The Day They Brought Down His Father's Towers

The man tasked to provide grief counseling to the hundreds confronted with fear, confusion and the loss of their fathers, mothers, sisters and brothers on September 11th saw two of his father's children crushed by jet liners, eventually tumbling to the ground in a fury of dust and rubble.

Like most, Michael Tozzoli remembers where he was just before 9:00 a.m. on a crisp, picturesque blue morning. He'd just started a new job at West Bergen Mental Healthcare in Ridgewood and as was customary for him, had the morning news on. 

It's 8:45 a.m. He called his brother just after the first plane ripped through the glass and steel.

"He immediately said, 'There's no way, the weather is too nice. It's not an accident, it's impossible,'" Tozzoli recalled from his office on Chestnut Street far from the towers, far even from the lookout on Crest Road, where a broken village watched the plume of smoke, leaving mementos and tears on the cliff a decade ago.

Twelve Ridgewood residents died that day, an enduring memory in the pages of time.

"I was still worried whether my father was alive or not. His office was on the 77th floor of Tower 1," Tozzoli says.

Guy Tozzoli, Michael's father, was stuck in traffic in the Lincoln Tunnel, en route to the towers.

"In many ways that sort of set the tone of the whole day," his son says. "It went from a huge catastrophe which could have been very personal," Tozzoli says, trailing off slightly. "It was actually personal given my family history with those towers."

Guy Tozzoli, known as the Shepherd of the World Trade Center, was 80-years-old at the time of the dual attack. He'd started working at the Port Authority in 1946 and had helped design and build the world's first container port in Newark, New Jersey, revolutionizing the shipping industry as global trade boomed.

In the early 1960s, he was tasked to see through what was then the most ambitious building and global trade project in the world–the World Trade Center. Four decades later, as President of the WTC Association President, his dual four-million square feet of trade had been buried hundreds of stories below, a casket for the nearly 3,000 workers on the nation's most memorable day in the new century.

In a way, Guy Tozzoli had lost two children that Tuesday morning.

"We used to say that Tower 1 and Tower 2 were his first two children and the rest of the six of us were child three through eight. Because he lived the towers, he was it," Michael says.

'He's either going to crash like the towers and go down with the ship...'

Later that day, in Westwood where he resides, Guy Tozzoli was sitting in his kitchen, staring at the clip of the buildings being struck. He'd lost countless friends and colleagues. He was a survivor of the first attack in 1993, spending several cold hours in a stairwell after the bombing.

"He thought that was an isolated incident," Michael Tozzoli says of the 1993 bombing that shook his father with fear.

On rewind, over and over, Guy watched the television. He thought about how to reconstruct the buildings before watching them crumble to the ground.

The engineers and contractors had planned for the possibility of small planes to hit the buildings. But that was the 1960s. They never expected an intentional strike. They never expected the sheer size of the jets to grow as large as buildings themselves. They didn't believe the jet fuel fires to be that intense, for the steel to melt so quickly and with such catastrophe. 

Replicas of the two towers were all around the basement and family room as sun drifted through the kitchen, illuminating the reminders of what once had been. "I remember thinking to myself, 'He's either going to crash like the towers and sort of go down with the ship or he won't look back,'" says Michael.

Michael Tozzoli did not have the time to stand by his father's side, to turn the hands of time and reflect back on his father's lost steel children, to comfort him in his agony.

He was needed elsewhere.

West Bergen mobilizes on September 11, 2001 in Ridgewood

"We quickly moved into action mode here at West Bergen," he says. Coordinating efforts with the village and the Ridgewood Public Library, West Bergen opened the library as a drop-in center for those needing to deal with their grief. "We were open pretty much 24 hours a day" once the attacks began, he says. With hundreds of therapists ready, West Bergen helped those cope with unimaginable loss.

"We stepped up and opened the doors. And people came. People came that were working in the towers, people came that were affected by loss of family members, people that were just impacted by the emotionality of the time, which was unprecedented then. Now, sadly, I think we all kind of have a new level of crisis orientation but then it was unheard of," he says.

The bankers and traders who had been high-powered executives and power brokers on Monday, arrived Wednesday in Ridgewood literally without a job.

September 11th, with all of its tragedies and impacts across life's various cross sections, broke down emotional walls.

"I think there was a segment of our community that never would have reached out for help – people that suffered from depression or anxiety, or in this case, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder," Tozzoli says.

A decade later, there's one face he'll never forget. He doesn't know her name, he doesn't know exactly where she was from but ten years later had he an artist's touch, his portrait would be remarkable in its accuracy.

"She came in and talked about being in the lobby of Tower One and running out and actually seeing people jumping from the towers. I won't forget her stare," Tozzoli says. "She stared off in a way that was almost a disconnection and that's fairly normal because the feelings are so strong you kind of disconnect."

She described in unbelievable detail what she saw–people facing being burned alive by jet fuel or leaping thousands of feet on their own terms.

"At that point it was so new, the press was as you can imagine, all over it," he recalls. "Yet they were missing it at exactly the same moment because they were so focused on the terroristic activities. It was a wildly personal moment." 

What the younger Tozzoli found in the days, weeks, months and years was a transition from the macro, geo-political terroristic issue to one that was centered on individual loss.

Groups of clients were paired up with multiple therapists for grief counseling; but some therapists at West Bergen even lost loved ones themselves, and still had a job to do.

"Here you have a therapist on staff, here we are charged with staying strong, helping the community doing what we need to do," Tozzoli says. "Yet we had to turn to this staff member and say, 'How can we help you, what can we do for you?' 20 minutes before he has a client. These were tough times."

Light enters the window

Despite the hardship, those willing to accept they needed help had really broken the flood gates, staving off some of the stigma against receiving mental healthcare, according to Tozzoli.

"There was a lot of light that entered the world," he says of the days after September 11. "I really felt like the Village of Ridgewood and the surrounding towns really came together in many, many ways. I think people did whatever needed to be done."

Nobody worried about bureaucracy. There was humility, altruism, vigor, patriotism and selflessness that defied the normal course of life in fast-paced suburban New York City.

Donors stepped up offering their services and resources, volunteers came in large numbers to help deal with the hundreds in need of counseling. "We did things we ordinarily would not be doing," Tozzoli says, remembering back to the initial days. "We had many we did home visits for because they would not leave their homes because they were so traumatized."

These were on Monday highly-powered Wall Street, World Trade Center executives with the pulse of power in their hands, and by Wednesday could not leave the house. These were people in tremendous psychological pain and did not have the skills, believe it or not, to deal with it."

Substance abuse increased and relationships frayed for some who survived, according to Tozzoli, who's a clinical social worker. They're the hidden losses not seen in the rubble, on the television sets or embolden on memorials. What happened on September 11th, for many, would flare up throughout their lives.

A decade later, have we really changed?

Since 2001, West Bergen, like the world around it, has changed. Its scope has widened, it's transitioning to becoming more proactive, to focus on preventative care. But Tozzoli still sees challenges ahead.

For Michael Tozzoli, ten years later, it's hard to believe a decade has gone by. In many ways, September 11th put West Bergen Medical on the map. Citizens reached out like never before.

Today, hundreds of Ridgewood residents are treated in its Chestnut Street headquarters. They could be the guy filling your coffee cup at Ridgewood Coffee Company, the man in a three-piece suit waiting for the next train, or the woman jogging as school buses swim past in the early morning.

"I like to call us the sleeping giant of Ridgewood," Tozzoli says. Part of that can be credited by the attacks, the ones that rocked his father's world. A new paradigm was created and yet, so many questions still remain.

"I wonder often what lessons we've really learned since September 11th. I think there's two parts to that – what lessons have we learned and what have we done about it? Did we really come together as a community?" he asks.

"I just worry sometimes that it takes a real crisis for us to come together. As an organizational leader in the area, I am challenged and charged with trying to figure out how to get the community to come together not in a time in crisis."