Edward Moran, of Jim Thorpe, was working in New York City on Sept. 11, 2001. Here, he provides details of what he experienced that day.

In 2001, I was dividing my time between Jim Thorpe and Brooklyn. On the night of Sept. 10, I drove through torrential rain in a rental car to pick up a Japanese friend who had flown in from Tokyo to JFK airport.

On the morning of the 11th, I woke up in a panic because I’d overslept and was afraid my car would be towed — it was parked on the wrong side of the street in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, a mile or so east of the World Trade Center. But when I went outdoors, I was shocked to see that no one had moved their cars, and there was absolutely no traffic moving through the silent streets.

When I went back indoors, my friend told me he’d gotten phone calls from Tokyo asking if he was all right. We turned on the television, but none of the channels were working — the master antennas, of course, were atop the Twin Towers. Finally, the emergency channel 2 came on, broadcasting from the Empire State Building, with images of the South Tower, which at first I thought was the Washington Monument because the announcer was talking about a plane crash in DC. Finally, it dawned on us what had happened.

We went across the street to the summit of a hill in Fort Greene Park, where neighbors had gathered in silence to watch a huge plume of black smoke rising skyward. The stench remained in the air for months afterward.

But it was on the following Sunday morning, when I went to church, that things really hit home. The church was packed — standing room only. During prayer time, scores of people stood up to pray for relatives and friends who were still missing and unaccounted for. More than 200 names were mentioned, including many I personally knew.

I learned that Rev. Mychal Judge, the chaplain of the NYC Fire Department, was among the first casualties, and that the firefighters had reverently carried his body across the street to rest at the altar of St. Peter’s Church in lower Manhattan. (I’d met Father Judge not long before 9/11.) Another casualty was my Brooklyn neighbor Frank DeMartini, who was the construction manager at the Twin Towers. His funeral took place in my church some weeks later.

For several days after 9/11, it was impossible to make a phone call from New York — this was before widespread cellphone usage — and I could not reach my friends in Jim Thorpe until 9/15 to tell them I was safe and relatively sound.

I wasn’t able to return my rental car until the following week, when we were finally permitted to go back into Manhattan, though not south of 14th Street. When I finally showed up at the car-rental agency, I was greeted with applause by the crowd patiently waiting to rent a vehicle.

My Japanese friend was an architectural historian. About two weeks after 9/11, I accompanied him to a forum at City University of New York on 34th Street that brought together some of the nation’s leading architects to ponder the future of the skyscraper in the light of the recent disaster. Included in the group was Robert Venturi, whose firm had designed a master plan for Jim Thorpe’s historic district in 1979.

Afterward, we all marched down 34th Street to the Empire State Building, whose observation tower had just reopened after having been shuttered since 9/11. Ours was the first group to take the elevators up to the 86th floor of the building that was once again New York’s tallest — hoping to make a bold statement of faith in the city and its architecture.