I was in Leningrad in 1991 on the day that its name officially reverted to St Petersburg.
:o :smack: (and I know you know what I intended to say)
succumb, to give way to superior force.
Thanks for outting me as being a lousy speller…feel good?
tsfr
I was guessing you were talking about some “subcommunications” center under the WTC that most people didn’t see.
There was another one? 
I marched in October 1969, when I got tear-gassed, and again in May 1970, after the Cambodia invasion, when I took a dip in the Reflecting Pool.
When I lived in London I went to school right next to the Israeli Embassy. When it (The embassy) was bombed by Hezbollah in 1994, I was in grade 5 IIRC. We happened to be having a sports day in nearby Kensington Gardens when the bomb went off.
I was in L. A. for the Northridge quake and in Oakland for the Loma Prieta quake.
But the best historical moment I was eyewitness to was Kirk Gibson’s home run in game 1 of the '88 World Series. I was in the right field bleachers, so when he hit it, I watched it come closer and closer (it landed about 50 feet to my left). That was one of the most incredible moments of my life. The agony of watching him take his first few swings, knowing in my heart that there was no way he was even going to be able to hit a fair ball, we were definitely going to lose, completely resigned to the thought of losing. Then, the crack of the bat, the ball rising in the air, getting bigger and bigger, and suddenly I realized it was going all the way, and the crowd was on its feet roaring, and when the ball landed in the stands, I was jumping and screaming, but I couldn’t even hear myself, the roar of the crowd was so loud. Ecstasy.
I was in Leningrad in March 1989 for the first free, universal-suffrage elections in Russia’s history.
I spent that summer in Berlin, but moved back to Canada three weeks before the Berlin Wall fell. 
I was in Moscow on October 3, 1993, getting ready to go to a movie at the KinoCentre when we got distracted by an anti-Yeltsin crowd breaking through the police cordon to take over the nearby White House. We went along to see what was going on (it didn’t look particularly violent), heard a few speeches and a lot of overheated rhetoric, then watched young men get ready to go storm the Ostankino TV center.
Common sense intruded, we beat a hastry retreat to my apartment, and watched the rest on TV…
I was in the stands when Hank Aaron hit his 715th home run.
I was working in the building across the street from the 1st anthrax incident, in Boca Raton, Fl, when it happened.
I was in downtown Manhattan, working directly across the street, on September 11, 2001. I didn’t see the planes hit, but witnessed too much carnage on the ground after the first strike, and after exiting my office and evacuating downtown Manhattan.
Less dramatic, in chronological order:
I was in Monterey, CA during the Loma Prieta earthquake.
I was in the eye of Hurricane Gloria in 1985. Not a very impressive hurricane, but hurricanes hitting Long Island are rare.
I was outside the train car when Desmond Robinson was shot, but did not see the shooting.
On a lighter note, I was sitting 6 rows behind the visitor dugout during the 1998 Yankees/Orioles brawl and got to see Darryl Strawberry take a header into the Oriole dugout up close. I was also there (same seat) when Derek Jeter got his 2,000 hit, a cheap little squib that Jeter was probably embarassed watching on all the nightly sports news when it happened.
Was in my basement when the 1967 tornado ripped through Oak Lawn, and lived right next to Plainfield when it got hit in 1990 - I saw the funnel cloud…
I was at the homestead in East Texas one clear Saturday morning in 2003, drinking coffee before I went to work. The house is very old, so when I heard the thunder, it rattled the windows. But the thunder didn’t stop and the skies were clear. So, I hopped up and went outside. I looked up in the direction of the noise and saw several corkscrew contrails. But I didn’t make the connection. The thunder rolled for over a minute. I considered that someone was doing a seismographic survey and the noise was dynamite shots. I wondered if this was an earthquake. I made a note to check the net when I got back to civilization.
I went back into the house and finshed my coffee. An hour or so later, the step-daughter called and asked if we heard about the shuttle Columbia. We turned on the radio and got the story.
My main chore that day was to burn a pile of brush. A couple of hours later, while the pile was burning, I heard a jet. When I looked up, I saw an F-15 flying about as slow as an F-15 will go. He was banked to one side and low enough that I could see the pilot looking out the window at my column of smoke. I waved my arms at him and shook my head ‘no’ to attempt to communicate to him that this was not part of the shuttle. Apparently, he figured it out because nobody in darks suites and singlasses showed up at the front gate.
A few weeks later, I combed the woods looking for pieces, but I found nothing.
I was also at Jeryy Garcia’s last 7 public concerts…RIP Jerry, we miss you.