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Paul Steiger, second from right, managing editor of the Wall Street Journal, examines one of the first copies off the presses of the redesigned paper along with some of the editors in the newsroom in South Brunswick, New Jersey on Monday evening, April 8, 2002. The April 9th edition will feature the first significant changes in more than 60 years including color on the front page, and a new section, Personal Journal. (Jim Sulley/Medialink Photography)
Gordon Crovitz, left, publisher of the Wall Street Journal, and Paul Steiger, the financial paper's managing editor, discuss the redesigned paper in the New York newsroom Tuesday, Jan. 2, 2007. The Journal introduced a smaller, re-designed format on Tuesday that publisher Dow Jones & Co. hopes will save money and help make the paper more appealing to a wider base of readers, especially younger ones. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan)
Paul Steiger, managing editor of The Wall Street Journal, poses for a photographer in the financial paper's newsroom on Dec. 5, 2006, in New York.
The morning of Sept. 11, 2001, nobody knew if Paul Steiger was alive or dead.
When calamity descended upon Manhattan, Steiger — then the managing editor of the Wall Street Journal — was starting his day at the financial newspaper’s lower Manhattan office, half a block from the southern tower at the World Trade Center. He was working on the next day’s paper with a top deputy, Jim Pensiero when the first tower began to rumble.
After fielding a call from his wife Wendy Brandes, a Lehman Brothers employee who worked in the same complex, and racing to a window, Steiger watched the North Tower smolder.
“I knew it couldn’t be an accident,” Steiger, now 80, said in an interview with Hearst Connecticut Media. “The flames that were coming out of the building were just too great.”
Steiger and Pensiero resolved to meet outside the office.
“But we never met,” he said.
Tragedy unfolded at the World Trade Center in all directions. Fallen bodies, emergency service workers and burning debris turned the streets of Manhattan claustrophobic. Steiger kept reminding himself that he wouldn’t suffocate in the outside air. The promise of staying alive, no matter how feeble, was enough to keep him going.
“You don’t suffocate in the outside air, you don’t suffocate in the outside air,” the editor told himself while navigating the chaos.
Pensiero ultimately ferried across the Hudson River after he failed to find his boss. After getting stuck in the dust storms on the street, Steiger pushed north and took a bus to his Upper East Side Apartment. But to the hundreds of journalists that served under him, his whereabouts were unknown until the early afternoon.
Steiger has told the story of that morning dozens, if not hundreds, of times. Countless interviews and at least one book have immortalized his account of the day. The machinations of that morning — how editors and reporters across the country put out the Journal even after its offices were decimated by the punishing ash and wind of the attack — won the newspaper a Pulitzer Prize.
Though Steiger was born in the Bronx and spent his adolescence in New Jersey, he spent a chunk of his formative years in Stamford. His recollection of Stamford is not one of a mini-metropolis but of the quaint, suburban Stamford of the 1940s and 1950s. He lived with his family in the Bulls Head, took the public bus to Franklin Street Elementary School and attended Burdick Junior High School in 1954, the very year it smoldered in a fire.
“It was a small town then,” he said. In fact, Stamford only became the modern city of today in 1949, when the town of Stamford and the city of Stamford merged into one municipal entity.
Much of the work for that award-winning newspaper was done by a group of Journal employees in South Brunswick, N.J., home to one of the paper’s secondary offices and a printing press. Pensiero and dozens of other employees pushed toward completing the next day’s newspaper upon arrival to the satellite office, even amid the suffering around them.
“These journalists, technicians and support personnel did not put their lives on the line like the hundreds of first responders who ran into the World Financial Center when everyone else ran out,” wrote journalist and WSJ alum Dean Rotbart in “September Twelfth: An American Comeback Story,” his book about the effort to publish. “But their same sense of duty and pride compelled each of them to block out their emotions and focus on the job at hand.”
The employees in South Brunswick weren’t alone in their efforts. After confirming to his loved ones and colleagues that he was alive, Steiger decamped to fellow editor Byron Calame’s apartment on the Upper West Side, where he met with four other members of the Journal’s top brass.
Together, they pulled off the third banner headline in the newspaper’s history. Across the front page, the editors emblazoned 12 words: “TERRORISTS DESTROY WORLD TRADE CENTER, HIT PENTAGON IN RAID WITH HIJACKED JETS.”
It was at Steiger’s insistence that the Journal published a banner headline, something he readily admits. Executing the format tested the newsroom’s technological capabilities in the face of such immense tragedy.
If not now, he remembered thinking, then when?
Verónica Del Valle is a reporter covering growth and development for the Stamford Advocate and economic mobility for Hearst Connecticut Media Group. Verónica graduated in 2020 from American University, where she earned both her bachelors and masters degrees. Her work has appeared in NPR and The Washington Post.