Two days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, structural engineer Irwin G. Cantor—guided by steel erector Bobby Stuart—walked up a darkened staircase to the 18th floor of a World Financial Center tower near Ground Zero, which his office had engineered in the 1980s. Cantor wanted to satisfy himself that a severely damaged corner column had been tied off safely.
The trek up and down 18 flights took place about a year after Cantor’s open heart surgery and diagnosis of lung cancer, but that didn’t stop him. “I kept saying to myself, ‘What the hell am I doing here?’” he recalls.