In their accounts sent to Law360, attorneys described where they were and what they were doing that Tuesday morning. They also talked about what the practice of law looked like in the days and weeks following the attacks and how New York came together in the aftermath.
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Massimo D'Angelo
Blank Rome
The morning of:
In the summer of 2001, I was a college sophomore working as a summer intern for SBC Securities at the Nasdaq American Stock Exchange. That summer taught me a great deal about what I was capable of, but it also clarified what I wanted my professional life to look like. By the time I left the exchange in late August 2001, I had made a decision that would define my career: I would pursue law, not finance. Less than two weeks later, on the morning of Sept. 11, the world I had just left was destroyed. The towers I had walked through every day that summer — the concourse, the plaza, the skyline that had framed my daily commute — were gone. The trading floor where I had stood shoulder to shoulder with Harry Feldman, Al Minafo and Richard Branda was suddenly part of a landscape of unimaginable devastation. I remember exactly where I was that morning, watching the tragedy unfold from my dorm room television set at UMass Amherst, and I remember the disbelief — the sheer impossibility of reconciling what I was seeing on television with the place I had known just days earlier.
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The months, years and decades after:
When I eventually began my legal career, it was as a real estate attorney in the Financial District — the very neighborhood that had been the backdrop to both my formative summer and the worst day in New York City's history. I worked in the Financial District for nearly a decade, and during that time I had a front-row seat to one of the most remarkable urban transformations in American history. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Lower Manhattan was a place defined by absence — the void where the towers had stood, the businesses that had shuttered, the residents and workers who had left. But what happened next was nothing short of extraordinary. Block by block, year by year, the oldest and most historic part of Manhattan reinvented itself. I was involved in many of the real estate transactions and real estate litigations that accompanied this transformation. I watched as former office buildings were converted into luxury residential housing. I saw new residential towers rise on streets that had been exclusively commercial for over a century. I witnessed the Financial District evolve from a neighborhood that emptied out at five o'clock into a thriving, around-the-clock community. Restaurants and bars — some of which I have had the privilege to represent over the years — opened in spaces that had once housed trading firms and brokerage houses. Families moved in. Schools were built. Parks were created. The area became one of the hottest neighborhoods in the city, a destination in its own right rather than merely a place people commuted to and from.
Twenty-five years after Sept. 11, the Financial District stands as a testament to the resilience of New York City. The neighborhood's rebirth is not just a story about real estate development, though the scale of that development has been staggering. It's a story about a community's refusal to be defined by tragedy. For me, personally, it is also a story about the arc of a career that began on trading floor steps a stone's throw away from the twin towers and continued in the legal offices and courtrooms of the very streets where the towers once stood. That summer internship, those mentors, that morning in September, and the decades of rebuilding that followed — they are all woven into the same narrative. It is the narrative of Lower Manhattan, the heartbeat of a city that will never die, but only grow back stronger after adversity.
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"25 Years Later, Real Estate Lawyers Reflect On Sept. 11," by Andrew McIntyre was published in Law360 Real Estate Authority on September 16, 2026.