Home and Away

As many of us can poignantly recall, I remember where I was eight years ago. It was not in New York City, but in Virginia, where my co-workers and I gathered to watch the colossal destruction in numbing silence. From our building's sky porch we could see the blackened trails in the distance where the Pentagon lay smoldering.

For the last two years I have been in New York on an almost weekly basis. It is a beautiful place, even more so at night, and it is filled with characters and colors that are likely not seen any other place on earth.

The scar of the city lays downtown, a place overrun with construction barrels and wooden fencing. The Ground Zero location still brings many visitors, but at its essence it is a site of re-birth vs. a site memorialized. The city is moving on, it is healing a tremendous wound.

In the same way that the French National paper announced on September 12 "Today we are all Americans", I believe that many of us are all New Yorkers. I rarely find anybody who hasn't visited the city, even if only as a small child, and cannot honestly say that the city did not stay with them in some manner.

New York stays with me at night. In the eerie quiet of a night in Virginia, I can almost hear the subtle street noises of New York...the cars, the sirens, the constant movement of people. In the ability to stand in my backyard and see the North Star, I remember the blinding strobes of Times Square and the haze of white lights that obscure the night sky. There is a scent as you walk through the city, the street vendors and the meats they spread over high heat. The city is not so much a combination of living things as it is a living thing. It breathes, it exhales.

One of the greatest ironies of September 11th is how beautiful the actual day started. A high pressure system dominated over the East Coast and it was a picturesque day. Clearest of blue skies and mild temperatures from Washington DC to New England. I can remember clearly the contrails of fighter jets screaming through the skies in Northern Virginia, the only blemish against the blue.

I was not in New York on September 11th, but most of my team was in their offices, and they describe a day of chaos and non-communication that I cannot even fathom. What people who aren't in the city sometimes forget is that once you get outside a building in New York, you generally can't see further than a block. The only views that are worthwhile are high up, in a building. And people were evacuating in droves, walking through the city, swarming the streets and public transportation that was still working. Tunnels were closed, people were taking the bridges. But they couldn't see downtown, they couldn't see the towers during those few hours that they were burning because the other buildings blocked their view.

But they did see the dust plumes when they collapsed, and what the plumes hid was the altering forever of the landscape of New York.

New Yorkers take their mark from the streets. They oriented off the Towers, at least downtown because they were like the sun to a sundial. People orient off of the main avenues...west side, east side. Near certain landmarks like the Chrysler building.

Without the towers, the compass of the city was lost. New York was unbalanced, its people both figuratively and literally lost.

I don't think that the city became disoriented for too long. They regained their footing, their direction. They persevered.

But some folks decided to leave. Some felt they were no longer safe. They felt that it was too risky, too much a target.

I never felt that way.

I work in one of the tallest buildings in Mid-Town, a rapidly growing area with increasingly higher and higher buildings being erected. I can look south and see all the way to the ocean.

I like to think the city is healing, that it has regained its strength and frankly that it defies any conventional wisdom that it has changed. Yes, the landscape has been altered and permanently etched in our minds.

But more buildings continue to go up. More continue to serve as monuments to the growth and resiliency. More continue to block lovely views unobstructed before and now provide shade to whole swaths of concrete and sidewalks.

At night, particularly at night, it is still beautiful. And I think when I'm at home, I sometimes miss it.