Stuyvesant High School is located three blocks from the World Trade Center. Students and faculty watched the 9/11 terrorist attacks from the school’s windows, until the smoke cloud from the first tower’s collapse forced their hasty evacuation.

In the months following their return to classes, English teacher and theater adviser Annie Thoms had students record their reactions and the staff’s reactions to what they saw. She then published the monologues they wrote.

At 7 p.m. on Friday, Sept. 11, Elevate Acting Studio in partnership with Arts Bonita will perform “With Their Eyes: September 11 – The View from a High School at Ground Zero” in remembrance of the 25th anniversary of the national tragedy. A talk back discussion will follow the performance.

Tickets are available at the door. Student tickets are $10; general admission is $15.

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“With Their Eyes” is a play of testimonials of students and staff of Stuyvesant High School describing the events that took place right outside of their school on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. Stuyvesant is a five-minute walk from the World Trade Center. The school was evacuated during the attack. The smoke cloud from the World Trade Center engulfed the building at one point, but there were no reports of physical injuries.

When classes resumed on Sept. 21, 2001, students were moved to Brooklyn Technical High School while the Stuyvesant building served as a base of operations for rescue and recovery workers. This caused serious congestion at Brooklyn Tech, and required the students to attend in two shifts, with the Stuyvesant students attending the evening shift.

Normal classes resumed three weeks later on Oct. 9. Fires were still burning at Ground Zero at that time. In the months that followed 9/11, Stuyvesant High was exposed daily to toxic air and contaminated dust.

Because Stuyvesant was close to ground zero, there were concerns of asbestos exposure. The US EPA indicated at that time that Stuyvesant was safe from asbestos, and conducted a thorough cleaning of the Stuyvesant building, but the Stuyvesant High School Parents' Association has contested the accuracy of the assessment. While there have been numerous cases linked to the dust clouds that emanated from ground zero, there is no definitive evidence that such cases have directly affected the Stuyvesant community.

Stuyvesant students did spend a full year in the building before the theater and air systems were cleaned. A group of Stuyvesant alumni is currently lobbying for health insurance as a result. Federal health experts now recognize the exposure as dangerous, and several Stuyvesant alumni have been diagnosed with:

• cancers of the skin, thyroid, breast, prostate, and lungs;
• chronic conditions such as asthma, GERD, rhinosinusitis, and sleep apnea; and
• significant mental health impacts.

Nine alumni were killed in the World Trade Center attack.

On Oct. 2, 2001, the school paper, The Spectator, under Editor in Chief Jeff Orlowski and Faculty Advisor Holly Ojalvo, created a special 24-page full-color 9/11 insert containing student photos, reflections and stories. On Nov. 20, 2001, the magazine was distributed for free in 830,000 copies of The New York Times to the entire New York Greater Metropolitan Area.

More on the students

The HBO documentary "In the Shadow of the Towers: Stuyvesant High on 9/11" revisits the events of that day through the perspectives of eight alumni of Stuyvesant High School.

Ilya Feldsherov, who graduated from Stuyvesant in 2002, said in advance of the documentary’s 2018 release, “I don’t think I’ve really relived the exact feelings from that day, but seeing the memorial –– the footprint of the two towers –– it calls back to the emptiness in my heart when this event took place.”

Feldsherov now works at WilmerHale Law Firm.

“I don’t know what emotion exactly I am experiencing, but it makes me think of all of my friends from high school –– everyone who was there with us that day,” he continued. “If we were together standing, looking at this memorial, we wouldn’t need to talk or say anything about it. We would all have that shared experience and shared feeling, and we would all be thinking different things but all be on the same wavelength in terms of being there, understanding it, and remembering it.”

Fellow 2002 Stuyvesant graduate Mohammad Haque remarked in 2018 that 9/11 changed the way he and other people think about identity.

“As New Yorkers, as immigrants or first-generation immigrants—I was born in Queens—but there is this idea even in New York City, sometimes, of who is American, who is a New Yorker, and who is an ‘other,’ and these are ideas that unfortunately still perpetuate today. But I think for me specifically, it had to do a lot with identity. Not just as a South Asian American or Muslim American but as a New Yorker as well.”

Haque happened to be staring out the window when the first plane struck the towers.
"I literally saw a flash and the first explosion," he said, "and the lights flickered."

"We also saw the dust cloud coming," said Liz O'Callahan, who appears alongside Haque in the HBO documentary. "And that — that was scary. That was scary."

O’Callahan, who was one of the 10 cast members in the original production of “With Their Eyes,” also said, “I discover more about how it’s affected me as the years go on. I think in some ways, as time goes on, you feel a bit more from the trauma of an event, but I think in other ways, as time goes on, you realize how much the trauma has been, and I think one of the learning points of any event like that is to recognize that the event will continue to have a ripple effect through the world but also through the individual life of a person. And how we respond to that is going to change over time. I think in school, we do [...] an explicit job of teaching facts, and I think one of the things that this has the ability to give back to us is a sense of learning about our humanity as just as important as learning about the facts that surround something. And if you can learn about the fact that people are affected by things in ways that aren’t always rational and things that don’t always appear immediately on the surface and things that change over time, that is also a valuable lesson to learn.”

She is now a family physician.

Jukay Hsu, who was Stuyvesant's student body president at the time of the attacks, also recalled the dust cloud.

"Just kinda coming and enveloping," she recalled. "It felt like a scary movie, almost."
As students exited Stuyvesant High School, the north tower collapsed. That prompted them to run uptown. Along the way, they encountered people who had been swept up in the second dust cloud.

"They were … covered head to foot in this off-white powder," O'Callahan said. "They looked like ghosts."

Support for WGCU’s arts & culture reporting comes from the Estate of Myra Janco Daniels, the Charles M. and Joan R. Taylor Foundation, and Naomi Bloom in loving memory of her husband, Ron Wallace.