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New York, New York
I count three four then we start to slow because a song has got to stop somewhere
There is nothing super special about this picture from the observation deck at Two World Trade Center, other than the fact that it’s from my last visit there in early 2001.
In early 2001. I took my cousin, her mom and a random Swede who was traveling with them into the city to see the highlights, and of course I took them to the World Trade Center. As part of this, I remember taking them to the plaza, where you could touch the facade and look straight up a 110 story wall, an absolutely exhilarating experience. I would regularly travel through the PATH Station, especially on weekends, when I would park in my favorite garage on Second Street in Hoboken and then be in the city before you knew it. I was there enough that I never really ended up thinking it was special enough to take pictures, a real regret. I still remember a lot of details, from the annoying revolving doors to the scary PATH hill escalators, to the best door to get to Fulton Street.
I don’t have a great story about 9/11, and I’m honestly grateful about that. I ended up most of the day just driving around on a work errand, listening to the radio, seeing the towers and smoke from a distance, trying to make cell phone calls (almost impossible at the time because the cell towers were overloaded), and driving up to an overlook in Montclair and only seeing smoke.
Four days later, I intentionally went into the city with a need to document what I could. Most everything was closed, this picture from Lower Manhattan is at Canal Street, as far south as you could go that day. The towers themselves would have just been to the left of the World Financial Center in this picture, it fells so weird and wrong to see them gone.
I circled around a bit. After going to Canal Street, I went out to the Brooklyn Heights Promenade and then to here, Exchange Place in Jersey City, right across the Hudson from Lower Manhattan.
Four days after 9/11. the smoke was still there and the city was already changed forever.
This is the same exact view, except zoomed in with my telephoto lens. In the first picture, you can see a piece of the facade still standing, despite the fact that all the floors and walls were gone. The second picture shows some of the destruction at the World Financial Center, with the corner of the building missing and One World Trade Center (which would have stood right behind the Winter Garden) now missing completely.
At the time, I debated going and I debated taking pictures, but it’s the only way to remember what we had and what we lost.
