. It became a very kind of beloved space. It's small, 55 seats. Were you proud of your work up there? Absolutely. First of all, I had a great team. You know, there was a great group of people. There were 450, 500 people that worked up at Windows on the World at one time. And I had a great team with me. My chef de cuisine is still with me today — Michael Ammirati. He came with me. Michael, who would be here now at Porter House, he was a key component, because it was really just the two of us with a culinary team that was 35 people, trying to turn it to a new direction. I think we were able to fulfill, to some degree, an original vision that Joe Baum had for Windows on the World. You know, I thought that Joe's vision was that Windows on the World should be a beacon of American cooking, on American products, on American foods. And, also, shine a spotlight on local ingredients. So we started working with the local suppliers at the greenmarket in 1997, and a bunch of the produce that we bought came from the greenmarket at the World Trade Center. This is something that fit into my vision of what we could do, and also Joe's vision. And I'll tell you, in 1998, we were talking about planting an herb garden and a vegetable garden on the roof of the World Trade Center. Sustainable cuisine, sustainable cooking was something that Joe started talking about back in '97, probably before, and it was really a big topic when we met and talked about ideas. On a Saturday night, we could do 700 or 800 covers, but all of that was from-scratch cooking. Everything was cooked à la minute. And we did that with a great team of cooks in the kitchen, and our culinary chef staff. We just did it through organization, and sheer will that we would cook everything à la minute. [The Greatest Bar in the World via The Container List] Cellar in the Sky reopened in 1996. It was expensive. It was a prix fixe, $125-a-head dinner and it was kind of staid. It wasn't getting the traffic, because there were so many more things happening in the culinary world. And so what we did in 1998 was we closed Cellar in the Sky with the idea of turning it into an American chophouse, and that's what Wild Blue was. 55 seats and a very aggressive wine-by-the-glass program. We served, I think, really delicious American chophouse fair. Prime beef, game birds, duck, squab, and it was all family-style. It was really kind of a fun place that became more of a locals restaurant. The tourist crowd, the visitor crowd would go to Windows, which had dramatic views. Wild Blue also had dramatic views, but on the south side of the building, facing the Statue of Liberty. We had a very kind of local crowd. I'm very proud of the work we did there, and I'm very proud of the people I met and had the chance to work with. Do you have a favorite memory from working on the 106th and 107th floors? A real favorite memory was the annual holiday party that David Emil and Joe Baum hosted, and that was held in January at Windows. That's where everyone who worked there was invited to bring members of the family and come to one of the private dining rooms, which could seat 500 people, if not more. That holiday party was a fantastic memory. Everyone came with family. Everyone who worked there got dressed up. We had people from the around the world at Windows, and it was an incredibly global staff. The team would refer to themselves as the U. N. of restaurants. They had such diversity in the workforce, the staff that worked there. And there were more than 60 languages that were spoken among the staff. You could alway find someone who could act as a translator for any guest who needed help. This diversity was exciting. But on that day when we had our holiday party, it was really wonderful to see all of the people we worked with. Much of them came in the finest clothes that they wore in their original, native homelands. It was like being at a party at the U. with beautiful clothing from around the world — from Africa, from Asia, from India, and Latin America. Just a beautiful thing where people were proud of where they worked. Everyone had a good time. You devoted a lot of your life after 9/11 to working with the families of the employees that died, and the employees that were displaced. Did you think that, after a year or two, there would be another Windows on the World? Did you think that you would be able to work together again? There was a lot of pain and loss felt by everyone and it was different for each individual. We lost 79 of our co-workers. But I think that there was some sense of time to recover. It's a very difficult question to answer, because I think it's personal to each individual. You've got to see it from this point of view: There were people lost at Windows who had family members who worked there who weren't lost. We had a family that worked in our kitchen, there were four brothers, the Gomez brothers, two were lost and two were not. There was a lot of recovery. I think the pain of recovery leads to, "We want to get back to where we were... " I think there was a sense of people trying to stay together. There was also a lot of confusion in the aftermath thinking, "What is the right thing to do? " It was something I wish could've happened overnight. For me, I wish that this never would have happened, of course, but there were different configurations of people trying to stay together. We had Noche in Times Square with nearly 50 of our co-workers. That's a small number compared to Windows Hospitality Group, which was one of the largest in the world in sheer volume and size. So, 50 people working together was a comforting thing for some of us to be able to continue to work together. Others went down to the restaurant on Lafayette Street — there were groups that felt they wanted to keep some of their friends and co-workers together. The loss of something so immense was a shock in itself. 12 years later, what is your relationship with the families of the employees you worked with? As in any situation, you know some people better than others. You have to cultivate some have to imagine 450 people working together. I'm just trying to stress that that's a lot of people. There are some people that I knew quite well, and I am in touch with some of the family members of those who lost. I do keep in touch with some. There are others who, we work together, and we have some contact during the year. I have a few of my co-workers who were with me at Windows, who now work with me at Porter House. If this is something that can answer your Windows of Hope Relief Fund, we raised 22 million dollars with the help of Tom Valenti, David Emil, the board members, and the group of people who were with me. That fund is still paying for education for 150 children who are eligible to receive education grants from that fund, every year. A great portion of the original funds went to emergency aid to those families who lost someone on that day. There was emergency aid and health insurance that the funds paid for, for the first five years. The original mission was emergency aid, health insurance, and educational opportunities for the children of the victims, of the food service worker victims. All of the food service workers who were identified, of which there were 102, Windows being the greatest. Just so you understand, when we established that fund, we worked with the Community Service Society of New York to administer the families' needs, and I think the most important thing that we could give them was a sense of dignity and a respect for their loss, and maintain the respect for their privacy. So, in a way, it kind of cut off having personal relationships with people that were included in this fund. Do you think New York will ever have a restaurant like Windows on the World again? Oh yeah, that's the spirit of New York and our nation and humanity. To build, to create, to entertain our guests — that's what we do. Windows was incredible, and because it had really been reborn in its incarnation in 1996, that version of Windows wasn't meant to be exclusive. It was a very inclusive and democratic restaurant. The prices were not exorbitantly high, and people could come in and go to the bar and have a Coke and having this incredible experience of seeing the city. It was very open, hospitable, and friendly. I think in that spirit, New York will have something like this. I'm very happy to talk to you, because what I want you to understand day, aside from the fact that I survived greatest thing I could offer is doing what I was doing before, so that the memory of my friends and colleagues lost that day have honor. I feel privileged to wake up every day and do what I do. What I do, in part, is a tribute to my friends and colleagues. [ A view from Windows on the World] Further Reading: · From Windows on the World to Windows of Hope [Thirteen] · Lomonco Escaped 9/11 but Dedicates Cooking to Friends he Lost [NYDN] · Windows That Rose So Close To the Sun [NYT] · Drinking at 1, 300 Ft: A 9/11 Story About Wine and Wisdom [Esquire] · Ruth Reichl Remembers Windows on the World [NYM] · Windows on the World: The Wine Community's True North [Wine News] · The Legacy of Joe Baum [Edible Manhattan] · Windows on the World Opening Report (Subscription required) [NYT] · Gael Greene's First Visit [Insatiable Critic] · Mimi Sheraton's First Visit (Subscription required) [NYT] · Gael Greene's Review from November of 1976 [Google Books] · Mimi Sheraton's Second Visit (Subscription Required) [NYT] · Bryan Miller's One Star Review from 1987 [NYT] · Bryan Miller's Review from 1990 [NYT] · Renovation Report from 1996: Can the Food Ever Match the View? [NYT] · Ruth Reichl's Two Star Review from 1997 [NYT] Windows on the World World Trade Center, New York, NY.

More jumpers came from the north tower becuase of less room above the imapct the smoke and heat and less space was a lot worse and not to mention how much longer the tower took to collapse. Also the north towers stairwells and elevator shafts above the 92nd floor were cut off so no one had a chance unlike in the south tower. The jews did this. He better count his blessings. Rip to those poor souls. Originally published in the September 2011 issue. This story needed an ending before it could find its first sentence. So please forgive me for delivering it ten years overdue. Maybe it shouldn't have been so hard to write. Looking back, it had everything: merriment, adventure, and a journey to the top of the world. It contained a crash into ground zero on one of the darkest days in America's history and a search for fulfillment afterward. Yet for ten years, the words were trapped inside me and I couldn't get them out. We all know the feeling of wanting to do something so well and so badly that we try too hard and can't do it at all. In the end, though, there's no trick to being yourself. So I'm simply going to tell this story the way it happened. It started fourteen years ago, when a new editor was hired to guide Esquire. The magazine was in distress. You might find only a dozen pages of advertising in an issue, and most of them were pitching hair-replacement schemes and promises to resurrect lost sex drive. The new editor called upon a group of writers whom he'd assembled over the years to join him. He was on a mission to resurrect a great American magazine, and he wanted good ideas. One of mine was to become the Perfect Man. The concept was to identify the subjects every man should know, and then have experts in each field show me how to master them. I was certainly up for the task. The only reason I call myself the Perfect Man, I used to joke, is that I have so many flaws to correct. We all know the feeling of wanting to do something so well and so badly that we try too hard and can't do it at all. The idea turned into a monthly column, and what a blast it was. The legendary Jack LaLanne showed me how to get in shape and eat right. I learned how to project my voice from boxing announcer Michael Buffer; how to smoke ribs at the Jack Daniel's World Championship Invitational Barbecue; how to walk with grace from a Victoria's Secret model; how to prolong my orgasms from specialists in tantric sex. (My wife is eternally grateful. ) The last area I poked my nose into was wine. Wine makes a lot of men uncomfortable. It's not as if sweat would bubble above my upper lip every time a waiter handed me a wine list. But I always felt uncertain and small in those moments, especially if I was taking out a woman or hosting a group. It was much easier to crack open a beer and mock snooty wine drinkers for their full-bodied aromatic claptrap than it was to admit I didn't have a clue. But in wine, you pay for your ignorance. A haughty waiter can roll his eyes and make you feel smaller than a raisin. A fast-talking one can chump you into ordering a bottle that will launch the check into the stratosphere. Anyway, the editor generously sent me off to wine school to finalize my education in self-improvement. In return, I agreed to showcase what I learned by becoming the guy who recommends wine to diners at an upscale restaurant. The sommelier. Then I'd write a story that would show how, with a little effort, any man could feel comfortable around wine. The Windows on the World Wine School, the best in the city, was down the corridor from the famous restaurant by that name, at the top of the World Trade Center. The elevator took fifty-eight seconds to reach the 107th floor, and you could always tell who was taking the ride for the first time. Halfway up, everybody's stomach did the same sudden somersault, and the rookies would grasp in panic for support... and then return the smiles of the vets remembering their own first trip. The classroom was a ballroom filled with tables topped with columns of empty wineglasses. Everyone who entered wandered first to the long stretch of floor-to-ceiling windows. On a sunny day or moonlit night, the view of lower Manhattan from Windows on the World was like the first time you heard Frank Sinatra singing "New York, New York. " It was amusing to look down at helicopters. Just thinking about the acrobat who once walked a three-quarter-inch steel cable between the tops of the Twin Towers made you wonder what wasn't possible. You had to hand it to the architect who envisioned that millions of people would travel millions of miles to dine some 1, 300 feet above sea level. For a time, no restaurant in the United States took in more money, and no restaurant on the planet sold more wine. Courtesy Kevin Zraly The guy who ran the wine school was, and still is, sort of a cross between a stand-up comic and Monty Hall from Let's Make a Deal. His name is Kevin Zraly. I could never describe all that Zraly passed on during this eight-week course in 1999. Time and a storm has eroded most of the memories. But a writer who prided himself on never keeping a diary once told me that "the good shit sticks. " Nine years later, I'm left with what stuck. So here's a story that gets to Zraly's core: As a young man, Kevin was interviewed by the legendary restaurateur Joe Baum for the position of cellar master at Windows. Baum's first question was "So, Kevin, what can you tell me about wine? " Now, that may appear to be a casual way to start an interview, but it's a terrifying question for an applicant who's depending on the answer to get a job. The question's too big. What possible answer is there? "I like to drink it, " Zraly replied. He knew how to shrink the complex to the simple—a good quality to have if you're going to introduce people to wine. For example, he'd point to the three major varieties of white wine—Riesling, sauvignon blanc, and chardonnay—and ask you to visualize them as skim milk, whole milk, and cream. Before you'd even tasted the wines, you had an idea of where they stood from light to heavy. Then he did the same for reds. Pinot noir: skim milk. Merlot: whole milk. Cabernet sauvignon: cream. With that information alone, you could go into a restaurant, order a thick sirloin, and know that it was wiser to muscle up to the steak with a hearty cabernet than a willowy Riesling. Classes passed quickly, and the wines that Zraly exposed us to began to work their magic. They encouraged us to go out and seek, to lose ourselves in a world that no one person could ever fully explore. In wine, you pay for your ignorance. The first day I got lost was a memorable one. April 20, 1999. When people who loved wine heard that I was attempting to become a sommelier, they immediately took me in as a long-lost brother. I had been invited to a wine-tasting lunch at the great restaurant Daniel, where eleven wines from Chateau Lagrange, in the French region of Bordeaux, were to be poured. One of the first things you need to know in order to function at a tasting is how to roll the wine around your mouth, spit it into a bucket, and define the flavors left behind. This allows you to discern the different styles and tastes without getting drunk. Unfortunately, novice that I was, I hadn't quite figured out how to spit and taste by the time of that lunch. So I drank all eleven glasses. Then, in a warm fog, I walked downtown to class at Windows on the World, where another dozen wines were poured, then drifted off to dinner with a winemaker, during which several more bottles were opened. It was like the best day of school you could imagine, when you also discover you have an enormous family that you never knew about. The Brotherhood of the Grape, someone called it. I learned, I laughed, I embraced. It was one of those days that end with you peeling off your clothes, lying down, and drifting off to sleep happy to be alive. And I did just that, completely oblivious to the fact that early that same day, twelve students and a teacher were gunned down at Columbine High School. Getty Images There's only one way to know which bottle of wine to order at a restaurant or buy for a friend: taste it. Problem is, how do you taste them all? Something like sixty-five hundred French wines alone can be purchased in the United States. Tens of thousands of labels are imported from Italy, Portugal, Spain, Germany, Hungary, Austria, New Zealand, South Africa, Greece, Argentina, and New Zealand. Wine is produced in all fifty states. Where would you start? There are good answers to this question. I was most impressed with the shortest: Vinexpo. Every other year in Bordeaux, winemakers from around the world pour their juice for more than fifty thousand buyers to sample. By brazenly promising to taste nearly every wine on the planet over a few short days, I wrangled some expense money from the editor and jetted off. My bravado evaporated the moment I stepped into the convention center and felt the bottom of my jaw dangling beneath my balls. I faced a hall that was—no exaggeration—a mile long and two football fields wide. I'm usually the type of guy who never says no unless you ask me if I've had enough. But this... was almost too much. I tasted, spit, and scribbled in a notepad as if I were one of the chosen few, the Jedi who could taste a wine blindfolded and tell you everything about it. But it wasn't long before I was lost in the maze. My first day would've ended without a memory of a single wine if I hadn't stumbled upon a man named Anthony Dias Blue. The pourers treated him as if he were a celebrity, because when Blue highlights a wine in the press, that label is elevated above tens of thousands of competitors. As I followed him around, I noticed that when certain pourers saw Blue, they reached under the table and pulled out bottles the rest of us weren't getting. I glued myself to his side and the pourers had no choice but to show good etiquette and fill my glass beside his. That was how I found out about La Turque, a wine made by Guigal in the Rhône region in France. Tasting a $400 wine when you've been cutting your teeth on $20 bottles will widen your eyes. But for me, this wine was bigger than that. La Turque opened my ears. It made me hear music. As I drank, Edith Piaf was singing "No Regrets" right out of that glass, and believe me, she was in her prime. That might sound a little loopy. But people have found crazier ways to describe the taste of wine. I've heard praise for the "barnyard odors" in a glass of burgundy. A sommelier once asked me if I had picked up "brussels sprouts" in the bouquet of a red wine from Chile. And a wine magazine editor once assured me that there was "a hint of Tasmanian black pepper" (my italics) in a glass of Shiraz. I could never get excited talking up brussels sprouts, and describing wine with adjectives like metallic, nutty, tart, floral, and woody just wasn't me. So I began to correlate wine with music, and to this day the melodies have stayed with me. As the months passed, I scribbled comparisons between wines and songs on scraps of paper constantly. I tossed these notes in a box along with pictures of some of the many wineries I visited when the opportunities arose and I could coax more expense money out of the editor. Ella Fitzgerald singing scat is wonderful champagne. Luciano Pavarotti is a great Barolo. Pick up a Robert Weil Riesling Auslese and you might hear Sade singing "The Sweetest Taboo. " I once observed a woman in a supermarket checkout line buying a couple of bottles of mass-market California merlot and asked her if, by chance, she happened to like the music of Barry Manilow. "I do, " she replied. "How did you know? " I once brought my wine-to-music theory to the home of Monte Lipman, chairman of Universal Republic Records, and it wasn't long before everyone was discovering Joe Jackson's voice in a glass of fine California chardonnay. Edith Piaf was singing "No Regrets" right out of that glass, and believe me, she was in her prime. The beauty of learning wine by music is that you're never ignorant. You have an opinion that's as good as anyone else's. If a sommelier brings you a wine list and you have no idea what to order, you can always say, "We'd like a bottle of Louie Armstrong singing 'What a Wonderful World. '" Suddenly, the pressure has been reversed. (He's right on track if he brings you a bottle of Lalou Bize-Leroy burgundy. ) Stick to the music and you'll never get bogged down in a conversation with some wine geek that includes the phrase malolactic fermentation. But there is some technique involved in tasting. You can help your ears tune in to the music by getting the most out of your nose and tongue. What you want to do is pick up your wineglass by the stem (not the bowl) and swirl. The air will turn up the volume on the aroma. There are chemical reasons for this, but maybe it's easier to understand by imagining yourself on a hot, listless day. In the distance there's a guy barbecuing, but he's too far away for you to see or smell a thing. If, however, a strong wind were to blow in your direction, your nostrils might twitch at the airborne molecules of 'cue. So stick your nose in that glass and inhale. But equally crucial are the taste buds aligning the insides of your mouth. Don't gulp the juice straight down—the flavors will zoom by. Let the wine coat the inside of your mouth before you swallow, and you'll soon be tuned in to the music. Whether you like a certain song is up to you. But if the bass in a song were so overpowering that it ran roughshod over the melody or the lyrics, everybody would know something was wrong. It's no different with wine. The winemaker is like a record producer looking for harmony and balance in flavor. The acidity in a glass of New Zealand sauvignon blanc should not squash the fruit. Nor should the tannins that come off red grape skins, the ones that bring a dry sensation to your palate, block out the fruit in a cabernet sauvignon. There are critics who score wines numerically, as if each bottle were a math test. But just as a song becomes magical when it coincides with a moment that has meaning in your life, a wine doesn't need ninety-seven points to be fantastic. Meet the woman you want to spend the rest of your life with and the $12 pinot noir you raised when you first looked into her eyes becomes priceless. The first night I was allowed to walk the floor as an apprentice sommelier at Windows on the World, I saw a three-hundred-pound man in his best suit get down on his knee in the middle of the dining room and propose to his fiancée. When she accepted and they embraced, there was applause all around. That's what made the place special. This was a restaurant that got a thousand calls for reservations each day, had twenty-five hundred chairs and seventy cooks. Seven hundred pounds of shrimp were served each week, and three thousand forks were washed each day. And yet, despite the restaurant's size and the enormous volume of food that left the kitchen, the staff made every diner feel like the experience was not only intimate but uniquely his or her own. The woman who accepted the proposal that night glowed like a queen. It would be my job to help maintain that glow. I had the good fortune to be assigned to one of the Jedi. Windows on the World's Andrea Immer had won a highly competitive contest in 1997 to be crowned the best sommelier in America. She was five feet two inches of pixie and pure grace, and the confidence she had on the floor reminded you of the way a great athlete owns a field. You got the sense that diners returned just to see her. Meet the woman you want to spend the rest of your life with and the $12 pinot noir you raised when you first looked into her eyes becomes priceless. When she asked if I'd brought along a waiter's corkscrew, I produced a sleek one that had been given to me as a gift and had the look of a new Jaguar driving out of the showroom. "I'll bet the blade is really sharp, " she said. "You might want to start out with one that's been used. " There are many skills that a great sommelier must master. But to me, the most important is the ability to remove the fear from diners who know little or nothing about wine. People have good reason to be nervous. Maybe it's the link to royalty in the past, but wine has a way of bringing out that I'm better than you quality in people you wouldn't want to have a drink with. But mostly it's the prices that keep people on edge. It may be strange to say this now, but when it came to wine, Windows was the safest place in the world to be. You'd never be made to feel uncomfortable if you didn't pronounce a wine correctly. You'd never be recommended a wine just because it wasn't selling and the manager wanted it out the door. You'd never be chumped into buying a pricey one to jack up the bill. Andrea had the ability to magically intuit how much you'd feel comfortable spending and then find a way to match your food with the best wine your money could buy. Her goal, it seemed, was to prove you could love wine as much as she did. As I followed Andrea around the floor, I was amazed at how her passion merged with precision. There was a certain way the wine bottle was to be carried from the cellar, the bottom grasped in the hand, the body cradled like a football inside the forearm. There was a correct way to introduce a wine by holding the label in front of the taster and reciting its name, region, country, and vintage. A correct way to open a bottle with the waiter's corkscrew, circumnavigating the knife blade around the lower lip and then using the blade to peel the foil off over the top of the cork. Chardonnay had to be poured to exactly the fattest part of the glass, allowing room for the drinker to swirl without spilling. It would take me pages to describe all the rules and procedures, but they contributed to something special, because diners were at the same time made to relax and feel like royalty. Redux Andrea made it all look so easy that when she asked me if I'd like to try serving a table myself, I accepted—without bothering to tell her that I had never removed a cork with a waiter's corkscrew. My first table was a group of guys who were ordering steaks and laughing so loudly that it didn't seem possible to screw up. The table reminded me of an Australian party, so I recommended a Shiraz from Down Under that wailed like Tina Turner. I circled the corkscrew's blade around the foil covering the lip, but when I went to strip the foil over the top of the cork, I fumbled and the sharp new blade sliced into my thumb and sent blood spurting. "You okay? " Andrea called from outside the door of the men's room as I rinsed off my bloody palm. It was beyond embarrassing. I stared in the mirror, shook my head, and tried to smile. An acrobat had once lain down on his back on a steel cable between the Twin Towers a quarter of a mile above the sidewalk. The Perfect Man couldn't even open a bottle of wine at the same height without bloodying himself. AP There was never a day that I entered the World Trade Center when I didn't think about Philippe Petit's tightrope walk between the towers. Even now, after watching snippets of it hundreds of times on YouTube, it still gives me thrills. The walk was not sanctioned, and there was no safety net. Petit spent six years in secretive planning, observing the towers as they came up and posing as a construction worker and a journalist to take measurements and check out the wind currents. Early on the morning of August 7, 1974, he and his posse hid in the World Trade Center and used a crossbow to first shoot fishing line across the gap between the towers, then pull successively thicker lengths of rope across that could support the cable. At 7:15 a. m., after the 450-pound cable had been stretched taut between the towers, he stepped out. The sonavabitch didn't just walk. He danced. At times, both of his feet bounded off the cable. He bowed on a knee. He lay on his back with his balancing pole balanced on his chest, and relaxed as if he were in the grass of Central Park. When he was asked later why he did it, he replied, "If I see three oranges, I have to juggle. And if I see two towers, I have to walk. " I took inspiration from his preparation, showing up early for business conferences so I could practice opening dozens of bottles consecutively with my waiter's corkscrew until I could do it in my sleep. I learned to discreetly point to prices on the menu as I spoke about wines so the host could let me know if my recommendations were within his or her budget without ever having to mention the cost. I wanted to connect every diner with the grandeur of the journey from wine dunce to sommelier. I wanted you to understand what it was like to try to drink every wine at Vinexpo and bump into Edith Piaf. Sometimes I got carried away with diners who knew more than a little about wine, entering prolonged discussions over exactly which hard-driving California cab could release "Freebird" in their souls. In times like those, the general manager, Glenn Vogt, would call me over, put his arm around me, and let me know that it was great to see an entire table looking at the wine list as if it were a jukebox, but in the meantime four tables had been seated and the diners appeared to be very thirsty. It was time to step out on my own. Glenn and the chef, Michael Lomonaco, knew just the right place to hang the high wire. Wild Blue was a romantic restaurant set alongside Windows on the World. It had the same floor-to-ceiling windows, but it was not a tourist attraction. It was an intimate dining room that New Yorkers knew about and returned to because it was the place where Lomonaco had thrown his heart and soul. It was his home within Windows, which made me proud when he made it mine. My first evening as the sommelier was a Thursday night in May, 2001. The first seating was a couple celebrating their twentieth anniversary. The husband was a friend of mine, but his wife had never seen my face and therefore had no idea that I knew who she was. I had them seated at a table overlooking the necklace of lights on a bridge straddling the East River. Then I approached them in a suit tailored especially for the evening with a bottle cradled against my chest. The Perfect Man couldn't even open a bottle of wine at the same height without bloodying himself. "Good evening, " I said. "On the occasion of your anniversary, all of us at Windows on the World would like to present you with a taste of Lordeaux champagne. It is served at the Assemblée Nationale in France and is ordinarily unavailable in the United States. Never before has it been poured at these heights, and never shall it be poured here again. " The wife knew little about champagne, but she understood something much deeper, and as she looked at her husband, her eyes welled up. If on that night I possessed one-trillionth the audacity of Philippe Petit on the high wire, it still was big juice. I simply had no fear of wine. If you asked me about the fifteen hundred wines on the Windows list, I could talk to you from amarone to zinfandel. Pick your music and I'd pour. I even found humor in my missteps. When I spilled a few drops on a table, I apologized with gusto. "That is unforgivable! Let me bring you another bottle on the house! " "Hey, " called a guy at the next table. "Why don't you spill some here! " I spread such joy on that evening that people actually took money from their wallets and slid it into the palm of my hand as they shook to say goodbye. Even as I protested—"No, you don't understand, that's not why I'm doing this"—they insisted, squeezing my palm shut, imploring, "Take it, please. " A week later, a woman whom I served that night came back with some friends and asked in all seriousness, "Is Cal working tonight? " Perhaps I should have started writing the story the following day. But there was no deadline, I was occupied with other work, and I went on vacation over the summer. I figured I'd clear out time in September. I didn't know any of the seventy-three staff workers at Windows on the World who died on September 11 after the hijacked plane smashed into the North Tower. I didn't know any of the waiters who were serving seventy-one guests at a technology conference breakfast. I didn't know any of the people who chose to jump rather than choke and burn, nor any of the firemen who went up when everybody else was coming down, nor any of the more than three thousand who perished. I do know a man who was in the bathroom on the eighty-first floor when the airliner struck, who got down the stairwell in time to see Tower 2 imploding in the reflection off the windows of the Millennium Hotel across the street, and who dove for cover screaming the names of his wife and son as the weight of the World Trade Center fell on his head. When my friend Michael described the experience, we both knew that there was no way he could even begin to convey the depth of emotions he'd passed through on that day. So there's very little reason to bring up my feelings—especially since I was five hundred miles away. I can tell you I felt the need to be there. A few days later, at dusk, a friend of a friend managed to get me on a National Guard Humvee that toured the site. Even after all the images I'd seen on television, it was unrecognizable. I understood why people in New York who were watching the towers fall on television had left their living rooms to watch it from their balconies or windows or rooftops, just to confirm that it was truly happening. We drove through military checkpoints, police checkpoints, fire-department checkpoints. I stared at the monumental tangle of steel and concrete and realized the hijackers had planned to kill with the same intense detail that Philippe Petit had employed to make our spirits soar. For hours, we toured the sight in virtual silence. At one point, we passed some graffiti that read: O BIN, YOU DONE FUCKED UP. As my friend Michael had run down city streets covered in dust consisting of the remains of people who'd been disintegrated, he tried to grasp some meaning from what was happening. This was all part of a pattern of human cruelty and killing that has gone on since the beginning of time, he told himself. He just happened to be very close to this one. Some part of me was not the same as it was on 9/10. It would have been very easy for me to kill anyone attached to this in the slightest way. The evening turned into morning and I never did get my balance. When I saw a parking garage filled with cars covered with that same gray dust, I turned to the National Guard captain and foolishly asked, "Why don't people come and get their cars? " "Cal, " the captain said, putting a hand on my shoulder to balance me and leaving it there for a while. "A lot of those cars don't have owners anymore. " I can't be sure that wine has ever tasted the same to me. Not long after, a benefit was organized for the families of those who'd worked and lost their lives at Windows on the World. Elite wineries in California donated cases of their best stuff to be auctioned off. The city's great chefs volunteered to cook for the occasion at Robert DeNiro's restaurant, Tribeca Grill. New York's finest sommeliers signed on to pour. Glenn Vogt called and asked me if I'd stand in as the sommelier of Wild Blue. Glenn had arrived at the World Trade Center the morning of 9/11 to see bodies and debris hurtling down from the sky. Michael Lomonaco would be at the benefit only because he stopped to get a pair of eyeglasses on 9/11, delaying his regular arrival for the fifty-eight-second elevator ride up to 107. At the benefit I poured fabulous wines from Screaming Eagle, Harlan Estate, Colgin Cellars, Bryant Family Vineyard, and Sine Qua Non, all the while thinking about the Muslim waiter at Windows who'd died in the carnage and whose wife gave birth to his son the following day. Hundreds of thousands of dollars were raised. Toward the end of the evening, the chefs were announced to great applause. Then the sommeliers. As my name was called out with a few others from Windows on the World, a few diners stepped out of their chairs to make it a standing ovation. Waves of emotion ran through me, incredible pride to have been touched by Windows, but also the feeling you get when you bite into a rotten pear. Yes, the evening was all about lifting spirits. But there was no escaping in that instant what an imposter I was. I was no sommelier. I had not lost my colleagues and my livelihood. I was a writer—and even worse, a writer who, at the moment, couldn't write. I'd spent many 3:00 a. m. 's staring at a blank computer screen searching for a first sentence. There was none. Nor was there a last. Everything in the middle was wine bottles falling end over end through space as bodies hurled by into the twisted jumble of wreckage. Months later, I went to interview the chef Mario Batali for another story, and I told him about my experience. If anyone would have a response to the one question I wanted answered, it would be Mario, for at heart he was a creator who knew how to bring very different ingredients together to make his food sing. "Is it possible, " I asked, "to write a story that balances the fun I had discovering wine with the horror of 9/11? " He was silent for a moment, then he slowly shook his head back and forth. "No. You'll never be able to do it, " he said. And then he paused and added, "but you've got to. " The editor who'd backed my journey didn't say a word—which only made it worse. After handing me one of the best years of my life and seeing the conflict it had smashed into, we both knew he was hoping for something extraordinary. I tried to jump-start the story like a dead battery by going off on my own to Portugal to do something I'd dreamed of: turning grapes into wine with my bare feet. Technology has made winemaking more efficient throughout the world, but the best ports are still made the old-fashioned way. After the grapes are picked, they're dropped into granite troughs called lagars that hold about two thousand gallons of juice. In the evenings, the pickers methodically march for a couple of hours. Then a free-for-all called liberdade erupts and a carnival in grape juice begins. I stepped into the lagar at Fonseca, marched for hours, and then threw myself into the party. We stamped our grape-stained handprints on each other's shirts and spun dizzily all night. When liberdade came to a close, one of the Portuguese grape pickers asked me where I was from. "New York, " I said. He blinked, said, "World Trade Center, " and came forward to embrace me. The woman next to him joined him in the embrace, as did the man behind her. The embrace grew larger and larger, men and women forming a collective hug around me up to our thighs in grape juice. And still, the world's understanding did not give me enough understanding to write. Nothing came, and in my guilt I'd find myself stammering to the editor that something soon would. But I knew the reality. I took the box of wine notes in my office down to the basement and buried it. My lies made my guilt feel like betrayal. More time passed. In 2004, the hilarious movie Sideways, about two guys on a road trip through California wine country, came out to great fanfare. Wine bars started sprouting all over America. More and more people were becoming aware of wine and less afraid of it. The editor called me in to tell me that the story might no longer be relevant, perhaps a last-ditch attempt to wrench it out of me. I went to my basement to dredge up my wine notes and found that they had been soaked by a rainstorm and were now black with mold. The fifth anniversary of 9/11 arrived and an extraordinary magazine cover appeared in my mailbox: an illustration of Philippe Petit with his long balancing pole on an empty white background. There was no tightrope. There were no Twin Towers. He was trying to balance himself on nothingness. Which is exactly what writing this story would be like—trying to walk a tightrope that didn't have any rope. There was no tightrope. He was trying to balance himself on nothingness. Time had only made the world more bewildering. There was a war declared on a country that didn't attack us. The world that had hugged me in a Portuguese wine trough had now seen a photo of a smiling American soldier holding a leash that circled around the neck of a naked Iraqi in a prison. Once, in North Carolina, an all-American eight-year-old kid I was interviewing told me about arguments he'd had with classmates who adamantly insisted that President Bush had secretly masterminded the attacks on 9/11. There was an economic meltdown. An opening appeared for a man with black skin to demand change and be elected president. Navy Seals finished off bin Laden. Dictators were overthrown in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, while the tallest building in the world was being constructed in the Middle East and the U. S. shuddered as it reached its debt limit. The world was evolving into a different place because of 9/11. Everything that happens for the rest of this century will stem from that day, just as September 11 came out of everything that preceded it. I had walked in the carnage of the most important moment of my lifetime. A writer with nothing to say. And how important was that, anyway, when I thought of the thousands of kids without parents? When the ball descended and the clock struck midnight to announce the beginning of 2008, I stood and cheered with my family in the middle of Times Square. Millions of people had been neatly arranged in blocks by the police department throughout the day, and my three children ran with their friends amongst the jubilant crowd with happy abandon. There had not been an attack on our soil since 9/11. I looked around at the police presence and the sense of organization, and I swear in that moment it felt like Times Square was the safest place on earth. Could I have imagined that on 9/12? No, I'd never be able to make sense of it all. Something inside me stopped trying. If it was death that took the story away from me, then it was death that brought it back to life. I was eating dinner with a group that included a woman whose husband had passed away. She'd spent a good amount of time on her own and concluded that she was ready for another partner. She explained how difficult the transition was. Having been married for years, she felt uncertain, didn't even know how or where to begin looking. As she spoke, an image came to my mind of Kevin Zraly proudly announcing how his Windows on the World wine class had been the meeting ground for more than a dozen marriages and created quite a few children. "Enroll in a wine class, " I said. It was a sensible suggestion. You can get a good glimpse of somebody's character simply by talking about wine, and if it flies from there, it's destiny. But the instant I made the suggestion, I realized that something huge had happened. For the first time in years, I once again saw wine in terms of possibility and growth. I had come to a new beginning—which meant that this story had an end. Not long thereafter, I sat at a hotel bar with a blank notebook and began to trace all the grape stains backward to the day in 1999 when I first stepped into the elevator in the lobby of the World Trade Center. The more I thought, the more I realized how absurd it was to think that this ever could have been a simple, merry story. Life is just not that way, and nobody's ever going to be perfect. The world is balanced just like the finest wines. Since 9/11, my life had been touched by births, graduations, weddings, anniversaries, and amazing little moments that make you grateful to be alive, as surely as it had brushed up against illness, cruelty, murder, profound sadness, and death. Wine is simply here to help us celebrate the joy as well as push us past the tragedy. "Give me wine to wash me clean from the weather-stains of care. " Ralph Waldo Emerson got that right. As I sat at that bar drifting back in time, a waiter approached the bartender carrying a glass of a sweet white wine from Italy called vin santo. "We have a complaint that it's not good, " the waiter said, pushing the glass toward the bartender. The bartender was young, just out of college. He poured a fresh glass from the bottle, took a taste, and looked uncertain. "Let me try, " I said. There was an authority in my voice that surprised even me, and the bartender poured me a taste and pushed it forward. I swirled the glass the way Zraly taught me and guessed from the aroma that the bottle had been open for a while and the exposure to air had distorted the wine. "That's correct, it's not right, " I said upon tasting. "Open a new bottle and pour a fresh glass. " The bartender opened a new bottle, poured the glass, sent it off with the waiter, and turned back to me. He told me he wasn't really a bartender but an aspiring singer, that as a high school student he had once sung "Ave Maria" for Pope John Paul II in the Vatican. "That wine wasn't that bad, " he said. "How were you so certain it was no good? " "If you sang for the Pope, you know all you need to know, " I said. "Taste it again. This time, listen to the music in it. You'll see how the music's right, right, right—then, at the very end, there's a note that's off-key. " He put the glass to his lips, ran the wine around his palate the way I told him, swallowed, and a smile slowly lit up his face. "Yeah, " he said, nodding. "Yeah. I get it. ".

Think it was you who said all but one of the US Presidents where related? Now there is no way that's By chance or coincidence. Do you think this is so they can pass down info we're not allowed to know. I almost got a panic attack watching this video. I don't believe it was just this video that almost caused it, rather, it was this video in addition to the mental images- now forever imprinted in my brain- of commercial airplanes smashing into the buildings and people jumping out of windows. Firefighters climbing the stairs of the towers that would be collapsing with out notice right on top of them. All of that played in my head while watching this the height at which this all played out is nerve wracking. Kills me, they did all type of scientific studies to see why Thut-Ankh- Amen's (king tut's) mummy was dark brown and it didn't come from soot from carbon. of otrches inside the tombs. Europeans will say any goddam thing to refute the fact that these were AFRICANS. AF-RA-KAH. of God's soul. aka God's chosen. Mr. Osman I have read your books and they opened me up to further research. You may not have realized it, but much of your information has proven that these are Africans.

Heartwarming movie with a of powerful message! Highly recommend. Great video. Forget my last comment. It was meant for the previous video I watched. BABYLONS BURNIN' THE RUTS ACE SOUNDS, BUT DIDN'T WANT TO KILL MESELF. HAVIN'TOO MUCH FUN. Windows on the World china. This partial place setting of Windows on the World china survived the collapse of the building because it had been removed to the restaurant owner's home for a private function. Location: World Trade Center Source: Gift of Night Sky Windows LLC Windows on the World restaurant objects Description: Artifacts collected from Windows on the World, a well-known World Trade Center restaurant, include a bottle of champagne, dinner spoon, table lamp, champagne flute, soup bowl, salad plate, dessert plate, and coffee cup. Context: The World Trade Center had a spectacular restaurant, Windows on the World, located on the 107th floor of the north tower with a conference facility on the 106th floor. Offering commanding views of the city, it was a popular destination with building occupants, tourists, and city residents (the restaurant served about 800 dinners nightly). When the first hijacked plane crashed into the north tower at 8:46 am, the restaurant had regular breakfast patrons on the 107th floor and a conference for the Risk Water Group on the 106th floor. About 73 employees and an unidentified number of patrons died in the fire and building collapse. Interior view of restaurant Windows on the World was known for its elegant appointments and sweeping panoramic view of New York City. Soup bowl from the World Trade Center�s Windows on the World restaurant Bird�s-eye view of cup and saucer from the World Trade Center�s Windows on the World restaurant Dessert and appetizer plate from the World Trade Center�s Windows on the World restaurant Salad plate from the World Trade Center�s Windows on the World restaurant Benefit-dinner program Program cover from a benefit dinner held in Italy to help Windows on the World restaurant employees. Transcript: AMERICAN MEMORIAL "How did I get these if everything was destroyed during the collapse? " David Shayt September 11 Collecting Curator. Museum Specialist, Division of Cultural History << BROWSE MORE OBJECTS.

Heavily promoted by with half a brain can see it is an orchestrated global project to rinse the public dry. Great show thanks 👍. Windows on the World English Episodes Windows on the World To read Watch Windows on the World Online, Fidelity Labs. Windows on the Online Hindi HBO 2018 DownloAd.

 

Windows on the World

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