by Bill Jaker
Everyone remembers where they were. I was driving to work on the 11th of September, 2001. It was a bright and clear Tuesday morning and I was looking forward to an OFF THE PAGE broadcast that afternoon. I’d stopped for a red light at the corner of Jensen Road and the Vestal Parkway. NPR’s MORNING EDITION had just gone to a report by Susan Stamberg about some teachers when the program was interrupted by a bulletin, with an eyewitness account of an airliner flying into the World Trade Centerin Manhattan.
The stoplight turned green. Everything had changed.
A few days later The New York Times invited readers to post comments on their website about the events of September 11th and I wrote an observation that seems to have not arrived or made it past the editor. I mentioned this to a friend who tends a New York literary website and she invited me to send it to her for a special page she’d established for reflections on 9/11. But once more it seemed to get lost in cyberspace.
So seven years later let’s post it again:
I never did like the design of the World Trade Center. Those towers were too cold and monolithic. I did enjoy walking around on the roof – the highest outdoor observation platform in the world provided a wonderful view across New York City and its suburbs. But it seemed to me that the buildings themselves broke into the Manhattan skyline. From a distance they were a pair of verticals trying to dominate the island and its flowing rivers. From street level they were just too blankly massive, hulking high into the sky from a undistinguished flat plaza. You could never see the top.
But there was one thing about the Twin Towers that I enjoyed. Looking at those skyscrapers from a distance I could imagine them being a gigantic tuning fork. Each morning the first ray of sunrise would beam across ocean and harbor from the east and strike the giant tines. A note would waft across Manhattan, silent to human ears but clear to the bricks and steel and glass of every other building, and the city would catch its tone and find its rhythm for the day.
In an hour, with an awful roar and a flash of fire the Towers were gone, descended into dust.
The great city may sing again, but its note will never be the same.
