Looking Left

On my way to school every morning for as long as I can remember, I took a second to stand outside my apartment building and breathe in the new morning.

Looking right, up Fifth Avenue, the Empire State Building stared back at me. It dominates the neighborhood, casting a long morning shadow on the buildings below.

Looking left, the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center shone in the morning sun as jeweled scepters of New York City. The towers represented achievement, success and prosperity as they rose high into the city air.

Looking left on windy days, the expertly engineered skyscrapers of steel and glass would rock gently in the wind. As a child I was afraid that they would fall, tumbling in the force of the howling winds. As I grew older, I learned that the 110-story buildings were specifically designed to sway so that they would not blow over. Feeling slightly more at ease, I would imagine the pair performing a quiet dance that I watched from a distance in a silent meditation.

Looking left some mornings, I would focus on the tops of the man-made wonders. On these mornings the buildings reminded me of an exhibit at the Museum of Natural History. The exhibit displayed a model of New York City after the melting of the polar ice caps, predicted to occur in 10,000 years.

The image is a frightening one: a New York swallowed by water. In the model, tiny men in boats make their way across an expansive ocean spotted only by the tops of the city's tallest structures: the Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building and the monstrous heads of the World Trade Center's Twin Towers. Staring at these monstrous heads, I was reassured by the exhibit's promise that even when New York is gone, these buildings will remain tall—proof of the power and history of a fallen city.

Looking left on foggy days, there was nothing to be seen. A cloudy sky veiled downtown Manhattan, and the Twin Towers appeared to be gone. As if stolen, the magnificent architectural masterpieces were nowhere to be seen. On these mornings I wondered if Carmen Sandiego had plucked the towers out of the World Trade Center and carried them off to her secret hideout.

Those mornings outside my apartment building seem far away today. Yesterday morning, the buildings fell from their place in Manhattan's sky. They were not knocked down by ferocious wind. They were not stolen by a fictional thief. They were not hidden in the precipitation of a chilly New York morning.

The buildings fell, without giving longer than two hours warning. They took a city's innocence and and a nation's naivete. Worst of all, the tumbling buildings took thousands of lives.

Under the smoke, New York City remains, choking in soot and rubble. The city bleeds from multiple wounds; it has lost a part of itself. With the crumbling of these towers, the city has been made a victim. Terror has bonded its citizens in struggle and hope, but it has forced them to mourn.

Today, as the television news shows an aerial view of Manhattan, I can recognize the place I stood outside my apartment building on my way to school. I look left and try to convince myself the towers are just hidden in fog.

Judd B. Kessler ’04 is an economics concentrator in Adams House.