After the Ashes: The Perseverance of Vanguard Direct

As Ground Zero smoldered, Vanguard showed its mettle.
The firm lost its home on Sept. 11, but not its heart.

BY DARIN PAINTER

At 8:46 on the mild, bright morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Millie Camacho's computer died, causing her to swear silently at Vanguard Direct's information technology department. During her first 16 years at the printing distributorship, then located in Lower Manhattan on the 18th floor of a historic building at 90 West St., Camacho had wanted a desk with a window overlooking the city. She got her wish earlier that year, but wasn't looking out of it when American Flight 11 slammed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

Camacho, Vanguard's customer service supervisor, says she heard what sounded like a car backfiring. The noise paled in comparison to the thunderous boom she and other Vanguard employees heard during the World Trade Center parking-garage bomb of Feb. 26, 1993. Now when Camacho looked up, the scene surprised her: Small flames and black smoke rose from the North Tower a few hundred feet to the north, and paper rained down like confetti. The South Tower, less than 100 yards away and slightly to the northeast, stood unharmed. Curious, she rode an elevator to the lobby and stepped outside for a smoking break. Some jerk hit Tower 1, she remembers thinking. Some plane must have flown off course. That, of course, wasn't the case.

Vanguard employed approximately 55 people at 90 West St., and many of them congregated in the hallway. Robert O'Connell, the company's president and a PSDA Board member, turned on his radio. A soft-spoken father of three, O'Connell was alarmed, but he assumed the plane was a Cessna. Out his office window and through renovation scaffolding, he could see only as high as the 50th floor of the North Tower. On the street below, he spotted a truck on fire. "We were comforted somewhat by thinking it was just an accident," O'Connell says.

Terror at the Towers

The moment Camacho stepped outside to have a cigarette, she realized that whatever hit the North Tower was bigger than she had thought. "The streets were littered with body parts and pieces of the plane," she says. "It was a sickening, quiet scene." Camacho went back inside and rode the elevator up with five other people. At 9:03, as it reached the 15th floor, she heard an earsplitting shriek and a thunderous crash.

United Flight 175 had smashed into the South Tower at 586 mph. The plane had banked slightly left, hitting three-fourths of the way up and stretching from the 78th to the 84th floor. A piece of the plane landed on the roof of 90 West St. and ignited the roof. "We all hit the back stairs, ran down as fast as possible and came outside," O'Connell says. "When we looked up, both towers were blazing. Cars were on fire all around us." Two people trapped in another elevator at 90 West St. died later from smoke inhalation.

Led by Vanguard's senior management team, employees who were in 90 West St. when the second plane hit began to move toward Battery Park, the southernmost point of Manhattan four blocks away. Today, as some employees recall passing mounds of rubble, they struggle to express what they saw-finger, sneaker and airplane seat. At Battery Park, Vanguard employees split into three groups-one led by O'Connell waited there for the Staten Island Ferry to New Jersey; one led by Executive Vice President Donald O'Connell and CFO Tim Murphy began walking up the east side of Manhattan on Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive; and one led by Vice President of Sales Ralph J. Fucci began walking north toward Chinatown.

Fucci is known among co-workers for being simultaneously intense and funny. Like many New Jersey natives, he detests whiners, speaks his mind and adores the New York Yankees. "I never felt my life threatened on Sept. 11," he says. "It was more of a pissed-off, now-what-do-I-do feeling. When you see bodies falling, it's something you just don't forget."

Shortly before 10 a.m., Lower Manhattan was getting crowded. The city's phone system, fiber-optic network and electric power grid weren't working south of Chambers Street (nine blocks north of Vanguard's building). About the time Robert O'Connell's group waited for police to check the Staten Island Ferry for bombs, Jack Dash, Vanguard's production supervisor, and Elaine Varnis, its administrative supervisor, noticed the top of the South Tower swaying. "I yelled, 'It's going to come down!'" Dash recalls. Varnis was hobbling on a leg she sprained earlier while running down steps at 90 West St. Dash was making sure she was safe. "We hoped the building wouldn't topple sideways," he says. "If it did, Elaine and I might not have made it."

The South Tower's sides consisted of aluminum columns. They were bolted and welded together and braced by horizontal plates. At 10:05, a cluster of exterior columns began to buckle. The top of the tower tilted east, then south, suddenly slamming down. The 1,362-foot-tall steel structure accelerated as it fell, sounding like an avalanche to onlookers. Its external walls peeled. Sections of the upper half fell east and south. A few of them plunged like spears onto the roof and into the north face of 90 West St. One beam sliced a 10-story gash in the north face of the Bankers Trust building, the adjacent structure to the east.

Survival on the Streets

Joseph Corbo, Vanguard's vice president of operations, calls himself the company's "nuts-and-bolts guy." For the past 34 years, including 13 at the distributorship, the Bronx native has drawn paychecks only from printing firms. He stood by his friend Fucci, watching in disbelief as the monolith he had seen nearly every day for three decades disappeared from the skyline. "My mind was working, but my legs weren't," Corbo says. "I literally couldn't move them for two minutes."

Air-pressure waves shattered windows for several blocks around, blowing powder composed primarily of crushed concrete into nearby buildings. One of those buildings was the apartment of Sean Andersen, COO of Garvan Interactive, Vanguard's interactive web development division. Andersen's newborn attended day care in the World Trade Center, but the child was absent this day because of a doctor's appointment. Andersen, who says he doesn't discuss Sept. 11 at length, says part of the first plane's engine landed in an apartment below his. Andersen evacuated his apartment and lived temporarily with his parents in Long Island.

When the South Tower collapsed, a rippling wall of smoke and debris several stories high rushed outward along the streets. Maren Christensen, Vanguard's senior graphic designer who moved to New York two years ago from Minnesota, was stepping off the subway platform at Rector Street, two blocks south of Vanguard's building, when the tower was struck. In minutes she spotted Scott Truong, Vanguard's director of information technology. "When it fell, about 10 people hunkered down near a service entrance to an apartment building, waiting to get hit with whatever was about to hit us," Christensen says. They braced for hot shrapnel but felt only grime. "We couldn't breathe," she says. "We thought we were trapped. It was black. We stuck our arms out and couldn't feel anything." Someone found a door to the apartment building's workout room and opened it to safety.

Dash and Varnis placed jackets over their heads and walked south along West Street, covered head to toe in soot. Twenty seconds after the South Tower collapsed, the smoke wall reached Robert O'Connell's group at Battery Park. "There was a shudder through the crowd like I had never felt before," he says. "We were engulfed, almost like a volcanic eruption. With nowhere to go, we braced and held onto whatever we could find." After the cloud hit them and lingered, O'Connell says, people seemed calm: They walked instead of ran, talked without shouting and tried to regain their sense of place. Minutes later, his group boarded the ferry. Halfway across the harbor, the boat passed out of the dust cloud and into the sunlight.

At 10:28, the transmission tower on the North Tower roof dropped slightly. From the ferry, O'Connell watched the building collapse. From his vantage point, he couldn't tell that much of it had landed on the 400-foot-long footbridge that extended from the Trade Center complex to the World Financial Center. Firefighters, he remembers thinking as remorse set in. Lots of firefighters. Another column of smoke and dust rose into the sky, widening slowly and streaming toward Brooklyn. In his neighborhood, O'Connell's friends already were holding a vigil outside his home, praying for his safe return. Two hours later, he called his wife from a Staten Island pay phone. When she picked up and screeched in joy, a small crowd on their front lawn cheered wildly. O'Connell asked what the heck the noise was.

That night, Vanguard's management team accounted for each of the firm's employees. Everyone was alive, and everyone had a story. Donald O'Connell's group had crossed the Queensboro Bridge at 59th Street after nearly three hours on foot. Christensen and Truong had stayed in the apartment-building workout room until the early afternoon. Dash, who had boarded the Staten Island Ferry but lives in Manhattan, had planned to sleep in a New Jersey shelter until Fucci invited him to stay at his house. "We had a few Heinekens, and I got extremely upset at Osama bin Laden," Fucci recalls. Varnis had invited three strangers she met on the ferry-a young mother and her two small children-to sleep at her house on Staten Island, and they accepted. Camacho had walked north to Grand Central Station and hailed a cab.

"One of our steadfast goals is to hire good citizens and courteous people at Vanguard," Robert O'Connell says. "I'm proud of the way we made it through Sept. 11, but I'm even prouder of the way we came together afterward."

Performance of a Plan

If Tuesday had been a day of survival for Vanguard, Wednesday was a day of determination. On Sept. 12, Ground Zero was a smoldering mountain of metal. That day, Vanguard's management team showed its mettle.

Since Vanguard began in 1976, the cornerstone of its philosophy has been an unwavering commitment to client satisfaction. Hospitals and other key clients needed to receive scheduled deliveries on Sept. 12; the company intended to make them. "There was no way we were going to back down, give up and lick our wounds," Corbo says.

On Sept. 12, senior managers met at Donald O'Connell's home in Rye, N.Y., to discuss a disaster-recovery plan. They created one in three hours. Their first decision was to relocate the company temporarily to a distribution warehouse in Brooklyn. Meanwhile, the O'Connells would look for space better suited to the company's size and resource needs.

The senior managers' meeting was an exercise in setting priorities: They determined who would be needed in Brooklyn, who could be mobile, and who could operate from the distributorship's two other offices in West Chester, Pa., and Rocky Hill, Conn. They settled on a rotating schedule in which some employees could work every other day because of long commutes. "Basically, we divided and conquered," Donald O'Connell says. "The people here are close-knit, and they rose to the occasion. We had to, and we expected to. You don't want to lose business. You don't want to lose something that you've worked hard to build."

Vanguard employees didn't know the status of their space at 90 West St., where police restricted entrance. Everything of corporate importance on the 18th floor-job jackets, computer backup tapes-might have been reduced to ash. Also, Garvan Interactive had planned to relocate Sept. 14 from its location in SoHo to the 22nd floor of 90 West St., one floor below the top. The 22nd floor had been painted white a few days before Sept. 11. What did that look like now? Much of Garvan Interactive's equipment was sitting in a Vanguard conference room on the 18th floor. "Until we knew the status of our building," Robert O'Connell says, "the highest priority was getting billing out the door from Brooklyn. It was a monstrous undertaking, but getting paid is the lifeblood of a company."

Led by Murphy, Vanguard organized a quasi-manual accounting system. Employees called and visited customers, obtaining hard copies of statements and invoices when possible. For a week and a half, the firm recreated its accounts receivable. During that time, it didn't miss a delivery, including those scheduled for Sept. 12. "Our regional sales offices, headed by John Tuozzo and Hugh Friel, were instrumental in keeping us going after Sept. 11," Robert O'Connell says.

Vendors also rose to the occasion, says Corbo, who's chiefly responsible for working with Vanguard's manufacturers. "Nearly all of them were forthright and treated our situation with grace," he says. Some companies, including competing distributorships, offered Vanguard space, employees, storage, delivery trucks and more, Corbo says.

Led by Fucci, Vanguard's salespeople contacted customers immediately, meeting face to face if security personnel didn't stop them. Salespeople developed lists of clients' new cellular phone numbers. Quickly after relocating to Brooklyn, the distributorship concentrated on boosting its communication capabilities and data infrastructure. Fucci says the Brooklyn location had six incoming phone lines for 20 people before additional lines were installed. Camacho, who now was commuting almost three hours each way, had access to two computers for her 8-person department. Vanguard purchased 25 new PCs and set up several America Online accounts for temporary internet access.

Connection to the Customer

"A main communication link to the outside world and to our remote offices was email, and that was gone after Sept. 11," Truong says. "The connection between [Brooklyn] and the New York headquarters obviously was gone, too. Basically, we lost all of our necessary data." Most of the data had been stored in fully integrated, multiuser software from Norcross, Ga.-based supplier TopForm® Software Inc. The system handled critical functions such as order entry, inventory control, estimation and quotation tracking, and forms management.

The main goal for Truong and two other people in Vanguard's IT department-Constantine Vasilevsky and Wally Nazario-was to install a working TopForm system as soon as possible. For two and a half weeks, they worked daily from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. Immediately after the distributorship purchased a new server and installed it at its West Chester, Pa., office, the employees spent three days there, integrating TopForm with the Brooklyn office. "It was a group effort with great support from senior management," Truong says. "They gave us the resources to do our work."

Even with TopForm operational, the Brooklyn office was running at 50 percent efficiency, Robert O'Connell says. He says he's proud that Vanguard didn't need to apply for a Small Business Administration loan. Instead, the distributorship relied on an old-fashioned concept: its rainy-day fund. "We tend to keep money in the company," O'Connell says. "We're somewhat conservative. We keep sound financial statements and invest wisely when we need to. If that weren't true, we could very well be out of business today."

In September, Vanguard billed a third of what it normally does. In November, it billed about half of what it normally does. Robert O'Connell estimates the distributorship lost $1 million as a direct result of Sept. 11. Approximately 25 percent of the company's sales are to financial clients, many of which are located in New York City and a few of which were based in the World Trade Center complex.

When employee paychecks mailed on time a few days after Sept. 11, Corbo says he felt rejuvenated passion for Vanguard and its clients. He realized the company had paid numerous bills on Sept. 10 as part of its regular cycle. "Instead of skipping a pay period, they showed their total commitment to the company," he says. "Not one vendor had to ask, 'Where's my money?'" Vanguard's message was clear: We still intend to grow this year, not just survive.

But grow from where? For two months beginning in mid-September, Robert and Donald O'Connell had looked at more than 60 possible locations for the company's new headquarters. "We had two realtors taking us all over the place," Donald O'Connell says. "I was bidding on several properties at the same time. Landlords were changing their minds in midstream. Fortunately, we signed a good deal."

Vanguard signed a 3-year contract to sublease the 23rd floor of 519 Eighth St. in midtown Manhattan from a dot-com firm. "The fact that Bob and Donald hit the pavement themselves to find our new place, putting in their own sweat and time, shows what kind of people we have leading us," Varnis says.

But before Vanguard and Garvan Interactive moved into their new digs on Dec. 1, a few people wanted to dig through 90 West St.

Retrieval in the Rubble

Christensen experienced a recurring nightmare several times after Sept. 11: She would be on her hands and knees, searching through rubble for backup tapes of Vanguard's electronic art files. Then she would wake up exhausted. Like other Vanguard employees, she desperately wanted to know the status of the company's former location. Its art department at 90 West St. faced the Hudson River, not the South Tower, so she was hopeful the area was at least partially intact. Christensen had been working on an anniversary journal for a credit union. It would be nice, she thought, to literally have the project back in her hands. "I basically just wanted the stupid nightmares to stop," she says.

After police permitted entrance into 90 West St., Vanguard's senior managers usually came in groups of four. On their first trip, Robert and Donald O'Connell wore hard hats and navigated by flashlight up stairs strewn with rubble. Inside the building, the air was dense and hazy. Fires still burned across the street. Looking out of holes in the building's north face, the O'Connells saw orange and yellow excavators with hydraulic arms and grappler claws. The machines tore concrete and steel, moving debris to trucks on the street.

The O'Connells moved up the stairs, stopping on most floors and commenting on their varying degrees of damage. Some floors, such as the third and fourth, were incinerated and seemed ghastly unfamiliar. Those were floors punctured and ignited by steel beams from the South Tower. Other floors were damaged only by piles of dust and swiftly blowing debris. When the O'Connells reached the 18th floor, tired and dirty, they were prepared for the worst. Instead, the floor looked better than most. "Let's call it divine intervention," Donald O'Connell says. "Some of the floors were solid ash. Ours was wrecked, but even fire safes got melted on some floors because of the heat." They stayed for two hours, filling multiple bags with critical files, nearly all of which were intact. The O'Connells returned three times in two weeks.

"Our department didn't want to recreate our commercial printing job history for the last six years," Dash says. "That would have been enormous, and I was glad to learn it didn't come to that."

The 22nd floor, which Garvan Interactive had planned to occupy, was "semi-OK," Andersen says. The ceiling had warped slightly due to the fire on the floor above. He was able to recover some laptop computers and files. "It was like a place frozen in time," he says. "I'd pick up paperwork and see a black-and-white area where dust had settled and heat had been." He imaged nuclear winter might look something like this.

Fucci says he was anxious the first time he returned to 90 West St. "I didn't know what to expect," he says. "I had a lot of great experiences there." Using a suitcase and two large duffel bags, he packed business essentials. Then he arrived at his old desk and saw pictures of his two daughters, ages 13 and 11. He stuffed them into the duffel bag and remembers thinking, It feels like I'm stealing from myself. Fucci didn't even look at the glass-encased frame of his $150 ticket from Game 3 of the 1993 World Series, played between the Yankees and the Atlanta Braves. Above the ticket were two celebratory sports pages from the New York Daily-News and The Star Ledger.

Corbo made 10 trips to 90 West St., more than anyone else. During one of his later trips, he saw Fucci's Yankees memorabilia and crammed it under his armpit. He lost his grip and dropped it, cracking the glass near the top. A few days later, Corbo handed it to Fucci, who said excitedly, "'Look at this crack! You see it? Not even Osama bin Laden can beat the Yankees!'" When Corbo told him what had really happened, Fucci laughed hard.

Corbo took his self-made role as retriever of personal relics seriously. "This was my way of dealing with Sept. 11," he says. "It's hard to describe the satisfaction I felt when I came back and gave an employee an old pair of boots or an old clock someone had forgotten about. You know what's important to your co-workers. Seeing them smile-that was worth its weight in gold."

Interest in the Internet

Most Vanguard employees say they miss 90 West St. and its close proximity to quaint lunch spots and walking trails through Rector, South and Battery parks. Today, the historic landmark designed in 1907 is draped with black safety netting, and its future repair and use is uncertain. By comparison, the company's new location at 519 Eighth St. has fewer conference rooms and more partitions. It's more communal than corporate, more dot-com than old-fashioned. When the company that previously occupied the space moved out, it had left usable furniture and a high-speed, internet-ready environment. Truong orchestrated the move of Vanguard's new server from West Chester to midtown Manhattan, received a good deal on 40 new PCs and had a T1 line installed in less than a month.

"For now, this place suits our needs just fine," Fucci says. "We can bring in clients and show them our numerous capabilities-a graphics team, a customer service department for forms, a production department for commercial printing, and a web design and interactive services group."

Like most members of Vanguard's team, Fucci says he's pleased the company stayed in the city. "We take pride in being here and are dedicated to helping New York as well as our own company grow," he says. "Many of us are from here and wouldn't think about living or working anywhere else." Robert O'Connell puts it another way: "I never understood why Israelis stayed in Israel until [Sept. 11]. We're not going to live in fear."

Vanguard lives happily with its interactive web development division, also located on the 23rd floor. Garvan Interactive offers web site design and development, application development, interactive branding and strategy, internet and extranet development, multimedia design and content management. Its 9-member team includes programmers, designers and project managers.

In April 2001, as more of Vanguard's clients needed creative internet solutions, the O'Connells acquired ownership in Garvan Interactive. Vanguard, formerly a client of Garvan Interactive, now is the division's main sales arm. "Anyone who puts out a message to an audience has to consider doing it through different media-print, mail and web-based communications," Robert O'Connell says. "We can make sure a client's brand flows through its entire marketing campaign." He says Garvan Interactive should generate a "significant part of our sales revenue in the years ahead."

Many of Garvan Interactive's projects involve high-end content management-organizing and extracting large amounts of data and making it easily accessible to an audience. Projects often entail back-end database connectivity, coding and front-end development. "It's powerful to show Vanguard's clients what we can do," Andersen says. "Forward-thinking companies get excited about this stuff."

Focus on the Future

It's a muggy afternoon in early July, and Robert O'Connell takes the subway to the Cortlandt St. station. He walks a block south on Church Street and turns right onto Liberty Street. He stands behind a black metal fence that outlines the perimeter of Ground Zero's construction hole. With his hands in his pockets, he looks toward what previously was 1.5 million tons of densely compacted steel and debris, most of which is gone now. Around the site's perimeter, several discussions focus on possible memorial plazas.

90 West St. sits just south of the construction site, cloaked in black netting. The 18th-floor office where O'Connell turned to his left on Sept. 11 and switched his small, silver radio to "ON" sits dormant. The stairwell employees descended hurriedly that morning is dark. O'Connell walks toward Vanguard's former building. "New Yorkers are known for being tough," he says on the way. "I think we also showed a human side. That's one of the nicest results of what happened."

Results are important to Vanguard, which grew nearly 10 percent last year despite losing business after Sept. 11, relocating twice and enduring a weak economy. Many employees cite the firm's leadership as the main reason they enjoy their jobs.

About 45 minutes later, O'Connell walks back to Church Street. To his left, three orange excavators move slowly in the construction hole. To his right, hundreds of photographs, drawings and signs hang on a wall commemorating Sept. 11. He stops briefly to look at them, then continues. O'Connell mentions how he hopes Vanguard, now primarily a regional distributorship, soon will serve national accounts. "We're ready for that," he says. As he makes his way down the stairs and into the subway station, 90 West St. disappears behind him.

Darin Painter is managing editor of Print Solutions. Email him your comments at <mailto:dpainter@PSDA.org>dpainter@PSDA.org.

What Vanguard Offers

Since it began in 1976, distributorship Vanguard Direct has fostered a customer-first philosophy that has helped the firm become a $27.1 million provider of printed and paperless communications. Based in New York, the company operates locations in Manhattan; Brooklyn; Rocky Hill, Conn.; and West Chester, Pa. Here's a rundown of what Vanguard offers:

• Forms. The firm provides forms management and analysis, document design and production, and electronic forms.
  
  
• Advertising specialties. The firm's web site at www.vanguarddirect.com includes an advertising specialty catalog. Customers can use the catalog to gain marketing ideas; search for promotional items by name, price range or production time; see virtual samples; and place orders.
  
  
• Direct mail. The company can insert, wafer-seal, bar code, label or hand-assemble direct mail packages.
  
  
• Design. Vanguard's design team has access to extensive selections of paper stock, photography and illustrations. The team provides assistance with prepress production and press checks.
  
  
• Interactive services. Garvan Interactive, Vanguard's interactive web development division, offers web site design and development, application development, interactive branding and strategy, internet and extranet development, multimedia design and content management.
  
  
• Ancillary services. Vanguard provides fulfillment and distribution from its computerized warehouse in Brooklyn; scanning services to replicate, archive and distribute large documents; database programming and development to help clients improve direct mail initiatives; and CD-ROM design and replication.
  
  
• Printing. The company operates commercial printing and digital printing presses.