Hugh Hardy

At first they were alien, and then they became landmarks, exclamation points in the city’s skyline. They announced downtown. Even for those who never saw the towers close or went inside, they were part of New York’s familiar profile, displayed in the logos of businesses and the contractors whose vans, trucks, and shop windows carried the signature twins all over the city. Built before Cesar Pelli’s World Financial Center, they overwhelmed the older towers of downtown, upstaging their romantic tracery in the sky, but after state-sponsored development moved the city westward, they became part of a new context, one that seen from a distance embraced both old and new.

But nothing could transform that windswept plaza. Despite all the efforts of the Port Authority and all the seasonal coffee and snack bars and all the humanizing presentations by a vigorous community of performing and visual artists, that place never became part of the city. It was conceived without street-level connections to the north south or west, creating barriers and walls where life on city streets once moved freely. The overwhelming 110-story towers, rising up naked of embellishment, impervious to the surrounding city and even each other, made frightening companions. Those vertical, parallel lines of glass and metal gave no sign that they held an astonishing diversity of people and activities.

Perhaps it was this bland vastness that made them so strange a part of New York, a city proud of its differences, a place pleased by individual expression and disdainful of conformity. However ugly the towers might have been we secretly liked their bigness, appreciating the hubris of New York’s having something in the record books.

At the same time, their height and nighttime illumination gave them a magical quality that provided a beacon to the entire city. Low clouds or fog could do wonders, making the buildings’ mass dematerialize as winds shaped changing configurations that glowed in the dark haze. The very implausibility of those floors suspended in midair, where mundane activities could take place thousands of feet above ground, lent a sporty drama to daily existence.

And now their memory confuses present reality. It is hard to believe they are not there. A visit to the site is disorienting as old buildings are seen in new ways. Vistas have appeared that make no sense. The assumption the city is permanent has no substance. What was once so big it was taken for granted has vanished, leaving no trace. A completely unfamiliar topography has replaced 16 acres of urban landscape.

The tragedy that destroyed the towers will resonate with loss for generations, and however September 11th is memorialized, their memory will inevitably influence what follows in their place. In that sense they will never be gone.