King Kong's home away from home
A moviegoer's elegy for the World Trade Center.
By Stephanie Zacharek
Sept. 21, 2001 | Suddenly, here in New York, everyone is missing a building no one ever much cared for before.
In the days after Sept. 11, people riding over the Manhattan Bridge from Brooklyn on the subway would, almost to a person, gaze out the window at that incomprehensible mass of smoke, an inadequate placeholder for the glossy dual monoliths that by all rights should still be there. More than a week later, people still look out -- not everyone, or at least not all at once. But it's a given that everyone's feelings about the World Trade Center have changed: Its absence is a presence in itself. The hole it's left is much bigger than the building ever was.
New Yorkers are used to seeing their city reflected back at them from movie screens: We see familiar streets dotted with restaurants or shops we've visited, and public parks where we've walked our dogs. Most of all, we're used to seeing our buildings, particularly our skyline. Every city's skyline has its own memorable contours, but New York's -- perhaps for no better reason than as moviegoers we've seen it so often -- is the most iconic.
The view from a subway window isn't much like a movie screen. But in a pinch, it will do. The subway ride in that first week was something of a trial run -- a way of adjusting to the new skyline, but also of getting ready for the weirdness of having it reflected back at us in its new state. The New York of the movies, specifically the buildings that make up its skyline, belongs to everybody, not just to New Yorkers. Better to reckon with it in the harshness of broad daylight than in the darkness of a movie theater, a place that we all prefer to think of as a source of pleasure.
Getting ready to adjust to a world of movies with no World Trade Center means coming to terms with what the building meant when it was still standing. Before Sept. 11, it was almost a full-time job for many New Yorkers to pretend the World Trade Center didn't exist. Unless you worked in or near it, it was pretty much a "tourist thing." In a noisy patchwork of a city with so many incredible little pockets, so many smallish neighborhoods with so many eminently charming buildings, it was just too obvious.
But secretly, when no one was looking, we loved it. In the daytime it stood guard over the city, gazing straight up Fifth Avenue, more benevolent than imposing. I know for a fact that tourists weren't the only ones who'd look for it if, emerging from the subterranean bustle of a subway station, they needed to orient themselves quickly.
And lit up at night, its magnificence always pulled you up short. When I look at pictures of the old nighttime skyline now, I see the World Trade Center as a gorgeous, dignified misfit, too tall for all the buildings around it, and just not caring because it was all that. It was confident without being arrogant; its size made it glamorous, but its simplicity made it elegant. It was so New York.
This past week, New Yorkers returned to work, putting a brave face on the act of returning to normal -- as rough as things have been, we're all happy to have the attempt at normalcy to keep us busy. But I've noticed that no matter what part of the city I'm in, I'm always aware of my location in relation to the ruins, and other New Yorkers have said the same. We desperately need to be in touch with where that building used to be; the space it occupied, no matter what is or isn't built on it in the future, will always mean something to us. It's a new point on our compass, a necessary addition to north, south, east and west.
People around the country can't feel precisely the same way, of course, but there's no doubt that to almost everyone a New York with no World Trade Center is just plain wrong: They've all seen the pictures of our skyline, with its two front teeth knocked out. People have talked about how strange it will be to fly into the city without the welcome of those towers.
Next page: To Kong, the towers look like home