NYC: Just like we pictured it!

Marty and I took the Liberty Landing ferry to the World Financial Center terminal on Wednesday, September 11, 2019. The sky was as sapphire blue as I remember it on September 11, 2001. 9/11 never far from our thoughts as we walked around lower Manhattan, we could not escape our own visions of the horror of the fall and aftermath of the Twin Towers destruction. The built environment has recovered; the 9/11 Memorial is an emotionally moving tribute to the 2,600 lives lost in NYC; “Oculus”, the new transit hub designed by architect Santiago Calatrava, is stunning and as the NYT states, “is positioned at an angle so that the skylight captures the sun each year during the hours when the planes struck the twin towers and the buildings collapsed”; One World Trade Center, designed by SOM, is a tapered octagon, achieving a true octagon form at mid-height, and topped off at 1,776 feet to honor the year of American independence; and the historic churches, like St. Paul’s (1766, attended by George Washington), facing the Twin Towers, but undamaged and able to provide sanctuary, food and shelter to first-responders and rescue workers.

While the debris has been removed and the landscape rebuilt, the cost of human lives, the devastation of impacted families, the health of New York City residents and responders, lives on eighteen years later and will for generations to come. I am grateful for my brother Brad’s contribution to the recovery efforts. As a member of FEMA Urban Search and Rescue Massachusetts Task Force 1, his unit was dispatched to the Jacob Javitz Center on September 12 and spent a week at Ground Zero. I can only imagine the images that are emblazoned in his memory. I am thankful that he is among the living.