In 2007, John Abruzzo and Michael Curci sat together for a StoryCorps interview.

Six years had passed since the descent.

Their conversation did not sound like a polished action movie. They remembered practical details: where people placed their hands, how the chair turned at the landings, how the group rotated, and how little they understood about the larger attack while they were inside.

StoryCorps recorded the interview on September 26, 2007. That date matters because the speakers were not anonymous narrators reconstructing someone else’s experience. Abruzzo was the person in the chair, and Curci was one of the ten who carried it.

They remembered stopping near a drink machine.

They remembered the temporary aid point and the decision not to leave Abruzzo.

They remembered reaching West Street.

Abruzzo said they could not have been outside for five minutes before their building came down.

That statement is a survivor’s recollection, not a synchronized timestamp. It should be understood that way. Yet it communicates something the official clock alone cannot: the distance between survival and death felt terribly small.

The North Tower collapsed at 10:28 a.m., 102 minutes after Flight 11 struck it.

Official time gives the account a fixed boundary. Oral history supplies the human scale inside that boundary. Used together, they show what a simple clock cannot: the descent consisted of dozens of small operations performed by people who did not know the deadline.

Within that span, the ten coworkers had assembled, transferred Abruzzo, negotiated 69 floors, changed stairways, passed firefighters, rejected the chance to leave him, crossed the damaged lobby, moved through a broken window, and pushed the chair away from the building.

None of them could see the 102-minute limit counting down.

Years later, Curci reflected that John might have saved the group too. Staying together gave them a shared task and kept them moving along one route.

That idea is meaningful, but it remains an interpretation rather than a provable alternative history. No one can know where the ten coworkers would have been at 10:28 if Abruzzo had not been in the office.

What is known is that all ten stayed together and survived with him.

Their closeness did not end when the dust settled.

Curci described a bond that did not require constant explanation. They continued working together. They shared knowledge of an event that outsiders could study but never fully enter.

Abruzzo’s words focused on what his rescuers had risked. He knew their families. He knew how much they had to lose.

The question of gratitude became difficult because ordinary language assumes an ordinary favor. A ride, a meal, a few hours of help—these can be answered with thanks.

Abruzzo had worked with most of the group for many years. He did not remember them as interchangeable rescuers. He knew the families attached to the lives they had placed at risk, which made the cost of their decision more visible to him.

What is the proper response when ten people delay their own escape from a burning skyscraper and carry you down 69 floors?

Abruzzo did not pretend to have a sufficient answer.

The chair offered another kind of answer.

It could be preserved.

Its scratches, tracks, fabric, and frame could show future visitors that high-rise evacuation is not an abstract policy question. It concerns real bodies, real architecture, and real time.

The chair also connected two attacks on the same building.

In 1993, Abruzzo’s evacuation had taken six hours because no equivalent device was ready for him. That failure helped produce safety changes. In 2001, one of those changes helped save his life.

The object demonstrated something larger than luck.

It demonstrated institutional memory made physical. A failure observed in 1993 became a device available in 2001. The device could not prevent the attack or guarantee escape, but it changed what was possible for one man on one floor.

A lesson learned after one disaster had not prevented the next attack. But it had changed one person’s chance of surviving it.

The chair remained with Abruzzo for years before it began its final journey back to the World Trade Center site.

That delay also preserved the object’s personal meaning. Before curators interpreted it for the public, Abruzzo lived with the physical proof of the route he and his coworkers had completed together.