All New Yorkers on that day, he said. And we're all Americans. He said time has not dimmed the honor of that day when our country came face to face with true evil. We're going to continue the coverage here, as we remember, just blocks away from the site of 9/11 at the New York Stock Exchange, we are joined now by Frank Bisignano. He served as Chief Administrative Officer at Citigroup here in Lower Manhattan at the time of the attacks, helped reopen the New York Stock Exchange, and is a founding member of the 9/11 Memorial and Museum. He's currently the Commissioner of the Social Security Administration and the CEO of the IRS. Frank, it's great to have you here today. Thank you for taking the time on this day. So, I mean, for those that aren't familiar with your story, tell us a little bit about what it was like for you and how.
You know, as I text many people this morning, I said, it's the same ride in from New Jersey to Lower Manhattan for me. I was at 388 Greenwich, which was really Citigroup's corporate and investment bank headquarters, headquarters for the whole company. It was up on Park Avenue. We had Seven World Trade Center, the old Salomon Smith Barney building that we or the Salomon Brothers building that we merged. And we were in a staff meeting with Mike Carpenter, who ran the corporate investment bank. I was fortunate on Wednesday night, the 9/11 Memorial Dinner, which I was a founding member of the memorial. I had a table with all my partners from that day. Bobby Druskin, who was the president, Tommy Harris, who ran all of fixed income, John Donnelly, who was like my brother that day, who ran human resources and was by my side the whole time. But when the first plane hit, you know, we had a plan for what to do if the towers went down. It wasn't brilliant. It wasn't brilliant because the towers were bombed once before, so it would have been negligent on my part not to have a plan. And I always say to people, I do not want to argue on the day. We have a big problem and we were organized for it. We had a recovery center for our trading force to trade out of in Rutherford, New Jersey. That's where our developers were. But I saw the hole in the building, and I called a gentleman named Tom Jones, who ran the asset management company, and he was in Seven World Trade Center. I said, Tom, you got to get out of there. Everybody's got to get out. He said, no, we're being told to stay. I'm saying, Tom, I'm staring at a big hole and a big building. I was on the phone with Bob Druskin at the time, who was uptown, and the next plane hit, and then it was very clear, you know, it was very clear it wasn't a Piper Cub when it happened. The minute our offices stared at the towers. Yeah, right. 388 was a straight shot. It was my view every morning.
It's what, like ten blocks? Probably north or so.
Yeah. And we had people at 388, 392 50 West Street. I saw Dick Grasso this morning coming in. Yeah. And he reminded me, as Mike Carpenter did, the President came down on that Friday, if you remember, and they wanted to open the exchange. And a bunch of people were being bravado that it could be getting done. And I kind of pooh-poohed it. Generally, I'm generally bravado, but I thought it was a big risk. Too many phone lines. We needed the whole weekend to test. That was a good decision, obviously. It would have been nice to do. We had 16,000 people in and we marched them up to 34th Street where we had an operation center, which was like my home away from home, and then got them up there and then came back down here. The idea was 388 was going to be a medical facility when we got back down late that night. And I never left Lower Manhattan through that whole time because we had to get one. We had to first of all, all day, we were making sure that we were moving money and that we could keep the economy going. You know, we were thinking about what to do about airlines and what type of risks they had. I mean, I was running the command center and then post that it was, you know, who's okay, how are we recovering? And, you know, what are we going to do to come back? So I went back downtown and kind of never left. You know, the idea of getting the exchange up became the new issue. You know, I remember talking to AT&T and Verizon. They actually had a big problem and God bless them, we already covered together, but lots of their truncation happened at the same location. So you might have thought you had diversity of carriers, but you really didn't. I had some odd situation. I had a BlackBerry that was on BellSouth. I had a BlackBerry that was off everybody's grid. And I was communicating with everybody I knew, you know, but not everybody could communicate with me.
But you stayed down there, Frank, right?
Yeah. I stayed down there. I stayed down there and then by the time maybe a week and a half, you know, I was then started commuting from home. But, you know, I was driving through the Holland Tunnel when the Holland Tunnel wasn't open. I was a different first responder. I was a technical leader with thousands of people who, you know, we worked on taking care of everybody and getting the markets up. And I had to get people to want to come back to 388 Greenwich Street. So I had to secure that. You know, it never turned into the medical facility we dreamed it would be. It got built out as one. So I never left. Ten years later, I was blessed with throat cancer, you know? But you know who was wearing a mask back then? You know, you were just trying to get the stuff up and running. And it was good.
It's which you beat thankfully. I'm sorry, which you beat, thankfully. And now we have the distinctive voice.
