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# Broadway & Lafayette
- URL: https://www.andrewboardman.com/newsletter/broadway-lafayette/
- Published: 2026-09-14T17:56:34.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-14T17:56:34.000Z
- Description: A 9/11 remembrance 25 years on
- Author: Andrew Boardman
- Tags: Newsletter

Dear Designer,

I’m writing this on the 25th anniversary of 9/11.

I was 15 blocks from the World Trade Center on that gorgeous day in September 2001\. I worked in tech R&D for a large dot-com agency called OVEN Digital.

It was a crazy-exciting time to be part of a culture inventing the internet.

We were building big sites for Tiffany & Co., the New York City government and the Museum of Modern Art. Like today, there was so much tech money in the air. It was fun, hard, rewarding. The sites were being built in Flash and then often duplexed — Flash plus HTML. Some even worked on flip phones with an “m” as a subdomain.

Every day, we broke some tools in order make others.

On that Tuesday, when I got out of the Broadway & Lafayette subway, I turned the corner, walked about 10 feet and was stopped by a growing crowd on the sidewalk. Everyone was staring south, looking up at a “small plane that hit the World Trade Center”. Our mouths were agape. I felt terrible for the poor folks in that little plane. A few sirens blared in the distance and we wondered: how could this have happened?

I walked to our offices a few blocks down Broadway, went up the stairs, saw my colleagues, and then heard the second plane streaking across the sky and into the second tower. Our offices were in a huge open loft. There was much confusion on the floor. We went up to the roof and watched the streams of smoke and, as it is said, all of us recognized that this was different than anything we had known.

On the roof, standing next to me was one of the smartest programmers on the team. He said: "This was Osama Bin Laden. The U.S. is now under attack by Al Qaeda.”

I didn’t know what he was talking about. Those were literally foreign words. Was he spouting conspiracy theories (those existed in 2001)? What kind of organization was this and how did they get planes into the air to attack New York City, of all the places?

After the towers fell, we tried calling others on the team, telling them not to come in. We closed up the offices and I walked 100 blocks north to find my wife, who was then pregnant with our daughter. Reunited, we made our way home on a slow-moving subway and, like most New Yorkers, watched television, wondering when the next attacks might happen and whether we would even be alive the next day.

New York City closed down for the next few weeks. Military jets screamed overhead. Everything, everything felt loud. But also there was quiet. Days of sitting. Mostly fear. Tanks sat near the Brooklyn Bridge. Few people went to work. The air smelled like dust and death. Nothing was funny or fun. We mourned for those lost, some of whom we knew.

Nearly all of the dot-coms (startups, dev shops and agencies) in New York City imploded in those weeks that followed. I lost my job. Then I was re-hired. And then I was laid off again. I applied for unemployment.

About 150,000 jobs were lost in the city. Investors, often right, pulled up their stakes, knowing full well that the U.S. would be on a war footing from here on out.

Months later, when the winds were settling and the city started to come alive, when we put away the flags, when we realized that we were truly among the fortunate, we started to move on.

It’s what we humans do, giving up past memories and traumas, letting them settle into our bones and brains. We start to figure out that we might as well live, at least while we can. We don’t take for granted those for whom we grieve — but we let them lie with our remembrances. May their memory be a blessing.

As a designer and researcher, there were no job prospects. Over coffee in the West Village with my wife, I decided to start my own design firm. Why not? I could combine my background in fine arts, technology and management into a small studio. And a few weeks later, over lunch with friends, I asked what I ought to call my new venture. After random riffing, someone said “what about ‘manoverboard’”?

Manoverboard. It was perfect. Goofy yet honest — I liked the idea of “saving” through my work. Fortune smiled. The domain name was available and I registered it that day.

This was my fall of 2001\. Out of the ruins of that day, I became a designer with a studio called Manoverboard.

In 2001, I was helping connect ideas to people and people with each other. Twenty-five years on, I'm still trying to do the same thing.

Yours,

![andrew signature](https://www.andrewboardman.com/content/images/2026/07/ab-sign.png)