NEED TO KNOW
Chef Michael Lomonaco says a spur-of-the moment decision saved him from being at the top of the World Trade Center’s North Tower on 9/11
Instead, he was on the ground floor, getting his reading glasses fixed when the first hijacked plane hit
Since then, he’s raised nearly $25 million to help the families of food-service and restaurant workers killed in the attacks
On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Michael Lomonaco should have been at work at Windows on the World, the famed restaurant atop the World Trade Center’s North Tower. Instead, a spur-of-the-moment decision saved his life.
Lomonaco, the restaurant’s executive chef, was on his way to the restaurant when he decided to stop at an optometrist at the World Trade Center’s lower level to see if he could get his reading glasses fixed.
“At 8:15 I walked in and I said, ‘I have an appointment at 12:15, but I really hope you can help me now,'” says Lomonaco, now 71. “And they did.”
While Lomonaco was sitting in the exam chair, hijacked American Airlines Flight 11 struck the North Tower.
“The building shook,” he says. “Then someone came in to the exam room and said, ‘We got to get out.’ “
Outside, Lomonaco first saw part of the plane’s fuselage on the ground. And when he looked up, “I saw the smoke coming out of Tower 1,” he recalls. “I could see that the upper floors were engulfed in smoke and there were flames.”
His thoughts immediately turned to his colleagues at Windows on the World, which that morning was hosting a breakfast for more than 100 people.
“That meant there was service staff, there were servers, there were kitchen people,” he says.
Then Lomonaco heard the deafening roar of a second jet.
“By the time I looked up, it was a fireball of an explosion,” he says of United Airlines Flight 175 striking the second tower. “That brought me to tears. It was an incredible shock, a terrible, tragic thing to witness. I mean, I was in tears.”
Opening of Windows of the World restaurant in the World Trade Center
Credit: John Roca/NY Daily News Archive via Getty
Lomonaco remained nearby, however, and stared up towards the floors where Windows on the World was, “out of great worry and anxiety for all of my friends and colleagues who were up there on the 106th and 107th floors,” he says.
“Well, they were up there,” he recalls. “They were waving tablecloths out the windows.”
Then the South Tower collapsed.
“It just disappeared in a cloud of dust that looked like smoke,” he recalls. “And that cloud started to move towards people. The police told everybody to run. There were adults, there were children, there were people with baby strollers.”
Lomonaco ran about a mile north to the building where his wife, Diane, worked. As he arrived, she was walking out the door to search for him, terrified.
“It was very eerie that our timing was so perfect, but it was meant for us to be together,” he says. “We were reunited at that moment. We were very lucky. We were reunited as though we thought we would never see each other again. We both felt that way.”
As the couple walked toward their apartment, they saw the North Tower collapse.
“We were stunned,” he recalls. “A shock.”
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In the days that followed, Lomonaco learned the magnitude of the loss at the restaurant: 79 Windows employees perished. “There’s a deep sadness,” Lomonaco told PEOPLE soon after the attacks in 2001. “It feels bottomless.”
But within a week, Lomonaco and friends in the restaurant industry decided they had to “do something for the families,” he recalls.
Michael Lomonaco with Windows on the World owner David Emil
Credit: Michael Lomonaco
Together, they co-founded the Windows of Hope Family Relief Fund to help the families of food-service and restaurant workers killed in the attacks with expenses including health care, rent and education.
Over the following year, fueled by donations from restaurants and individuals, the nonprofit raised nearly $25 million and continues to provide educational scholarships for some of the employees’ children.
People Magazine Cover 2001
Credit: People Magazine
Helping the families of his murdered colleagues helped Lomonaco go on. So did continuing his work as a chef in New York City, despite multiple job offers from friends across the country.
“I felt from the very beginning,” he says, “that staying here and working in New York was how I honor and pay tribute to my friends and colleagues who I lost on that day.”
And a quarter century later, he still does just that.
In May, Lomonaco and some business partners opened Brasserie Cognac Américain in midtown Manhattan. “Even now,” he says, “opening a new restaurant, part of it is really to do this in honor and in memory of my friends, of my colleagues.”
Michael Lomonaco
Credit: Eric Vitale Photography
“I wake up every day with a small mantra to remember them and honor them and honor their memory by going out to do my work in the restaurant world, which was what they were doing,” he continues. “And I do that as a way to honor their memory.”
To honor the 25th anniversary of 9/11, and what would have been the 50th anniversary of Windows on the World, a documentary short about the restaurant airs Sept. 7 on CNN.
Read the original article on People
Dining and Cooking