9/11 a retrospect....my view on the world and how it has changed.

On September 11 2001, according to data, “more people clicked on documentary news photographs than on pornography for the first and only time in the history of the Internet.” We couldn’t take our eyes off the pictures. Magazines and newspapers devoted full-page bleeds to the images; a nearly-identical photograph of the smoking towers ran on the front page of hundreds of newspapers around the world.

 In 2001, these photographs showed breaking news: people streaming over bridges to Brooklyn. Office workers covered in dust. I was only a short distance away in my office at 110 Livingston Street on the other side of the Brooklyn Bridge (which is now luxury condos). I remember the day as if it were yesterday. It was the first day of my school for my daughter who is now a freshman at NYU Poly, only a few blocks from my old office and the new building where the Trade Center once stood.

 I recall that day entering my office and the call from my father telling me “a plane flew into the World Trade Center.” Thinking it was some kind of prop plane that had wandered off course, I retorted, “what was the pilot drunk”? He explained, it was a jet!!!

 I immediately turned on the television and watched the horror unfold, sharing an office with my Asst. Superintendent the look of horror filled her face, Drew (her husband) worked in the building. I told her I would contact him to let everyone know what was going on.

Reflexively, I prayed for the souls caught in the conflagration and began to call friends in the NYPD to find out more information all the while trying to reach Drew, which I did about 20 minutes later.

 The ashes, I imagined, fell like the snowflakes at the close of James Joyce’s story, “The Dead,” falling all across a city I know so well — ashes settling on the lake at Prospect Park where I used to go as a child, softly descending on Coney Island, on the beach where I first rode a roller-coaster, and wafting on to Old Calvary cemetery where my family is buried.

 I see the ashes that bright and sparkling fall morning making their descent on the whole of the city, the ashes of corporate executives, secretaries, and janitors, of firefighters from Brooklyn and Queens, men who lived in neighborhoods just like my own, firefighters like Carl Bedigian, my brother’s best friends older brother we all knew growing up.

 The following days for me were a period of numbness as I was working to help open schools and set a feeling of normalcy back to the NYCDOE.

 Years later I reflected about the process of “rebuilding” and redevelopment in lower Manhattan. So politicized, so fraught, and so painfully disappointing, the process of memorialization of the events of 9/11, symbolically focused on Ground Zero in New York City, was in many ways entirely predictable from the first months after September 11.

 I recall walking by the street-level abundance of shrines, missing posters, and impromptu photo exhibitions that dominated the early months has been replaced over the subsequent years by an official process of memorial design contests and student art contests.

 As the 9/11 memorial stands, it is clear that this official process has now produced, an exceptionally banal result. On the fourteenth anniversary, the impact of the 9/11 memorial and the public response to it are yet to be clear.

 Still, it is possible to say that the process of the memorialization of 9/11 and the rebuilding of Ground Zero in lower Manhattan will be seen in retrospect as a lost opportunity of exceptional magnitude in the history of art and design in New York City, as a spectacular failure of imagination and renewal.

 One World Trade Center (formerly the Freedom Tower), now icons of defensive-security design, producing far more office space than the city and the current economic climate can fill? The players in this dramatic story were entirely predictable—greedy real-estate developers, politicians whose motives were swayed by presidential ambitions, grieving and angry families who channeled their mourning into demands that memorial designs conform to their beliefs at the expense of broader community needs and input, ego-driven star architects, weak-willed bureaucrats, and so on.

 This city can show its compassion, and its resolve, but it is also a city incapable of the large, appropriate gesture in the public interest if it costs too much. . . . If the usual scenario is followed, the debate will lead to a “solution” in which principle is lost and an epic opportunity squandered. So sad, we cannot get to a result that benefits the community and the city as a whole.

Memories of that day and the turbulent debates of what came after have overshadowed the loss we suffered that day. The loss of innocence for so many, the loss of security, where we now have to re-think our every move entering an airport or public space, the reality of the world we live in and how it changed for our children.