I took this photo one Sunday afternoon in the summer of 1994, a few blocks from the apartment I was sharing in the East Village. I never got tired of the ghostly look of the World Trade Centre seen from a distance. (Like a lot of people, I suspect, early evening was my favourite time for looking south.) The idea that those towers could disappear never remotely crossed my mind, even though it was just a year after the first bomb attack.
There was a comedy festival in New York some weeks before I snapped the picture. One event involved going on an open-top bus tour of Manhattan hosted by an ancient survivor of the Bilko show (the blonde private - I can't remember his name). At one point our bus passed the foot of the towers. Construction workers were still patching things up. We were too busy being amused by the comic's wisecracks about nothing in particular to pay attention to the scaffolding. I mean, who would ever be stupid enough to try to destroy such a huge building?
UPDATE: Belgravia Dispatch revisits a memorial site entitled Here Is New York: A Democracy of Photographs.
MORE: Christopher Hitchens warns against indulging in too much introspection:
"We" - and our allies - simply have to become more ruthless and more experienced. An unspoken advantage of the current awful strife in Iraq and Afghanistan is that it is training tens of thousands of our young officers and soldiers to fight on the worst imaginable terrain, and gradually to learn how to confront, infiltrate, "turn", isolate and kill the worst imaginable enemy. These are faculties that we shall be needing in the future. It is a shame that we have to expend our talent in this way, but it was far worse five years and one day ago, when the enemy knew that there was a war in progress, and was giggling at how easy the attacks would be, and "we" did not even know that hostilities had commenced.
