NEW YORK (TIP): Thursday marks 24 years since Sept. 11, 2001, when 2,977 people were killed in terrorist attacks on New York’s World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a plane that crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
In New York, families of the Sept. 11 victims participated in the annual reading of the names at Ground Zero, where the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers collapsed. More than 2,700 of those killed on Sept. 11 died in that attack.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams was among the mourners gathered at Ground Zero, along with New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, former Gov. George Pataki, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, and former Mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg. FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino could also be seen in the crowd.
Hochul directed more than a dozen state landmarks, including One World Trade Center and the Empire State Building, to be illuminated with blue lights Thursday in observance.
“Today I join the world in remembering the nearly 3,000 souls taken on 9/11, the people who went to work and never came home, and the brave heroes – uniformed and otherwise – who ran toward danger to save others,” the governor said in a statement.
“Many of our enemies, foreign and domestic, thought we were going to collapse as a country, but we got up 9/12,” Adams said before the ceremony. “Teachers taught, builders built. We showed the globe our resilience, even in the midst of pain.”
Adams’ mayoral opponents, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo and state Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, were also in attendance, while Republican Curtis Sliwa was scheduled to visit a different 9/11 tribute in the Rockaways.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who was CEO at Cantor Fitzgerald on Sept. 11, 2001, which was located in the World Trade Center North Tower and more than 650 employees died, described to CNBC his own “harrowing” experience that day.
“I ran my tail off, dressed like this, running with that big sort of black cloud chasing me. And then I dove under a car. But it was. Yeah, it was harrowing, to say the least,” Lutnick said.
Lutnick said he would have been at Cantor Fitzgerald’s offices on the 100th floor and above but he had been dropping his son off at kindergarten. Lutnick then said he drove down after the plane first hit the building, and that he was in the doorway of the North Tower when the other tower collapsed.
President Trump attended the ceremony at the Pentagon, noting that “an entire generation of Americans have come of age in a totally different world” but “they are carrying on the legacy of those” who died.
President Trump issued a proclamation on Thursday declaring Sept. 11, 2025, as “Patriot Day 2025,” saying that “we renew our resolve to ensure that we never again face such a ruthless attack.”
“September 11, 2001, will forever live in the collective consciousness of those who witnessed four commercial jetliners converted into weapons of terror to target innocent Americans on a beautiful Tuesday morning in September, 24 years ago,” the proclamation says.
President Trump and first lady Melania Trump watched as a wreath was laid at the Pentagon. The president also signed a guest book to mark his visit.