Stuyvesant High School
From September 11 Memories
Stuyvesant High School is located at 345 Chambers Street, a quarter-mile from the former site of the World Trade Center. The school was evacuated during the ordeal and the students were temporarily relocated to Brooklyn Tech starting September 21 while the Stuyvesant building was used as one of several bases of operations by rescue and recovery workers. Normal classes resumed three weeks later on October 9.
The following is a list of the Stuyvesant alumni who were killed during the September 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center:
- Daniel D. Bergstein '80 (tribute)
- Alan Wayne Friedlander '67 (tribute)
- Marina R. Gertsberg '93 (tribute)
- Aaron J. Horwitz '94 (tribute)
- David S. Lee '82 (tribute)
- Arnold A. Lim '90 (tribute)
- Gregory D. Richards '88 (tribute)
- Maurita Tam '97 (tribute)
- Michael Warchola '68 (tribute)
FDNY Lt. William "Billy" McGinn lost his life on duty in a North Tower staircase. Posthumously promoted to Captain, Lt. McGinn was a member of a family based on Staten Island and strongly tied to Stuyvesant. His father William McGinn taught at Stuyvesant for many years, and his brother Michael and cousin Connie both attended the school. In the year following the attack, Michael's view of his brother was covered several times by the Times Herald-Record, a mid-Hudson valley newspaper (see [1], [2]). Other sites on the web have also discussed Lt. McGinn's last morning (see [3], [4]).
Stuyvesant alumnus Richard Ben-Veniste '60 was a member of the 9/11 Commission.
On October 2, 2001, the school paper, The Spectator, included a special full-color 9/11 insert containing student photos, reflections, and stories. The insert was reprinted in the Nov. 20, 2001 issue of the New York Times.
In the months after September 11, Annie Thoms, an English teacher at Stuyvesant, a '93 alum, and the theater adviser at the time, suggested that the students take accounts of staff and students' reactions during and after 9/11 and turn them into a series of monologues. Thoms then published these monologues as With Their Eyes: September 11th – The View from a High School at Ground Zero (ISBN 0060517182).
Alexander Epstein of the Stuyvesant Standard, an independent school publication, contributed the section Out of the Blue to the book At Ground Zero: Young Reporters Who Were There Tell Their Stories (ISBN 1560254270).
