From Queens to Ground Zero: St. John’s Response to September 11

Tuesday, September 11, 2001, was a flawless, late summer morning in New York City. 

Barely a week into the new semester, the Queens, NY, campus—then, as now—was buzzing with activity with new students trying to find their way, while faculty, administrators, and staff provided all with the resources necessary to get their college semester off on the right foot. 

One such annual resource, the Activities Fair, was scheduled for that day.

Shortly after work began at 8:30 a.m., Jackie Lochrie ’94ED, ’99M.S.Ed., ’08P.D., ’24Ed.D., Vice President for Student Affairs (then, Coordinator of Student Services), and her team were setting up for the fair on the Great Lawn, when news came that a plane had struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

Without a television, the scale of the disaster was initially unknown. She noted that students and colleagues around her immediately began saying that several people they knew were at the World Trade Center. “It was like, ‘My wife works there, my girlfriend has an internship there,’” she recalled.

Rosa C. Yen ’03M.S.Ed., ’12M.A., ’21M.A., Director of the Office of Multicultural Affairs, was a graduate assistant in the Division of Student Affairs at the time. She was living in O’Connor Hall and getting ready for work when she noticed the same images on every channel. 

“It must be a new movie,” she said to herself. “I really thought that. I finally asked myself, ‘Is this real?’”

Former student David Graziano ’03CCPS, Senior Vice President, Head of Retail Network at GoodRx, was a junior, as well as a resident assistant and student worker in the Department of Athletics. At that moment he was in a philosophy class. “Around 9 a.m., the professor announced that a plane had struck the World Trade Center.” The class initially assumed it was a terrible accident.

After contacting his family in Rhode Island, Mr. Graziano looked from Alumni Hall (now Carnesecca Arena) toward Manhattan and could see smoke billowing from the towers. “In those first hours, there was fear, confusion, and very little information,” he explained. “But fairly quickly, a different question began to emerge among those of us on campus: What can we do?”

As word came that students from the newly established Manhattan, NY, campus were making their way toward Queens, the focus changed from shock and horror to what must be done. “We had to rally around what was right in front of us,” Dr. Lochrie explained. “What were we doing for students?”

Students from the Manhattan campus walked across the 59th Street Bridge to the Queens, NY,  campus, “because they simply did not know where else to go,” Mr. Graziano said.

Michelle McCullers, Associate Director of Residence Life, was in her second year at St. John’s and could not comprehend what she saw. “The students were covered in dust and soot, carrying little plastic shopping bags containing whatever they had managed to grab.” Some were missing shoes or even socks, she recalled. “And then from that point, it was like, go. In Residence Life, you’re trained to deal with stuff. Your mind just shuts off and then goes into assist mode.”

Ms. Yen said that Student Life administrators quickly needed to determine who was stranded, who could get home, and who couldn’t. Students were unable to reach their families as communications broke down.

Dr. Lochrie and her colleagues sprang into action. Residence Life administrators and staff began determining vacancies, finding linens and clothing, and acquiring basic necessities. They and others donated clothes, while textbooks and supplies eventually had to be secured as well. The concern extended beyond the students arriving from Manhattan. She was also teaching an undergraduate course, and broke away long enough from the relief efforts to call each student individually. “Are you okay? Are you safe?” she remembered asking them. Classes could wait. “We’ll figure out next week, next week.”

Ms. Yen recalled beds being counted in the relatively new residence halls and people trying to locate mattresses and blankets. 
“We had to get them a place to stay. We had to get them food to eat. We had to get them clothes. We had to get our phones to make international phone calls,” Ms. McCullers stressed. Several students from Trinidad desperately needed to call home. “They would come to our office every day. ‘I have to call my mother. I have to call this person.’ That’s the strongest memory I have,” she recalled. “I don’t remember who we called to get everything done. It was simply all hands on deck.”

Students shared supplies, rooms, showers, clothing, and whatever else they could offer. “As a resident assistant, I had a slightly larger room and a student from the Manhattan campus stayed with me for several days. My room became his room,” Mr. Graziano said.

Ms. Yen spent much of her time talking directly with frightened students, some of whom were crying or trying not to. One told her, “Rosa, I feel like I want to cry.” “I said, ‘Just cry, just let the tears out, don’t worry about that.’ The students trusted us.”

Resident assistants secured vans, organized potential blood donors, and tried to account for students whose worried families could not reach them. “Students immediately volunteered to donate blood, so we began collecting names and contact information and organizing trips to a local hospital,” Mr. Graziano noted. 

“At the same time, we tried to keep track of students and their whereabouts so that worried families trying to reach their children could get information. There was fear everywhere, but there was also an extraordinary instinct to help.”

The residential community at St. John’s was relatively small at that time. “In the hours and days that followed September 11, that small community became remarkably close,” Mr. Graziano stressed. 

“Barriers seemed to disappear. People who had never met embraced one another. Doors opened. People shared what they had. We talked. We hugged. We stayed close, sometimes simply because no one wanted anyone else to face those moments alone.”
Ms. McCullers echoed those sentiments. “We were a new residential community. We had only opened in 1999, but we rallied as a community, as did the University as a whole.”

In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, St. John’s offered the use of the Manhattan campus to the Red Cross as a respite center. “We were able to pivot on a dime,” Dr. Lochrie recalled, adding that the partnership seemed to cement the city’s relationship to St. John’s. “It was nice to see that the University was part of what the city needed at the time.”

Ms. Yen stressed that the normal hierarchy disappeared as people came together. “There were no titles.” 

She added, “Working in a Vincentian community, everybody at that moment applied compassion and did whatever we could do to help. That’s what we’re always talking about: how Jesus shows himself through people that you’re serving. This was such a moment.”

“I can’t think of any better expression of the Vincentian ideal of service than that day and everything that followed,” Dr. Lochrie stressed. “If it had to happen, I’m glad I was here at that moment in time.”

Ms. McCullers also recalled the important role played by the University’s resident ministers, who offered emotional and spiritual support not only to students, but to those caring for them. “I’m so thankful that they were part of that because they were so instrumental in providing that comfort, that counseling—not just for the students, but for us.”

“I feel very blessed to have been at an institution whose mindset when this happened was service,” she emphasized. “We practiced what we preached.”

“Looking back more than two decades later, what stays with me is not only the enormity of the tragedy, but what the St. John’s community demonstrated in response,” Mr. Graziano said. “We were young. We did not have a plan for something like this. We certainly did not have all the answers. But when confronted with fear, uncertainty, and tremendous loss, people instinctively chose to serve one another.

"That experience became one of the most formative lessons of my life. It taught me that in moments of crisis, values like service, compassion, and community cannot simply be ideals. They have to become actions.”