Pueblo man recounts working on World Trade Center

The events of September 11, 2001 are personal for a Pueblo man who was working in New York when the World Trade Center was under construction.

Thirteen years after the Twin Towers collapsed, the image remains painful for Richard Van Manen, a native New Yorker.

“It was my hometown. When it first happened, you thought you were being attacked. And of course I had that tie to the trade center and when you watch them come down it was kind of weird,” Richard Van Manen said.

He was a consulting engineer in the 1970s, working on the World Trade Center.

“My office was two blocks north of the World Trade Center so not only did I work there, I hung out there,” Van Manen said. “It’s hard to watch them come down, especially the north one because I did the antenna on that one, so that’s the last thing you see is the antenna before all of the smoke. That’s kind of rough.”

Van Manen has two tattoos on his arms of the World Trade Center. “This I did after it happened,” he said of the tattoo. “It’s still personal. It always will be.”