NEW YORK — In the panicked days after the deadliest terrorist attack on American soil, New Yorkers agreed that their city had changed forever. Perhaps, many worried, for the worse.
Lisa Keller, a history professor at the State University of New York College at Purchase, recalls huddling with other historians, debating what would come next.
The World Trade Center’s twin towers had collapsed, and 2,977 people were dead. Thousands more would perish from illnesses linked to toxic dust. The property destruction and job losses and stalled tourism and fear that emptied downtown streets would amount to an $83 billion economic hit, researchers later calculated. Residents would flee, Keller recalls hearing, and real estate values would plunge. No one would want to move there.
But that’s not what happened.
“The predictions of New York’s demise were dire,” she said, “and were proved to be totally false.”
Over the last quarter century, the Big Apple has morphed in ways that now seem inevitable but back then registered as unthinkable. New York got bigger, richer and more diverse. The cost of living shot up. The city that resisted building a mosque near Ground Zero went on to elect its first Muslim mayor, Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist governing the global center of capitalism.
On Friday, he will stand with every living former president and Vice President JD Vance at the 9/11 Memorial Plaza as speakers read the names of the lives lost. Similar tributes have been held at the site each of the last 24 years.
The usual bipartisan display of unity is tenser this year, though, due to a recent campaign by a few Republicans, including a former New York mayor, and some family members of victims who urged the mayor not to attend remembrance ceremonies.
Traveling New York as it prepares for the anniversary of its worst day reveals both optimism and unease across the metropolis of 8.5 million. Life is generally safer and more prosperous, data show, but in working-class neighborhoods and wealthier pockets alike, residents are grappling with a fresh set of challenges.
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Lower Manhattan, the site of Ground Zero, has undergone the most pronounced transformation of all, evolving from a financial district that quieted in the evenings to a bustling community full of young families. What the attackers sought to destroy became more vibrant than before with schools, performing arts venues and twice as many apartments.
Yet parts of it remain frozen in time as a place where tourists come to reconnect with the emotional impact of that day.
Inside an Irish bar once submerged in the ash from the towers, an elderly couple from Iowa bent together with a young woman from the Chicago suburbs over a scrapbook stuffed with photos, articles and handwritten letters documenting 9/11 and its aftermath.
Marshall and Karol Beard, both 74, hadn’t known the blonde woman nibbling fries when they sat down at the table next to hers for their meal at O’Hara’s Pub. But Rory Whetstone, 22, had seemed friendly, and she reminded Marshall Beard of his young niece and nephew who’d been working in New York when the planes struck the towers. So he invited the young lady to join them, and they turned the pages together.
“I wanted to come this week just to pay my own respects for everything,” said Whetstone, who recently moved to New York for work.
A couple of blocks away, Joel Jimenez drove his street sweeper in slow curves around the holes where the twin towers once stood, thinking about his changed city and the two men who would never see it.
Jimenez had been working the same job exactly 25 years and two days earlier. Around 7 a.m. that Tuesday, he recalled, he had just finished an overnight shift stripping and waxing the floors with two colleagues, a man called Roberto and another whose name Jimenez no longer remembers.
As they often did, the two men headed up more than 100 floors to eat breakfast at Windows on the World, inviting Jimenez to join, he remembered. But he declined, explaining he had to get to his next job. Jimenez doesn’t believe they ever found his co-workers’ bodies.
Today, despite what the statistics suggest, the city doesn’t feel safer to him. The mayor’s policies strike Jimenez as weak on crime. He sees people vandalizing buildings and fences.
But every day at 2 p.m., when Jimenez arrives at One World Trade Center for his nearly 10-hour shift cleaning floors, his discontent disappears. People show proper deference for security personnel, instead of challenging policemen like he’s seen them do elsewhere in the city. The millions who travel thousands of miles to pay their respects, he thought, can walk around without fear.
“That’s what I want for all the city — Bronx, Brooklyn — to feel safe like this,” he said.
There is also a new sense of insecurity among the city’s Jewish residents who perceive a rise in antisemitism.
Nicole Nash, the head of a Jewish day school in Brooklyn, said her campus hired a security guard after 9/11. But the “acceptable dialogue” around Jews, Nash said, only began scaring her after October 2023, when conflict surged anew between Hamas and Israel.
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Across the East River, in the Queens neighborhood of Jackson Heights, Abdulkder A. Moshoor remembered working as a paralegal near the twin towers when it happened.
He keeps a photo taken on the day of him pointing through a window to where a plane had just slammed into one of the 110-story buildings.
Moshoor, 67, who immigrated here from Yemen decades ago, sustained damage to his lungs from the massive dust cloud created when the towers collapsed. Now he suffers from nearly two dozen medical conditions, he said, including issues with his heart, prostate and back. The retiree receives care through a special program for 9/11 survivors.
The city around him has seemed to degrade, too. Everything is more expensive, politics are more divisive, and people are dying because they cannot afford good medical care, he said.
“We are dying now after 9/11, more than died in the building,” he said.
A few blocks over, Jerling Marcano, a 42-year-old delivery driver from Venezuela, recalled people warning her before she came to the U.S. that New Yorkers might be more hostile toward immigrants with darker skin after the horrors of 9/11.
Yet she has built a happy life in Jackson Heights, she said. Her seven-year-old son is safe and attends a good school. But in recent years, she added, her family has struggled to keep up with the cost of living, even in a three-income household.
Her grown son helps her husband, a construction worker, pay the bills. “Things you buy — especially food — are three times more expensive,” she said. “Before, you could actually save money. Now, no.”
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In Prospect Park, Barbara and David Arky said they, too, worry New York is becoming unaffordable. Still, they remain optimistic about the city they moved to over four decades ago.
The couple, both in their 70s, were finishing their regular afternoon walk around the park. Not a day passes, Barbara said, that they don’t feel lucky to live in a three-story Park Slope brownstone they bought as a young couple. Now, as retirees, they cherish their ability to dine at good restaurants once a week and occasionally catch world-class operas or musicals.
The couple has watched their beloved New York recover twice from catastrophes, they said — first 9/11, and then the coronavirus pandemic. David, a commercial photographer, recalled clients of his vowing they’d never return to the city in 2001. Barbara remembered many people moving away as the virus death toll rose.
But most everyone came back, Barbara said. Eventually.
“Everything comes in waves and cycles,” David said.
“I just think there’s something about New York,” Barbara said. “Just no matter what, people are drawn to it.”
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Perhaps no person embodies the duality of New York’s trajectory since 9/11 as clearly as Mamdani himself.
His ascent is another example of the city’s historical ability to absorb waves of immigrants and integrate them into its power structures. But the success of his political project speaks to a desire among many residents for disruptive change.
Since Mamdani took office in January, registered New York voters have given him high approval ratings, with the vast majority saying the 34-year-old politician has been handling his duties better than they’d expected.
Mamdani’s appeal was decades in the making, said Joshua Freeman, a history professor at the City University of New York’s School of Labor and Urban Studies. New York lost hundreds of thousands of factory jobs before Wall Street took off and never regained those paths to the middle class.
“It’s a booming city that many people can’t afford,” he said, “because of the tremendous increase in housing costs and incredible increase in inequality.”
Mamdani’s critics have accused him of being “insufficiently critical of extremist ideologies.” Rudy Giuliani, who was mayor on 9/11, bashed Islam in an interview Sunday and said Mamdani’s presence at any memorials would “offend” him.
Most New York voters said they support Mamdani’s decision to attend commemorative events across the city and meet with those grieving loved ones. His team also released documents showing that the air quality around the crumbled towers was worse than previous administrations revealed.
“When we say ‘never forget,’ it is not an empty platitude,” Mamdani said Wednesday at the NYPD headquarters.
Asad Dandia, who grew up in Brooklyn, recalls heightened paranoia as the city rebuilt. Plainclothes officers, he’d heard, were hanging around mosques, watching New Yorkers pray and hang out with friends. One informant had pretended to be his friend, he later discovered.
Dandia, 33, joined a class-action suit in 2013 against police that led to intelligence-gathering reforms. Now the walking tour guide is the Brooklyn Borough Historian, appointed this spring by Mamdani.
“Islamophobia lost the battle,” he said. “The mood has changed today in many ways because we have a Muslim mayor.”
Michelle Boorstein contributed to this report from Washington. Natanson reported from New York. Paquette reported from Washington.
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