Asmat Ali still remembers asking his coworker Telmo E. Alvear why he was coming back to Windows on the World so soon.
The two had worked late on Sept. 10, 2001, and Alvear was returning just hours later for a breakfast shift at the restaurant atop the World Trade Center’s North Tower.
“I want to get a home just like you guys,” Ali recalled Alvear telling him.
Alvear was among the 73 Windows on the World workers killed the next morning in the Sept. 11 attacks. The famed fine-dining destination occupied 50,000 square feet across the building’s 106th and 107th floors, with a restaurant and bar offering sweeping views of New York City. For 25 years, it drew Financial District workers, tourists and visitors from around the world.
“Twenty-five years later, when I hear living wages, I think about Telmo and his dream,” Ali said Friday. “People who work hard should be able to support their families.”
Ali was among former Windows workers who reunited in Lower Manhattan on the 25th anniversary of the attacks to read the names of the colleagues they lost and remember a restaurant workforce that survivors repeatedly described as a family.
But the gathering also doubled as a labor rally, linking the workers killed on 9/11 to the restaurant-worker organizing that grew out of the attacks — with a sizable contingent from Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration on hand as advocates pressed government officials to deliver higher wages.
Deputy Mayor for Economic Justice Julie Su, Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services Helen Arteaga and Immigrant Affairs Commissioner Faiza Ali all attended. State lawmakers and Democratic congressional nominees Brad Lander and Claire Valdez also joined the gathering.
The turnout from City Hall came days after Mamdani launched the Mayor’s Office of Worker Power, an initiative Su pointed to in her remarks as evidence of the administration’s commitment to workers. Its new executive director, Tony Perlstein, had served as the union representative for roughly 300 Windows on the World workers through HERE Local 100 before the attacks.
“We see you, we hear you, we value you,” Su told the surviving Windows workers and their families, after describing how her own experience working in restaurants taught her that service workers could be standing directly in front of customers and still feel invisible.
Su said the new worker-power office was part of the administration’s effort to “keep on showing up for the people who show up for the city.”
For the former Windows workers, Friday was also a reunion.
Saru Jayaraman, president of One Fair Wage, told the room that some members of the extended Windows community now see one another only every several years at gatherings marking the anniversary.
“We see each other sometimes every five years now at these reunions,” Jayaraman said.
In the aftermath of the attacks, surviving workers and labor organizers began raising money, helping displaced employees pay bills and trying to find them new jobs.
Fekkak Mamdouh, a former Windows waiter and union delegate, recalled Friday how he initially believed the effort would be about meeting those immediate needs.
He remembered sitting down with Jayaraman and telling her they needed to get money to workers so they could pay rent and buy food. Jayaraman had a different idea.
“Hell no, we’re gonna organize people,” Mamdouh recalled her telling him.
Mamdouh figured he would spend about six months helping before returning to waiting tables.
“I thought it was six months,” Mamdouh said. “It’s 25 years now.”
That organizing eventually expanded beyond the surviving Windows workforce and into a broader campaign over wages and conditions in the restaurant industry. Mamdouh later co-founded One Fair Wage.
On Friday, Jayaraman used the anniversary to make clear that, for the organization, commemoration alone is no longer enough.
“We are tired of memorials,” she said.
Jayaraman challenged the government officials in the room to turn their support for workers into policy, calling on Albany to end the subminimum wage for tipped restaurant workers and saying the city should tie use of public sidewalk space by restaurants to minimum-wage requirements.
“We don’t want to do any more memorials,” she said. “We want to celebrate winning in their name.”
Assemblymember Jessica González-Rojas, who sponsors One Fair Wage legislation in Albany and won the Democratic primary for a state Senate seat in June, pledged to continue pushing the issue.
González-Rojas said women who depend on tips can face sexual harassment from customers.
“We have to keep fighting,” she said.
The push extended to two candidates hoping to take the wage fight to Washington.
Lander, the former city comptroller and Democratic nominee for New York’s 10th Congressional District, said he would support a national living-wage push. He also recalled working with the family of Manuel Asitimbay, an Ecuadorian immigrant and Windows cook killed on 9/11, whose family lost its source of income and housing after his death.
“There’s lots of ways to remember the folks who were killed that day,” Lander said, arguing that winning fair wages for workers would be among the most meaningful.
Valdez, the Democratic nominee for New York’s 7th Congressional District and a former union shop steward, made a similar pledge.
“As I head to Washington, D.C. next year, believe me when I say that fighting for a living wage for all is going to be number one priority,” Valdez said. “Fighting for every single worker in this country is going to be a number one priority.”
Immigrant Affairs Commissioner Faiza Ali also drew a personal connection to the memorial. As the workers’ names were read, she said she recognized one as the father of her younger sister’s best friend.
Many of those killed were immigrants, including some who were undocumented, she said.
“We commit ourselves to building a place for every worker,” Ali said, “regardless of where they come from, regardless of their immigration status or what language that they speak.”
For Mamdouh, one reason the group holds its own commemoration is that he said Windows workers can feel like “just the restaurant workers” at broader remembrances of the attacks.
“We honor them the right way,” Mamdouh said. “And we make them very, very special.”
Twenty-five years on, Mamdouh said he does not expect the memory of what happened — or the organizing it inspired — to disappear.
“The history and the struggle gonna continue and the fight gonna continue,” he said. “From the ashes of 9/11, we create these movements that will help generations to come.”
