Three days before 9/11, I hosted an out-of-town friend who wanted to take in the view of New York from above. I suggested a drink at Windows on the World, in the north tower of the World Trade Center. We arrived a minute too late to catch the last elevator to the 107th floor.
“Next time,” I remember telling her. Of course there wouldn’t be one.
Many years of living in a city creates a kind of archaeology of private memory. A street corner, a bar, an office building, a playground, a spot where a favorite restaurant or bookshop used to be — each recalls a buried layer of life, and each has its own circumstances, its web of relationships, its emotional color.
In 1998 I got a job with The Wall Street Journal, which at the time had its offices across the street from the Trade Center. My subway stop was at Cortlandt Street; my gym was on the top floor of the Marriott that stood between the towers. That summer I overnighted a hard copy of my master’s thesis to London from the courier service in the sunlit lobby of the south tower and said to myself, “School’s over forever.”
Now and then the thought of another terrorist attack, like Ramzi Yousef’s 1993 underground bombing, crossed my mind. But I never imagined jetliners slamming into buildings, incinerating perpetrators and victims alike.
On the day itself I was in Jerusalem on assignment for The Journal. I watched the towers come down on TV and wondered who among my colleagues had been killed. (None had, miraculously, despite some close calls, and they performed the additional miracle of putting out a paper the next day for which they won a Pulitzer Prize.) For one of the few times in my life I felt an overwhelming desire to pray. At the Western Wall I found this in the Book of Psalms:
Lift up thy steps because of the perpetual ruins, even all the evil that the enemy hath done in the sanctuary. Thine adversaries have roared in the midst of Thy meeting-place; They have set up their own signs for signs.
I moved to Israel for a new job soon afterward. When I came back to New York three years later I had a family, as well as an office with a direct view of the giant pit called ground zero. For a long time nothing seemed to happen inside it, or if it did, it was at a glacial pace. It struck me as emblematic of a post-9/11 national paralysis, “testifying,” as I wrote in a bitter column from 2009, “to a society in which everyone gets their say and nothing gets done.”
I was wrong.
Ground zero may have been stuck in legal gridlock — and coated in more toxic dust than was previously acknowledged. But the neighborhood around it was springing to life, thanks to a combination of civic spirit, government subsidy and capitalist creativity. Between 2000 and 2026 the number of downtown apartments nearly tripled, from 13,000 to 37,000, according to The Journal. Battery Park City, the neighborhood directly west of the old towers, became an oasis for families with young children, including our three. I never worried for the safety of my kids in the 16 years that we lived there.
Except once. On Halloween of 2017, two of our kids were out when I heard a crash and what might have been a gunshot, then one police siren after another. My 12-year-old son came home to tell us that he had seen a truck smashed at the corner of our street with blood on its windshield. An Uzbek man named Sayfullo Saipov had driven a rented Home Depot truck down the Hudson River bike path, killing eight people and injuring many more.
President Trump used the occasion to rail against immigration — and Chuck Schumer. But what I remember was the calm good judgment of our neighbors, many of them immigrants themselves, who sheltered the students at P.S. 89 just as they were being let out from school. It was America at its best. The kids trick-or-treated that night as usual.
And ground zero did come back. On Monday, another old friend came to town and we toured the site together. The early September weather was perfect, just as it had been 25 years ago. Thousands of people, locals and tourists alike, shopped and chatted and gawked at the sights around us.
We visited the shrine of St. Nicholas, a stunning replacement for the unassuming Greek Orthodox chapel that once stood a stone’s throw away on Cedar Street. We walked through the oak-shaded plaza encompassing the memorial pools ringed by the names of the fallen. We went down to the vast underground mall that looks (in the best possible way) like the rib cage of a gigantic dinosaur and which, from a certain spot, gives a neck-craning view of the spire atop the tallest of the towers surrounding the site. We both remembered the plaza of the old World Trade Center, so intimidating and sterile. What we have now is so much better: reflective but not somber; commanding but not forbidding; sheltering but not closed.
It’s a magnificent civic achievement.
On Sept. 11, 2001, the forces of death paid a visit to Lower Manhattan and extracted their awful irreparable price. Twenty-five years on, what’s clear, most of all to those of us who saw both sides of that date, is that the forces of life proved much stronger.
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