Remember

I remember when I lived in Brooklyn driving past the sky line and the twin towers every morning as a magnificent sunrise would sparkle across the glass. I remember a 4th of July standing in a horde of people watching the Macy's fireworks display, paying less attention to the fireworks then to their reflections as they shimmered across the glass panes. I remember eating at Windows on the World as a kid and being disappointed in their desert selection, I remember as a young child driving past those buildings with my family convinced they could never fall, and I remember going to a class at Queens college shortly after the attacks and seeing the smoke emanate from where the towers once stood.

Downtown, fires burned, smoke plumed. The odor stood.

It was a city humbled and scared, where the possibilities of destruction had been recalibrated. It was Sept. 12, 2001. The day after.So much has been said and written about what happened on 9/11. The following day is forgotten, just another dulled interlude in the aftermath of an incoherent morning.

But New Yorkers were introduced that day to irreducible presumptions about their wounded city that many believed would harden and become chiseled into the event’s enduring legacy.New York would become a fortress city, choked by apprehension and resignation, forever patrolled by soldiers and submarines. Another attack was coming. And soon.

Tourists? Well, who would ever come again? Work in one of the city’s skyscrapers? Not likely. The Fire Department, gutted by 343 deaths, could never recuperate.If a crippled downtown Manhattan were to have any chance of regeneration, ground zero had to be rebuilt quickly, a bricks and mortar nose-thumbing to terror.

Eight years later, those presumptions are cobwebbed memories that never came to pass. Indeed, glimpses into a few aspects of the city help measure the gap between what was predicted and what actually came to be.

Indeed and through strength courage and hard work from America to across the globe our homes were never attacked again.