At 10 a.m. on a quiet Tuesday morning at the Milton S. Eisenhower library, staff at the circulation desk were talking about an airplane hitting New York's World Trade Center.
On M-Level, people continued to read newspapers and listen to their portable CD players. On D-Level, students were looking-up books on the electronic catalog.
By 10:20 a.m., a television was hooked up and at least two dozen people were standing in a wide semicircle around it, watching the smoldering buildings. Some were making phone calls on their cellular phones.
At MegaBYTES, a louder crowd was seated and standing around the television set, watching clips of a commercial jet approaching the Twin Towers from behind as one of the 110-story buildings already stood with a gaping hole from the previous jet collision. Flames erupted from the second building, followed by its collapse.
On omnipresent cellular phones, many students with friends and family in New York and D.C. tried to call them, to no avail. Many people who had phones with New York area codes could not call anyone. Even local cell phone lines clogged as people tried to contact others in the two cities.
By noon, with television networks urging viewers to donate blood, many students were going to nearby Union Memorial Hospital. Soon after the initial calls for donations, however, Union Memorial began turning potential donors away because of space constraints, asking them to sign-up to come back later. Security guards in the lobby said that hundreds of students had inquired about giving blood, most of whom were unable to.
At 4 p.m., in a small room on the first floor of Union Memorial, junior Aurora Porter was seated with a blood pressure cuff on her right arm. She had been waiting since noon and was about to donate blood. Earlier in the morning, Porter's bags were packed and she had been ready to leave Baltimore for a semester abroad in Bologna, Italy. With all commercial flights in the United States abruptly cancelled, Porter was stuck in Charles Village. She made the most of it, though, wanting to do something for the soot-covered office workers, firefighters, police officers and others who were running from the billowing gray-brown smoke tumbling through the narrow streets of lower Manhattan.
"It was the only proactive response to this tragedy that I could think of," said Porter, who was one of three donors in the room.
Outside of Penn Station, the line of yellow taxicabs stretched to St. Paul St. Inside, the departures board listed a series of delays and cancellations. A lone man with luggage inquired at the ticket window. The LED screens above the windows read "no data."
At Hopkins' downtown center, the news "zipper" flashed messages about the disaster, the economic consequences and the response from the government. Occasionally, a headline about the Ravens whizzed by, interrupting the almost unbelievable news. A block and a half to the west, the Greyhound bus depot was closed. Outside the locked doors of the depot, cab drivers shouted at pedestrians, offering rides. The alley behind the station, where the busses pull in, was empty. Only one empty bus was pulled into a slot.
At 5:30 p.m., the typical height of rush hour, the Baltimore-Washington Pkwy was nearly empty. At BWI Airport, state troopers blocked the access ramp to the upper terminal. On the lower level, the roads were nearly clear. Outside the terminal, passengers sat expressionless with luggage at their side.
Although far from the dust, rescue workers and stunned victims, Baltimore stood still on Sept. 11.
This story was compiled with the help of Aaron Glazer and Zoe Fraade-Blanar.
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