Early on Sept. 11, 2001, City Paper was quite pleased and ready to go to press with "Supa Sista" Ursula Rucker on the cover of its Fall Guide. Things changed. The staff mobilized for an eyes-on-the-street account of Philadelphia on the day everything changed. The cover that art director Brian Hogan designed for the occasion won accolades.

But what else was there? Well, pre-9/11 there was Andrew Ervin on jazz's pied piper Rufus Harley, Frank Lewis on new Phillies manager Larry Bowa's side gig peddling bovine colostrum, Trish Boppert's investigation of same-sex couples sidestepping adoption obstacles and an unofficial guide to the X-Games written by Rick "Rick V." Valenzuela and half our design department (our little skate-rat friends Siemond Chan and Jason Fritzsche). Gwen Shaffer exposed shoddy prison medical care (with a cover featuring the toe-tagged foot of Michael Pelusi). We continued our five-year tradition of tortured Fringe puns with "Fringedividuality." We shoved a fist into a condom for the cover of our February "Power of Love" issue. Nate Chinen's The Gig debuted as did Jim Barry's Underworld.

After 9/11 we got serious — with Daniel Brook's Sept. 20 profile on Bart Blatstein and his dream of an upscale NoLibs artist community! OK, that one was already in the can. But 9/11 did shake things up. Bell Curve took two weeks off. We looked at how dissenters were being silenced. We fucking dropped Life in Hell! And added Chris Ware's Rusty Brown!

2001 was all about change for CP. David Warner took off for a Columbia National Arts Journalism Program fellowship, leaving the interim keys to Howard Altman. Brian Howard left for Egypt. Debra Auspitz became arts editor and Patrick Rapa took the reigns on music. Reseca Glasser, Michael Polimeno, Rachel Furman, Michele Greenberg, Ryan Godfrey, Stephan Sitzai, Sharon McWilliams and Jenn Carbin were new or newish staffers. Photographer Michael T. Regan pushed his button-box for us for the first time. Lou Camp, Marc Kravitz and intern Liam Wilson all lent hands.

It should be noted that in the end, the terrorists didn't actually win: We eventually ran (a tiny, black-and-white version of) the Ursula Rucker Fall Guide cover in our annual What Happened Next? issue. Take that, you al-Qaida fuckers!