Just hours after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, Alliance Review photographer Ed Hall Jr. was on his way to New York City.
“I had come back from an assignment and I approached Susan Shea, who was the executive editor at the time, and I send, ‘Send me to New York,’” explained Hall, who is beginning his 27th year as a photographer at the newspaper. “After a little consideration, the paper sent me.”
Hall was on his way to the scene of the deadliest terrorist attack in U.S. history after American Airlines Flight 11 struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center and United Airlines Flight 175 crashed into the South Tower just 17 minutes apart on that pristine morning.
He spent three days there, documenting the tragedy.
Hall will share many of the hundreds of photos he took when he presents “Remembering 9/11: Looking Back Through the Lens of Alliance Review Photographer Ed Hall Jr.” inside the Rodman Public Library Auditorium at 6 p.m. on Wednesday, September 9 ahead of the 25th commemoration of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Registration is required to attend.
“People who come will see a lot of pictures showing the areas I was able to get to see up close,” said Hall, who was about a mile away from Ground Zero. “They will see some of the sites that maybe didn’t make the news and to hear about local stories that I discovered while I was in New York City.”
While Hall was the “boots on the ground” in the Big Apple, he said he was getting much help from reporters and editors back in the Carnation City like Mike Patterson and Nancy Whitaker, who were helping locate people with ties to the Alliance area who were living and working in New York on that infamous day or volunteering with relief efforts in the aftermath.
“It was all about localizing one of the biggest stories in our nation’s history,” said Hall. “That’s the reason I was there.”
Ten years later, Hall and former Review Newsroom Leader Jack R. Weber Jr., now the community relations manager at Rodman Public Library, teamed up for a series titled “The Day the Towers Fell.” Hall’s personal memoir about his experience was the initial article of a dozen that looked back at how area residents were impacted by the attacks. The series earned recognition by the Associated Press of Ohio.
Hired as a full-time reporter in August 2000, Hall was still quite new to photography when he made his trip to New York, but he wasn’t a stranger to travel.
The 1980 Marlington graduate who attended Bowling Green State University had spent a couple of years overseas in the mid to late 1980s before returning to the United States, where he lived in Washington, D.C., from 1988 to 2000.
He had also spent some considerable time in New York City prior to his post-attack assignment and knew his way around.
“I had witnessed poverty in Haiti and other devastation on my travels,” said Hall. “So nothing was really too shocking. Also, I had seen images on TV and I sort of knew what to expect when I got there.”
Hall, who crossed into Manhattan in the early morning hours of September 12 and left on Saturday, September 15, said that he took about 400 to 500 photos during those three days.
“I knew my way around New York, but I was fairly new in the game of photography,” said Hall, noting The Review had gone digital about nine months prior. “Today, I would take so many more photos than what I did back then. I would have also taken less pictures of the destruction and more of the people looking at that destruction. In New York, that was really the first time I tried that, turning around and looking at the people and getting their reactions. I wish I would have done a little more of that.”
Being sent to New York City to cover one of the biggest news stories of the century was an honor for Hall.
“It was an assignment of a lifetime for me,” said Hall. “But I think it says a lot about our organization during that time. For a newspaper our size to have a presence there and finding those local angles amid all of that chaos really spoke volumes of the teamwork amid The Review newsroom staff at that time.”