We were hardly teenagers when it happened, that day the towers went down. Ten years later, and textbooks have been updated, memorials dedicated. For victims like 22-year-old Hali Geller, whose dad left in the morning for his office on the 104th floor of the first tower and never made it back home that night to cook dinner with her, as he always would, the notion of what was lost never really strays. And while our age has practically doubled since 9-11-01, vivid still are our memories of what classrooms we were sitting in, of who delivered the news that the Pentagon had been attacked and the World Trade Center destroyed—of precisely where we were that moment when history changed.
– Katie Sanders
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Ten years after 9/11, daughter cooks up memories of her kitchen-smitten hero
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The HC Team Weighs In: Remembering 9/11
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Ten years after 9/11, daughter cooks up memories of her kitchen-smitten hero
By Katie Sanders
Nearly a week before the decade anniversary of September 11th, Manhattan native Hali Geller decided it was time for another tattoo.
A 22-year-old sous chef with teal highlights streaked through the underlayers of her waist-length brown hair, Geller handed a Lower East Side tattoo artist a scribble of initials on a page she’d torn from a Disney World autograph book—a souvenir from a Geller family trip. The letters “S P G” now lay inked across her first tattoo, a simple design she had etched on her right shoulder in jet-black script back when she was 15:
Steven Paul Geller
9•11•01
Steven Geller was a cooking enthusiast, a Yankees fan, and an institutional trader at global investment giant Cantor Fitzgerald. He was a family man if Geller ever knew one, and above all, he was her father—an infectiously loving 52-year-old who’d flown to Texas to adopt her the day she was born.
Geller was 12 on September 11, 2001, outspoken and obsessed with Ludacris, Disney, and all things Harry Potter. “Have a good day,” Steven told her, his only child, as he peeked into her room on his way out the door of their Upper West Side apartment that Tuesday morning.
“Bye, Dad,” she called out from her bed, half asleep at 7 a.m. Then he left for work on the 104th floor of 1 World Trade Center—the first tower to go down in the 9/11 attacks—and never made it home.
Looking Back & Moving Forward
Flash forward many special moments in Geller’s life, and the memories jogged by the decennial milestone of when America lost 3,000 and Geller lost her own American hero are nothing short of bittersweet: a pleasant reminder of someone she adored, her “kitchen buddy,” and still very much her voice of reason, but also a less welcome memory of the day he disappeared.
This year’s anniversary is a landmark—a week when networks and newspapers nationwide look back on the moment the numbers 9-1-1 took on a new level of emergency, and when some of the same reporters who delivered the news that Geller’s father was lost forever return to explore all that has happened since he has been gone. But Geller prefers not to dwell on the headlines. Instead, she spent the day remembering who her dad was, thinking even more than usual of his love of fresh mozzarella, tendency to befriend all the guys working the deli counter at Zabar’s, and avuncular way with everyone’s kids. She joined her mother and grandmother at a Cantor Fitzgerald service in Central Park, along with many familiar faces also there to commemorate Steven and his 657 coworkers in the North Tower who died that day, with hardly a moment’s notice and certainly no time for real goodbyes.
What would her dad have thought, Geller wonders, of her going off to boarding school and becoming the only girl on the high school football team? Standing at 5’7”, she boasts the build of a somewhat formidable right guard, though she bets her best knives that her short-lived varsity career would have come as a surprise. And what would Steven made of how she is neither a veterinarian nor an artist, as her 12-year-old self had so badly wanted to be? If only he knew that she’d taken a different, more delicious path, turning their passion into her own profession after graduating from Johnson & Wales University’s culinary program last spring.
“He wouldn’t have expected it, but man, he would love this,” Geller said at the thought of Steven coming home from Wall Street to hear about how she’d just spent an entire lecture learning how to make mashed potatoes. “He would always want to know exactly what was cooking. And if I had my own restaurant, he would have insisted on being the maitre d’.”
Now a newly trained gourmet chef and forever a New Yorker, Geller has begun her first job, working as a junior sous chef to help open the midtown location of the upscale nouveau-American steakhouse STK. And as she spends her days in the kitchen, with Steven present in her mind and on her shoulder, she thinks of what he would say to each new recipe, each big occasion he wasn’t around to see. A lot has happened through the years.
The April after the attack, she went ahead with her bat mitzvah, chanting from the Torah in the same synagogue in which her congregation chanted the Mourner’s Kaddish during Steven’s private memorial service. The photo album from the bat mitzvah celebration—a blowout candy-themed party she knows Steven would have loved—shares a shelf in her apartment with Portraits: 9/11/01, an encyclopedia-thick hardcover book published by the New York Timeswith commemorative listings of thousands of 9/11 victims. On Steven’s page, Geller is pictured between her smiling parents, alongside the headline “Trader Cooked, Shopped With His Daughter.”
For all Geller and Steven did manage to cook and do together—they made a brilliant brisket (“Forget it, it was so good.”), rollerbladed the Upper West Side, grilled in their yard in the Hamptons in the summertime, and watched episode after episode of Emeril and the original Iron Chef—there were of course the things they had planned but never got to, with attending a Yankees game high up on the list.
Geller eventually made it to a ball game, and this July, she and her executive chef invaded the kitchen of the Yankee Stadium’s Legends Suite, serving mini barbeque beef short-rib sliders and lobster salad wraps with arugula, avocado, and a lemon olive oil to crowds of Yankees fans. She thinks Steven would have loved that she was cooking at the home of the Yankees even more than he loved the Yankees.
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Daddy’s Little Chef
Geller was bred to be a sous chef, crumbling ingredients and pouring measurements into mixing bowls from her highchair well before she had the teeth to sample what was cooking.
But Steven made sure to develop his daughter’s palate early on, replacing cans of Gerber puree with steamed artichoke and orecchiette pasta with spinach when Geller was still in diapers. Eventually, she could sit perched on the counter, or better yet, one of the high kitchen stools, at which point Steven upgraded her to egg cracking and meatball rolling duties.
As Geller’s tastes and skill-set grew, the duo’s dinner preparations became more elaborate and exciting, though still staying true to Steven’s purist values: spaghetti and clams, fresh impeccably marinated fish. Her mom would pick her up from school each evening, and Steven would call them on the car phone to ask what ingredients he would need to collect from the three gourmet neighborhood markets on his way home.
He taught her how to use his gadgets, like their in-home fryalator and top-of-the-line Japanese knives—family heirlooms that her mom admits are worth more than the majority of her fine jewelry. Geller remembers being promoted to “knife status” not long after her ninth birthday. Steven would show her how to chop something and then give her a go. That’s how she learned to cook.
“My mom’s a total neat freak, but he never cared if I made a mess,” she remembered. “It was just us, and I think cooking was this totally liberating thing for him because he could do whatever he wanted as long as I would eat it. Sometimes he’d come home and throw on this denim chef coat that definitely looked like it belonged to a dad. It was kind of a joke, but he was very much a jeans kind of guy.” That same chef coat has since become a part of a 9/11 memorial exhibit.
For as much as Steven loved to cook, he also loved to share his cooking. Freshly flipped chocolate chip pancakes made from scratch appeared for Geller and her friends the morning after any sleepover, and on the occasions the Gellers would go out to eat, it was hardly uncommon for Steven to be casually fraternizing with the restaurant’s executive chef. A few of their favorite spots have closed in recent years (with Geller claiming the loss of Steven’s business may have proven more fatal than the financial crisis). But even with the neighborhood having undergone many changes and her apartment newly renovated, Geller need only look at the New York skyline, with a giant gap where her dad’s office used to stand so tall, to be reminded of what used to be and of the void it represents.
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The Day The Tower Went Down
In early September of 2001, right before the start of school, Geller rode the subway with Steven to 1 World Trade Center, where she spent a few days each year bouncing around executives’ corner offices and peering out the giant windows, watching fixedly as the wind would make the skyscraper lightly sway.
Nothing was unusual about that day. She played a few Disney games online, said her hellos, and enjoyed the tantalizing view while her dad worked away.
“There was no other place in the city you could get that high without paying,” she recalled. “Christmas, Take Your Daughter To Work Day—at least a few times a year I’d get to go and sit at those big desks, and that was just the coolest, being on top of the city and watching all these traders at work.”
The Cantor Fitzgerald floor plan was an open one, Geller remembers, conducive to brokers constantly calling out to one another. Needless to say it was an intense environment, and with talk of markets, things heating up, and boiling points being reached, it’s perhaps no wonder Steven was such a natural in the kitchen. It was only days after her visit that, in a matter of hours, two planes hit, two colossal buildings came crashing down, and the intensity emanating from within her dad’s office, throughout New York, the entire country, and the world would never feel quite the same.
On She Cooks
The built-in bookcase in Geller’s living room represents a mix of old and new. It’s the original unit that was there when Steven was around, but the plasma television it holds is an upgrade, different from the set she and her mom sat home staring at for dozens of hours upon finding out that the first tower had gone down.
Geller remembers being in class at the Dalton School on the Upper East Side the morning of 9/11 when her principal interrupted, noticeably panicked, to ask if anybody had parents who worked at the World Trade Center, where a plane had just struck. Sitting in the office waiting for her mom to come sign her out, Geller at first cried, and then comforted her hysterical friend, a fellow 7th grader whose dad also worked in the Financial District. By the time Geller’s mom managed to get to her, they sat in lock-jam traffic, making it only a few blocks by car before they got out and walked across Manhattan, through Central Park, determined to get home to the television. All the while, Geller watched as plumes of smoke billowed uptown. She knew the mess was coming from where her dad had been but just kept hoping he was no longer there.
As they waited for news that survivors had emerged or bodies had been uncovered, weeks went by where the Geller’s kitchen went unused. And with each passing day, it became clearer that while there was no body to be found, no one person to even blame, Steven wasn’t coming home. His pictures still sit in frames on the bookshelf, including one of when he was a little boy, right next to a young Geller and some other family shots. Their renovated kitchen is more spacious and modern, entirely pristine with granite counters, custom cabinetry, and a sleek metallic-tile backsplash. But the plates, silverware, and kitchen toys tucked in the drawers and on the shelves under the island have largely stayed the same. And when Geller is home and hasn’t had enough cooking on the job, she pulls out Steven’s giant checkered wooden cutting board and puts together a meal, admitting that in addition to being her favorite pastime and now her occupation, it’s her way of keeping him around. “This would be a playground for most people,” she said. “It was my dad’s escape, and it’s what I do.”
These days, however, life in the kitchen is hardly all play. With STK about to open, Geller is spending more time laboring away with food than she even thought possible, returning home after what are sometimes 17-hour workdays with aching feet, the occasional burn, and consistently dreary eyes to show for it.
“It’s a deeper pain than high school football,” she said. “The ankles, the knees. It’s even worse than three-a-days.” But she loves to cook, and every time she practices a new technique or gets her hands on a state-of-the-art, commercial-grade gadget, she thinks of how her dad would be so excited, even a little jealous, just as long as she still loves it.
She now has a wardrobe of chef coats of her own, which cover her tattoos as she works away thickening soup and preparing purees and crudités. She talks fast and she talks food, and after those long and draining days dealing with that occasional “jerk who asked for medium but really wanted well,” she gets home, rests her feet, and thinks back to why she does this.
Last week, she and a fellow chef were on location at STK, winding down after an event for which they had prepared burgers, mac n cheese bites, and mixed green salads by the mass. They were chatting about the upcoming 9/11 anniversary and both of their new tattoos—his a Japanese dragon symbol between his shoulder blades—when Geller’s right shoulder got a little itchy. She reached into the pocket of her chef pants and pulled out a tube of antiseptic.
“His dream job would have been what I’m doing,” she said. “And I don’t necessarily do it for him, but I do it because of him.” She let off a sigh of relief after another long day in the kitchen and smeared a wad of Bacitracin across her dad’s healing signature. “I don’t do it because of his absence, but I do it for his presence. These anniversaries come and go, but the hardest part is looking back and trying to be okay with the fact that there could have been so much more.”
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