Seeing the Bright Side After Surviving Worse (Free Article)

For most of the 45 journalists—reportedly half its editorial staff—abruptly laid off by the Daily News July 23, there were good reasons to treat it as a traumatic experience. This was particularly true for some of the older ones, cut loose in an industry that has been contracting for some time.

But Todd Maisel, part of the 12-person photography staff that was cast out by the Chicago-based ownership group known as Tronc, didn’t sound shaken when reached by phone a couple of days later.

“I’m really grateful for the time I was there,” said Mr. Maisel, who had been hired fulltime by The News at age 40 18 years earlier.

“Am I mad at Tronc? No, but I think they’re making a mistake.”

There was a good reason, apart from job prospects, that he was relatively unfazed about pulling up stakes. Not quite 17 years earlier, working early because of the mayoral primary that began at 6:30 on Sept. 11, 2001, he was moving on to his second assignment of the morning, covering Gov. George Pataki speaking at Columbia University, when he heard over his police radio that a plane had just crashed into the World Trade Center. Seconds later, he saw a Police Department Emergency Services Unit truck go flying by, heading downtown, “and I just got in behind it. I saw the second plane hit—we were just crossing Canal St.”

‘You Go Towards the Danger’

Over the next seven hours, Mr. Maisel would have an up-close view of the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil—“you go towards the danger, not away from it,” he said during an extended interview July 26—and in the process found himself stepping out of his accustomed role of photographing the emergency workers who were taking the greatest risks to become a rescuer, after coming perilously close to death himself.

Newspaper photographers are a hardy lot—some would say foolhardy—willing to take chances to capture a moment or a mood for their publications. There is a particular esprit de corps among those shooting for tabloids that has perhaps been most pronounced among those working for The News, which long billed itself as “New York’s Picture Newspaper.” Mr. Maisel’s first work for the paper came in 1981, while he was prowling the streets of the East Village as photo editor for Torch, one of the two student newspapers at NYU.

“There was an explosion on 14th St. and there was a blackout,” he recalled. He ran to the scene over by Ave. D, and his lack of an NYPD-issued press pass meant he was barred from the area set aside for credentialed shooters. So he ran around the corner to East 13th St., entered a building and climbed up the coal elevator until he was able to locate a spot that gave him a good view of the scene and began snapping away. When he finally came downstairs, he spotted a veteran News photographer, Willie Anderson, and showed him what he’d gotten. Mr. Anderson handed him the film he’d already shot and told Mr. Maisel to take both sets over to The News, which was then located at East 42nd St. off 3rd Ave.

“I ran the entire distance,” Todd said. “I was moving faster than the traffic.”

He arrived sweaty and out of breath and handed the film to one of the photo editors.

“They didn’t use my pictures; they used Willie’s,” he said. “I ran mine in The Torch. But they sent me a check for five bucks.” Coming from The News, the money seemed like an affirmation that he had a career ahead of him.

He knew early on what he wanted to shoot, and it was the kind of photos for which The News was best known: breaking news, often involving cops and firefighters. The paper was also known for its sports photography, but it would be nearly 20 years later, during the 2000 Subway Series between the Yankees and Mets, that he shot baseball for the first time, capturing Roger Clemens’s beaning of Mike Piazza at the precise moment of contact. Sports was fun, Mr. Maisel said, but when he was dispatched to ballparks and arenas, “I would have my radio on going to the job and I would go to jobs on my way and on my way back, sometimes shootings.”

‘An Adrenaline Junkie’

Asked why he hadn’t shot sports earlier, he replied, “Because I was a chaser. I was an adrenaline junkie.” He also had a knack for making the people he most enjoyed covering feel comfortable with him around.

“My thing was always cops and fire, and all the city people knew me,” Mr. Maisel said. “I would have access to the precinct like nobody else. I would take [crime] reports out of the building like I was a cop. I had a really good relationship with them, even when I didn’t write a [favorable] story.”

One example, he continued, came when he told the cops in the area of Stuyvesant Town/Peter Cooper Village that he was covering for Town & Village that there was a serious drug problem in Stuyvesant Park. When that didn’t spur them to action, “I went undercover,” covertly getting shots of the dealers in action and then publishing the photos and an accompanying expose.

“It was a little embarrassing for the cops—I was an insider and I had told them I was gonna do this,” Mr. Maisel said. But they didn’t hold it against him, he said, and “I got to know the ESU cops, the local firefighters got to know me.”

He was promoted at Town & Village, and at one point was offered the position of deputy publisher, he said, but turned it down “because I didn’t want to be hemmed in. I felt I could achieve so much more at the Daily News." So in 1996 he quit his job to become “a full-time free-lancer,” with many of his shots appearing in this newspaper, where his wife, Andrea, worked as a reporter during that era.

Too Good for Own Good

“I became a ‘perma-lancer' with the Daily News,’” Mr. Maisel said, getting an increasing amount of work from the paper, until he had the bad taste to win 14 awards from the New York Press Photographers Association, which didn’t reflect so well on the staff photographers. Or, for that matter, on the higher-ups who hadn’t brought him on staff.

At the awards ceremony, “I’m sitting there with the big editors, and I won photographer of the year and photograph of the year,” he said. “And they were not too pleased with me.”

Feelings were sufficiently frayed that in early 1999 Mr. Maisel opted to return to Town & Village. That March he shot a major fire in Harlem, “and I made some really good photos.” But The News hadn’t paid him for two months of photos he had shot for it before giving up his free-lancing there, and he wasn’t happy.

“So I call The Post,” Mr. Maisel said, escalating the tensions between him and the photo editors at The News, particularly after one of his shots wound up on the front page, “with my name in 18-point type,” and another eight ran inside the paper—“unprecedented.”

His old boss at The News, Michael Lipack, called him up the next day “screaming. I said to him, ‘You did this,’ ” and hung up the phone. After months of simmering anger, at the end of the year, Mr. Maisel said, Mr. Lipack called him back and said, “We’re hiring you—we can’t afford not to have you.”

And so 20 months later, he began the day in The Bronx with Fernando Ferrer, one of the front-runners in the Democratic mayoral primary, then started over to Columbia to shoot Mr. Pataki, and suddenly life changed as swiftly as that ESU truck was moving when Mr. Maisel got in behind it.

‘We’re Under Attack’

At the time that he saw the second plane hit the Twin Towers, “I’m listening to the radios and cops are saying, ‘We’re under attack.’” He drove over to nearby Borough of Manhattan Community College, parked his car on the median, and got out to see what he could shoot of the destruction around him.

Referring to a Port Authority cop, Mr. Maisel said, “Chris Amoroso was one of my most-famous pictures—he was helping a woman that was in trouble, with another guy that was helping him.” Officer Amoroso would then go into 1 World Trade Center seeking to assist others who had been inside the building, and was there when it came crashing down.

“I brought that picture to the funeral, and I wound up sitting in the limo with the family,” Mr. Maisel recalled. “One of them said, ‘You just brought him back to life for me.’”

He wandered over to Liberty St., near a Greek church. “I saw something come down from a building and hit Firefighter Danny Suhr.” He didn’t immediately realize it, but the falling object had been a body, one of the people who jumped out of the burning building rather than be consumed by fire.

“My reaction after shooting a picture was to say [to myself] ‘You gotta get help.’ I went around a corner and I saw Dr. [Kerry] Kelly,” the Fire Department’s Chief Medical Officer. He told her what he had witnessed—“I saw a guy get killed; a body landed on him.” But after conveying that information to her, “I kind of froze. Things were raining down—there were pieces of debris. But because of Danny Suhr, all those firefighters who were dragging him away lived. And so did I.”

‘Sky Like a Monster’

It was far too early for that kind of reflection. “The sky looked like a monster: black with tentacles,” Mr. Maisel said. “It just ran through my head: don’t take a picture—run, run, run.” And that impulse carried him out of the path of the south tower as it collapsed.

“That building hit while I was in mid-air, diving into 90 West St.” along with rescue personnel on the scene who had realized what was happening. “That building saved us—it was a heavy concrete building. As opposed to the Deutsche Bank building, which was totally destroyed, a block away.

“I was still focused on getting myself to safety,” Mr. Maisel said. He encountered a female cop and grabbed her by the shoulder and gave her some of his water. “She ran towards the tunnel area. Me, I went back into the debris field, looking for survivors.”

That impulse runs counter to the training and inclinations of most journalists, who are taught not to get emotionally involved in what they’re covering, and focus solely on getting the shot, getting the quote, bearing witness to what is happening in front of them. But when he was younger, Mr. Maisel had been part of a volunteer patrol in Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach section, “where occasionally we had to render assistance.”

As he was searching, “there’s fire coming out of the ground from broken gas mains. And then I found [Firefighter] Kevin Shea—he was the only survivor from that company,” Manhattan’s Ladder 35. They shared an odd kinship: as Mr. Maisel would later learn, “His Captain had told him to go out [of the first tower] and get a couple of pictures. That’s the only reason he’s alive today. He had a broken neck and he lost his thumb.”

Helped Lift Him Up

Mr. Maisel was among those who lifted up Mr. Shea to try to get him to a safe place. “I had a bandanna in my vest pocket,” he recalled. “I put it on my face because I didn’t trust the air. I guess it was better than nothing, because all I have today is asthma.”

When a large-enough group of rescuers had gathered to carry Mr. Shea without his help, Mr. Maisel began taking pictures of their efforts. A short time later, he encountered a fellow News photographer, David Handschuh, whose leg had been shattered. Mr. Maisel got a photo of him being carried by a cop and an Emergency Medical Service Chief while a firefighter with a grim look on his face led the way. They brought him into a deli, and then the second of the Twin Towers fell. 

“The freakin’ façade comes down and everything turned black and you heard cops and firefighters screaming, ‘We’re gonna die, we’re gonna die.’ You never heard anything like that. And then the sun came through the windows, and we realized, ‘We’re gonna make it.’”

And so he went back to what he had been doing before they needed to be inside for reasons beside his injured co-worker.

“I took pictures, I was taking part in the rescue,” Mr. Maisel said. “I helped carry one of the other firefighters outta there, by the footbridge. There was a motorcycle he was underneath. He was banged up, but he was OK.” But the work became grimmer: “We searched for [other] survivors, but there was only dead people.”

There would be a moment of gallows humor: when he returned to his car, he saw he had left its lights on, leaving him with a dead battery, and “some wiseass had put a ticket on it but it wasn’t filled out.” Someone came by and gave his car a boost, and by 4 p.m. he had arrived at The News’s then-offices at West 33rd St. He was one of numerous photographers from the paper who hadn’t been heard from as cell-phone communication was knocked out.

‘Not Sure We Were Alive’

“They weren’t sure we were alive,” Mr. Maisel said, which produced a few moments of relief and sentimentality. Once that passed, however, he said Mr. Lipack told him, “Get me some pictures—now.”

He had brought Mr. Handschuh’s camera back with him as well—“He had some extra memory cards that came in handy”—giving his superiors the photos both had taken. Mr. Maisel had gotten one shot of a woman who had gotten out of one of the towers who turned back to look, with an expression of horror on her face. He also got a shot of a hand, which he believed came from one of the passengers on the planes that the terrorists had steered into the buildings.

“I had so many of my friends [die] in there: {FDNY} Rescue 1, Rescue 2, and the cops, Vigiano, Curtin,” including some of his neighbors in Marine Park. “I went to 70 funerals—it was just one after another. I didn’t photograph any one of them.”

Some of his colleagues at The News, he said, “were knocked out” emotionally by what they had witnessed. “Some of them didn’t want to do any work on” the follow-up coverage at the Trade Center site.

His own reaction had been a different manifestation of the trauma he experienced: when city officials blocked off large parts of the area near Ground Zero, he would yell at the cops, some of whom he knew, to let him through. “I would be so vociferous—I wasn’t taking any of their s---, because who the hell were they to say? Because there were dead people there? Most of the dead people were unrecognizable.”

‘Saved to Tell a Story’

He remarked, “Yeah, I suffered PTSD. But we deal with it in different ways. Me, I stopped working at the Trade Center [that afternoon] and I cried on a friend’s shoulder. I lost friends that day, but I told myself I lived because I had something important to do. Journalism is like religion to me—there was this feeling I had been saved to tell a story. How could I have been in the right place at the right time, didn’t get hurt, got my pictures in and David Handschuh’s.”

His personal involvement in the rescue efforts, as it became known, elevated his stature among cops and firefighters who had liked and trusted him but now viewed him as something more than a journalist telling their stories with his photos. “They knew who I was, they called me ‘brother,’ ” Mr. Maisel said. “To this day, I appreciate that. It’s important for me to be trusted.”

More significantly, he said, the heroic rescue efforts and the daunting losses suffered by the NYPD and especially the Fire Department created a unity between the two forces that was sometimes lacking in the past, when they would both be summoned to an accident scene and wind up squabbling and even physically fighting over who should be doing what. He remembered one incident in which a cop reacted with outrage when, seeing the police were having difficulty extricating a man trapped in his car after an auto accident, Mr. Maisel pulled a fire alarm, and another one in which photographers were blocked from getting to the roof of a building from which they could have shot a furious “Battle of the Badges” going on in the street below.

“After 9/11, it all came together—they all understood each other,” he said. “Task Force 1 was a godsend because it brought their expertise together and brought them together. Today you go to a job and there’s no arguments.”

‘Getting by With Medication’

He’s enrolled in the World Trade Center health program for those exposed to the toxins at the site, and feels fortunate, with so many people whose paths crossed his on Sept. 11 having already died of their illnesses, that asthma is his only physical affliction. “I’m getting by with medication,” he said, “but so far, so good.”

Recalling one friend, Timothy Stackpole, who had come back from grievous injuries suffered in a fire to return to work, only to perish on 9/11, Mr. Maisel said, “I understand the invincibility thing. I go into some very dangerous situations. I’m not a very religious guy, but I trust in God. I was given a second chance, and so what happened with the Daily News doesn’t really matter. My life isn’t the Daily News; my life is journalism.”

And so losing the job he had wanted since he became interested in photojournalism, and had done so well once he finally got his opportunity there, didn’t rock him, even at an age when there’s added uncertainty that future employers will look past the gray hairs and lines in the face and see the energy and enthusiasm that still pulsates through his being.

His phone hadn’t stopped ringing over the three days since he was summarily fired, and Mr. Maisel said with a smile, “I’m gonna do just fine.”

We depend on the support of readers like you to help keep our publication strong and independent. Join us.