He worked on the 107th floor of the World Trade Center. A shift swap saved his life
A Sunday Swap, a Tuesday Favor, and the Morning Everything Changed
Qwenews.com – In the weeks before September 11, 2001, a routine exchange of kitchen shifts between two coworkers at Manhattan's most famous restaurant quietly rewrote the course of one man's life. Sekou Siby, a cook stationed on the 107th floor of the World Trade Center's North Tower, had agreed to cover a weekend for Moises Rivas, an Ecuadorian musician in his early twenties who played in a band on Saturdays and Sundays. Rivas needed that particular Sunday free. Siby stepped in. Then, on the following Tuesday, Rivas reciprocated — taking Siby's place at the breakfast cold-food station in Windows on the World. That single Tuesday swap meant Siby was at home, in bed beside his pregnant wife, when the first plane struck the tower where he had worked every day for nearly three years.
The phone call that shattered the morning came from the wife of Abdoul Karim, a fellow West African immigrant and Windows on the World employee who had helped Siby land the restaurant job years earlier. Karim's wife was searching for her husband. Siby switched on the television and watched, stunned, as flames consumed the North Tower. He dialed the restaurant kitchen. Both phone lines rang. No one answered.
"Your building is burning," he recalled her saying. "She was looking for her husband."
The Man Behind the Knife
Siby's path to that 107th-floor kitchen was neither fast nor straightforward. Originally from the Ivory Coast, where he had taught French, he arrived in the United States in 1996 with little English and a plan: save enough money to bring his wife across the Atlantic. For two years he worked as a supermarket delivery driver while attending language classes. In October 1998, he finally walked into the Windows on the World kitchen as a prep cook, earning eight dollars an hour to peel industrial bags of onions, potatoes, and shrimp.
"As a prep cook, you are not required to have a knife skill," he said. "Learning how to hold the knife, how to chop without hurting yourself … this is how we progress from being a prep cook to a cook."
On slow service days he volunteered to assist the line cooks, absorbing technique by osmosis and repetition. The effort paid off. He was promoted to full cook at twelve dollars an hour. By late 2000 his wife had joined him in New York, and the couple was expecting a daughter. Siby was in the country without legal status but had applied for asylum and held work authorization. After years of limbo, the pieces of a stable life were finally clicking into place.
The Restaurant at the Top of the World
Windows on the World opened in 1976, perched inside the North Tower with floor-to-ceiling glass that placed diners a quarter-mile above the streets of Manhattan. At its peak it was the highest-grossing standalone restaurant in the United States, drawing international celebrities — Henry Kissinger, Dolly Parton, Donald Trump among them — for the sheer novelty of eating steak while the skyline scrolled beneath their feet. Yet behind the starched tablecloths and rigid dress code, the engine of the operation was a kitchen staffed overwhelmingly by immigrant workers from Africa, Latin America, Asia, and Australia, many of them navigating uncertain immigration statuses while trying to feed a room full of tourists and politicians.
Siby moved through that world with a quiet determination. He shared an apartment with Karim, who had vouched for him at hiring. On weekends, a loose-knit group of coworkers gathered at a park in Queens to share meals and talk through the anxieties that followed them off the clock. Three days before the attacks, several of them played soccer together.
"It was almost like a real window on the world," Siby said of that community.
The Morning of September 11
Siby was thirty-six years old. He had been sleeping when Karim's wife reached him. The television showed smoke pouring from the Twin Towers. He called the kitchen. Silence. He later learned that Rivas — the young musician who had taken his Tuesday shift out of friendship — was among the more than 2,700 people killed in what remains the deadliest terrorist attack on American soil. In total, Siby lost seventy-nine coworkers that day.
"You can't imagine losing the entire morning crew — all of the people you used to interact with — all gone," he said. "You're not a soldier to be prepared for something like that. You're just a simple worker."
The grief settled into something heavier over the following months: survivor's guilt, the question of why the universe spared him while taking Rivas and dozens of others who had shared his hours, his jokes, his soccer matches.
"They were all gone. I have to live with that," he said. "Why them? Why not me?"
Twenty-Five Years Later
As the nation marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, a new documentary short titled Top of the World places Siby's story at the center of a broader narrative about the immigrant labor force that kept one of America's most iconic restaurants operational for decades. The film, produced by CNN Films, premieres Monday at 8 p.m. Eastern and Pacific on CNN. It frames the restaurant not merely as a tourist spectacle but as a workplace where people from at least four continents built careers, friendships, and fragile futures in close proximity to one another — and where a single Tuesday shift swap determined who went to work and who stayed home.
For Siby, the anniversary is not a clean milestone. It is a recurring reckoning with the question he has carried since that phone call rang through his bedroom: why him, and not the young musician from Ecuador who simply wanted a Sunday off?
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