One moment of anxiety came when Peter Jennings announced to the crowd that a plane was still missing en route from Boston to Los Angeles. The crowd, instinctively, looked up at the sky.
The entire city seemed to shut down: all the major high rises, the airports, the Federal buildings. Even the suburban Old Orchard shopping mall, well north of the city center, had shut its doors. “It’s been an interesting morning,” said Larry Orr, 53, who drives a cab downtown. Usually his weekday trips are short ones, office building to office building. But today all the cab stands were closed. And all his fares have been going the same way: out. He drove one worried mom from the South Side up to pick up her young girl from day care. Another businessman offered Orr $800 to drive him to New York City. Orr declined.
Inside Billy Goat’s tavern, a local reporter’s hangout, reporters sipped Old Style beers, chain smoked and furiously scribbled notes from the television sets. They listened intently as Mayor Richard Daley described the closings and cancellations: the United Center sports arena, the financial exchanges, freight tunnels under the downtown area, Northwestern University classes, the Shedd Aquarium, the Merchandise Mart, even the day’s baseball games. “We can’t be too careful,” Daley said.
Near the Hancock building at around 11 a.m., Sharon Saxelby and Kathleen Jenkins stood on a street corner, in Saxelby’s words, “processing the situation.” The two work as fundraisers for Loyola University. When they got the news that New York and Washington had been attacked, they gathered with about 20 co-workers in their office and held a prayer service. After calling her daughter in New York, Saxelby decided to take a walk with Jenkins. “We don’t know how to react,” said Jenkins, looking up at the Hancock building. “This thing happened in New York, and the whole city [of Chicago] is at a standstill,” added Saxelby in disbelief.
By noon central time, the downtown streets had turned into a virtual ghost town. The nervous chatter quieted and the sirens faded. A lone bell could be heard chiming at the Holy Name Cathedral, a Catholic church just off the Magnificent Mile. Inside, parishioners at the daily 12:10 service filled almost every pew and sang “Amazing Grace.” At the front of the church, the pastor, Bob McLaughlin comforted his parish.
“In a very short time our illusions were shattered,” he told them as the midday sun shone through the stained glass. “Suddenly we were helpless. We were terrorized. We were wondering what would come next. Our illusion of invincibility, security, power, self-sufficiency, was shattered. This series of events reminded us of our own fragility-our inability to control events or even our own reactions to events.”
