CNN Films revisits a forgotten 9/11 casualty the restaurant at the 'Top of the World'

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Set us as preferred Michael Lomonaco can account for every minute of the morning of Sept.11, 2001 — including the small decision that saved his life.Lomonaco, the executive chef who ran Windows on the World on the 106th and 107th floors of the North Tower of the World Trade Center, was on his way up to his office when he stopped at an optometrist shop on the ground level to have his eyeglass frames adjusted.He was still inside when American Airlines Flight 11 hit the tower above him at 8:46 a.m.“I felt the buidling shake,” he recalled in the new CNN Films documentary “Top of the World.” “And I thought that can’t be the subway.

That’s impossible.” Lomonaco was evacuated.From the street, he watched employees of his own restaurant wave a white tablecloth from a window more than 100 floors up.

Seventy-nine Windows on the World employees and 91 guests died that morning in the gastronomic soul of the Twin Towers — the one part of the complex that belonged to New Yorkers who didn’t work there, and to visitors from everywhere else.“Top of the World” premieres Monday at 8 p.m.ET/PT on CNN and begins streaming the following day on the network’s subscription streaming platforms.

The documentary short arrives on a double anniversary: 25 years since the attacks, and 50 years since Windows on the World opened on April 19, 1976.Hollywood Inc.

20 years ago, the news ticker became part of the TV viewing experience.It is the work of producer-director team Betsy West and Julie Cohen, who made “RBG,” the Oscar-nominated portrait of the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.The film is a production of CNN Films, TIME Studios and Tribeca Studios, in association with Montalto Pictures and Storyville Films, and was inspired by Tom Roston’s book “The Most Spectacular Restaurant in the World.” Actor ...