On the day of the tragedy, I made my way downtown
to the Staten Island Ferry (wearing a respirator)
past churches, mosques and synagogues; through
Chelsea, the East Village, the Lower East Side, Chinatown
and the Financial District with a strange mix of
sites. Thousands of people from 14th Street up milling
about trying to get to who-knows-where - or nowhere at
all -- to residental communities where neighbors were
all on the streets sharing their shock and grief --
through a vacant Orchard Street where all the businesses
were gated shut -- and through Lower Manhattan where
we had to walk along the East River under the
Brooklyn Bridge on dust-covered streets strewn with office
litter. All the time, the omnipresent cloud of smoke and
dust hiding the great vacancy where the towers stood,
just hours earlier.<br>As the Ferry pulled away, there
was no towering presence above the skyline. The first
comment I heard from a fellow passanger was that it
looked like Seattle. Although these architecturally
lifeless monoliths dominated the skyline and were never
loved with sentimentality by New Yorkers the way the
Empire State Building is loved, they were literally
filled with life -- restaurants, shops, a convergence of
transit and combined 220 floors of office space in just
the two towers.<br> These symbols will be missed, not
just as a monument to human achievement, but with the
memories of the thousands of lives lost.