NEW YORK -- Michele McNally studied theater arts in college, a fine preparation for working in this frenetic city, one of the world’s biggest stages.

As a guide for New York Tour 1, the 32-year-old woman has educated visitors about the Broadway theater district, taken fashionistas on shopping sprees and accompanied food lovers on a movable feast of memorable pizza places.

Five years of experience and her personal connection to the events of Sept. 11, 2001, qualify Ms. McNally for guiding visitors on an hour-and-a-half walking tour that covers the 9/11 memorial fountains, Zuccotti Park and the rebuilt complex of seven buildings called the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan. She is articulate, engaging and encourages people to ask questions.

“I’m a New Yorker so I’m very used to being interrupted and yelled at,” she says, adding that her Irish and Italian roots are the reason so many of her relatives are police officers and firefighters.

On a rainy Monday in August, Ms. McNally meets a tour group outside St. Paul’s Chapel, where George Washington attended Episcopal services. Built in 1766, the Georgian-style church became a physical and spiritual refuge for police officers and firefighters during eight months of rescue and recovery work at ground zero.

Ms. McNally carries standard props for tour guides — a black binder filled with vivid pictures under one arm and an umbrella printed with a famous Paris street scene in the other. Sunglasses are parked on her head.

She grew up in Flushing, a neighborhood in the borough of Queens. She was a 16-year-old high school sophomore on the day hijackers forever altered America’s physical landscape and collective psyche by flying two planes into the twin towers of the World Trade Center, 

The North and South towers, Ms. McNally tells her listeners, were built to sustain the impact of a 707 passenger jet. That’s because back in 1945, a plane struck the Empire State Building.

But the planes that struck the North and South towers were 767s — twice the size of a 707. Each of the World Trade Center’s twin towers stood 110 stories, contained 10 million square feet and 50,000 people. The attack killed 2,983 people, including 343 firefighters.

“They were people who were killed just because they went to work. The island of Manhattan essentially shut down,” Ms. McNally said, because authorities feared more attacks were coming.

“You had to stay where you were. Only first responders could cross bridges.”

The planes’ impact caused nearby buildings to shift on their foundations. Only one staircase in the South Tower remained in place after the impact. Jet fuel from the planes fed fires that burned for an hour, Ms. McNally said. 

Shortly before 10 a.m., the South Tower collapsed and North Tower fell about a half -hour later, spewing concrete, glass and drywall into city streets and sending up a dust cloud that could be seen three miles away. Dust and dirt smothered tombstones and plants in the St. Paul’s Chapel graveyard, which closed for two years. Miraculously, the chapel was not damaged.  

“St. Paul’s was like an oasis in the middle of hell,” Ms. McNally said.

Soon, photos of missing people covered the wrought-iron fence outside the chapel as well as public parks and walls. Only about half of the human remains found were identifiable; the rest are stored in a repository which is in the same building as the museum but is independently operated by the city’s medical examiner and is not visible or accessible. About 20 people were pulled alive from the towers; most were first responders, she added.

Unable to comprehend the full scale of the attacks, Ms. McNally sat in history class at Benjamin Cardozo High School in Bayside, Queens. Cell phones were not nearly as common then and the classroom lacked a television.

Each time parents arrived to pick up a student, an announcement was made over the public address system. By mid-afternoon, Ms. McNally’s mother, a mortgage underwriter who worked on Long Island, arrived to pick up her daughter after an exhausting six-hour drive in bumper-to-bumper traffic.

The young tour guide’s largest memento of that apocalyptic Tuesday sits in the Brooklyn apartment she shares with her husband. A simple upright Sterling piano doubles as a bar.

Ms. McNally, who plays Broadway show tunes on it occasionally, knows the piano is the reason her father is enjoying retirement in Florida with her mother. A health care consultant who regularly visited the South Tower at 8:30 a.m. on Tuesdays to meet with clients, Ms. McNally’s father stayed home on Sept. 11, 2001, to take delivery of the piano, a birthday gift for her.

“He and the movers wound up sitting on the couch watching the news and drinking coffee. He has the visitor badge he used at the South Tower,” Ms. McNally said.  

Since March 2016, Ms. McNally has led tourists around the World Trade Center neighborhood.

“When I first started, I couldn’t get through it without crying at least once. If I do it too many times a week, I have nightmares,” she said.

What is most rewarding is talking to people “who thought they knew about Sept. 11 but didn’t have a lot of the facts right or didn’t realize the scope of it. They thought it was just two buildings. They didn’t realize the extent of the damage or how long the recovery efforts were.” 

The 2,983 names on the 9/11 memorial include the crew and passengers of all four planes plus six people who died during a 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. Bronze panels around two reflecting pools hold the names. A white rose is placed on a name to recognize that person’s birthday.

The fountains’ water represents a constant flow of tears pouring into an empty void that can never be filled. The memorial fountains are called “Reflecting Absence.”

Partly at the urging of Cantor Fitzgerald, which experienced the largest loss of any company on 9/11 with 658 deaths, thousands of interviews were conducted to determine the placement of individuals’ names at the fountain. If two names are next to each other, it’s likely those people were friends, desk mates or shared a commute, Ms. McNally said.

Surrounding the memorial fountain are 400 swamp white oak trees, planted in 6 feet of soil, making the ground around the fountain akin to a huge planter box. 

After the walking tour, tourists enter the 9/11 museum through its back entrance and go through security. On the museum’s upper level, video screens show the facial expressions of shocked New Yorkers looking up at the sky. The subterranean exhibits cover 100,000 square feet of space. It’s an emotional experience that will test your eyesight and endurance. 

If you take the 9 a.m. walking tour and spend two hours in the museum, you will still have time to take the elevators up to the 100th floor of One World Trade Center, the tallest building in the Western hemisphere. If visibility is limited, you can exchange your ticket for a day when the weather is clearer. The view includes Brooklyn, New Jersey, Lower Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty. 

Marylynne Pitz: mpitz@post-gazette.com, 412-263-1648 or on Twitter: @mpitzpg

Correction, posted Sept. 9, 2017: An earlier version of this story incorrectly reported the total number of victims and the number of victims from Cantor Fitzgerald and misstated the location of a repository for remains.

First Published: September 8, 2017, 12:00 p.m.
Updated: September 8, 2017, 6:01 p.m.