I finally decided to make the pilgrimage to lower Manhattan, just about two years after that fateful Tuesday. And I’m glad to report that the site of the former World Trade Center has a sense of life about it, in contrast to the horrors of despair and death that held sway there for many months. The place has become a typically unique New York City artifact (ah, New York, city of oxymorons). I.e., a combination construction site, tourist attraction and wailing wall. There is life teeming on all four sides of it. People with cameras (like myself), bicyclists, young couples on dates, souvenir venders, people on official business, people passing through, etc. Hard to believe that our modern-day Pearl Harbor happened there some hundred odd weeks ago.

I don’t mean to disrespect the memory of the thousands who died that day or to trivialize the significance of what was once such an unimaginable event here on home soil. But I didn’t personally feel any sense of melancholy while I was there, nor did I detect it amidst the people who were out and about that weekend. No sense of awe, no sense of anything deep. Just New York City. Had something like that happened in Philadelphia or Cincinnati or Houston, it probably would have taken longer to regain a sense of normalcy anywhere near ground zero. Yea, if it had to happen anywhere — New York City, you are indeed one tough old town.

Anyway, here’s one of my pix, looking from the southwest corner.