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April 10th, 2002
It seems somehow unfair that I should have finally been moved to relocate to this incredible metropolis after this city lost her two legs. For that is what I think the Twin Towers were. I have been trying to figure out why the city looks and feels so odd without them…something has been so incorrect about it's shape since I've been here. And while that may seem obvious, I am not speaking of merely how it's silhouette has been changed, or how the streets in lower Manhattan are traversed differently, or how the subways have been rerouted, or even how the psyche of those who live here has been moved. It is something more difficult to put your finger on and after spending the day riding the West Side bike path from 59th street down, I think I'm beginning to see it.
Tomorrow will be four months to the day since I moved here and one month to the day since I've been living in the East Village. I've spent the last few days watching the PBS Documentary of the history of New York, written and directed by Ken Burns. Each episode begins and ends with long shots of Manhattan from the south or the East. Always the Twin Towers are there. Towering over the much smaller buildings of lower Manhattan and then the Village, and the teens and twenties until finally, in the mid-30's buildings start to climb, dozens of high skyscrapers, bunched together in a span of 20 or 30 blocks, then only slightly lower past both sides of the park and level off into Harlem and the Bronx.
Physically, the Towers had so many responsibilities.
First and foremost they were the gates at the entrance of this new world. When I was very young and they had not yet been built I marveled at the Empire State Building, not grasping how a building could be so tall. But when I was older and making my weekly pilgrimage to the punk clubs of the East Village, it was the Towers I looked to as a means of reminding myself that I was in New York City. In "The Lord of the Rings" there is that stunning moment when they sail a boat through the two tall statues leading into some new world. Within the narrative of the story, it is the beginning of a new act, just as every person who came into the city for the first time, post-1972, knew as they passed by the Towers for the first time (or anytime), that they were, indeed, beginning a new act, crossing a threshold into an existence that was completely unlike anything they had experienced before, the experience of this city.
Secondly, and almost immediately upon their completion, they provided
the world with a totem, the ultimate water cooler conversation piece,
the biggest paper weight. How ugly, how monstrous, how positively late
twentieth century, how sterile, everything that is wrong with the ever
maniacal goals of capitolism and the 70's, how fitting for the 80's. One
cannot underplay the importance of this responsibility. The Twin Towers
reminded us of the beauty of things curved, of things old, and of things
historical, of all things New York. The Twin Towers helped us to see that
there was beauty all around, even if it wasn't the newest, the biggest,
or the most profitable. It helped to keep New York of the 20th century
from becoming a figment of our collective imaginations.
