Twinning

The other night I watched a movie called The Hot Rock with Robert Redford and George Segal and a slew of other vintage actors some of whom are no longer with us.  What held my attention most of all were the getaway scenes-- the driving, the reels of 70's New York City through the car windows-- the storefronts and bank names long deceased-- the PanAm building, the concrete corridors as they had been in the years I grew up.  There was a solidity to New York.  Even the skyscrapers were part of an architectural profile-- they stood out, they raised the skyline, but they were part and parcel.  They spoke 'city'.

In one or two scenes you could see the World Trade towers--- they were maybe not quite complete when the film came out... but this was downtown-- the world of finance and headquarters-- it was like a little island of its own, downtown... they were a symbol of future, of Internationalism.  

I remember so well the building of the Towers.  I'm old enough at this point to even remember the Verrazano bridge construction... but the Towers-- we criticized them, we dissed them... and by the time I finished college they were a fixture.  It was their version of New York that welcomed me after my months in Italy and again after graduation, when I came 'home'. On the bicentennial I celebrated them, not far from the tall ships, and walked from the Seaport to Battery Park, all the way up to Harlem. Just now I remembered I was with a Hungarian professor of philosophy-- an odd date-- but I felt a little patriotic and urban-savvy.  

Most of my 1970's city existence took place on lower floors--- study buildings, libraries, museums, my little ground-level studio, the subways and buses, rock clubs.  I worked in a gallery and was given an office of fairy-tale proportion in a grand townhouse with high ceilings and an arched window that looked out on other historic brownstones and mansions.  I felt like a princess.

In those days we did international business with Letters of Credit-- ancient banking instruments that insured payment upon evidence of shipping a painting or sculpture.  Many of the relevant institutions were headquartered in the Towers-- the shipping company, the financial offices.  I'd take the C train downtown to Cortlandt Street, into the cavernous lobby with a mall's worth of shops, before we had malls in Manhattan. There was a B. Dalton bookstore where I'd browse, a cafe where I'd grab a salad and coffee, and then upstairs to do my banking... into the elevators which clogged my ears. The shipping company was a seedy counter and desks with paperwork... but the bank... it was like a soundproofed heaven-- the window view spectacular.  I was young enough to be allowed to linger... another world there... the quiet, the altitude was like an amusement park thrill.  Like a holiday.  Give me your young and your ambitious... you can work here, we embrace you.

When I travelled and returned,  the sheer height of them beneath the plane was amazing.  The twin thing-- like sentinels.  Not many pairs of things in New York-- yes, the El Dorado, the NYPL library lions... but here they were-- anchoring the island... shapes of things to come.  We trusted them.  They were fortified and record-shattering. They were permanent future.  Years later we began to gig annually in the plaza.  I took my son; we visited the rooftop and held our breath.  My son had a little camera and photographed the Towers.  A fellow musician waitressed at Windows on the World... I occasionally visited her just to cop a view.  

We all adopted these buildings with great affection once we got over the resistance of their newness.  They were spectacles and spectacular.  They were symbols and they housed all kinds of things and people... I hung art there, sat in on meetings, saw gold and jewels in a vault, ate and drank... and mostly just inhaled the magical vista that both miniaturized and amplified my city.  It was like a spell... an architectural holiday.

For 20 years we have watched over and over the unimaginable horror of September 11th; it is compelling and terrifying.  We mourn, we grieve... all our lives changed on that day.  I have spent many pages listing the personal anguishes, describing what it was like standing beside the smoldering wreckage with small children silenced.  We've written novels, stories, songs... poetry.  The city has moved on; a whole generation of adults do not remember life before 9/11. It seems incredible-- the way someone dies in our life and we think we cannot go on... and then we do. 

No matter how many memorials, how many monuments and museums... there is nothing that does justice to the strange magnificence of what was there.  The way even the toughest of us old fucks-- we grew to love this place, these twins of solidity.  It was a vision-- a city's worth of people there, of activity... of breath.  The sealed-off world of prosperity and future which erupted into war... the people-- they brushed by us, shared elevators... and then vanished in the ash.  We breathed their cremated flesh and bone. Punished like some biblical idol-worshippers and sinners?  I still cannot make sense of it... the message, the lesson.. a foreshadowing of some massive apocalypse... the loss of innocence, of trust... ? We will go on, some of us; we will remember, yes, and we are forever changed.