The World Trade Center was still new when I arrived in New York in the summer of 1977. Just three years before, Philippe Petit had made his famous high wire walk between the partially completed Twin Towers. The city was struggling financially, and the World Trade Center was a colossal white elephant rented out largely to government agencies. It was the festering summer of the blackout and the serial killer Son of Sam.
The Twin Towers remained aloof from the passions below. They were the perfect backdrop buildings, minimalist pylons signifying nothing in particular -- unlike the heroic Empire State Building -- but serving always as inscrutable signposts. If you emerged squinting from the subway, momentarily disoriented, the Twin Towers, looming in the distance, visible from almost everywhere in the city, helped you get your bearings.
By the turn of the century, the World Trade Center had become accepted, if not loved, as a symbol of the city’s endurance and power on the world stage. For most New Yorkers, it had become another workaday part of the city. Thousands of commuters passed through it daily or shopped in its immense lower level mall. And its concourses and pedestrian bridges provided the easiest way to get to Battery Park City and the World Financial Center across West Street. It was a city within a city with its own zip code.
Those who masterminded the destruction of the World Trade Center on 9/11 understood the potency of the Twin Towers as image and symbol. They also understood that striking at this image would unleash forces that are not easily returned to station. It can be said, I think, without much question, that the current state of our national discourse, which has normalized nativist and authoritarian impulses, is connected to that event 15 years ago.
During the 90s I lived in Amsterdam in the Netherlands making trips back and forth to New York for work. On September 11, 2001 I was in Amsterdam, when the phone rang just before three in the afternoon, six hours time difference from New York. A friend told me that a plane had hit one of the Trade Center towers.
I turned on the TV in time to see the second plane hit, and then watched the whole progression of horrors unfold. I flew back to a nearly deserted JFK airport a week later on one of the first flights in from Europe. Not being a photojournalist, I did not in any sense try to cover the story. I stayed back, observing, as is my usual modus operandi. In the book you see glimpses of ground zero, and several images of Union Square Park where a spontaneous memorial sprang up around the statue of George Washington.
For several years after 9/11, I thought about how I might respond as a photographer to what had happened to New York. Surprisingly, within a short period of time, the city was on the upswing again. People were moving in, not out, crime continued its downward trend, and money began to flow into areas of the city previously impervious to gentrification. It occurred to me then that I should return to photographing the Lower East Side. The old immigrant neighborhood beneath the bridges and skyscrapers of lower Manhattan would serve as a barometer of change and continuity.
As I began to re-photograph the Lower East Side, I discovered numerous images of the Twin Towers in the neighborhood — murals, posters, and memorials. And as I moved about the city I began collecting WTC imagery, either using a digital pocket camera or the view camera.
For about twenty years most of my attention was focused on Europe where I photographed the landscape of the Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall. After the fall of the wall in 1989, and its quick dismantling, I continued to make photographs in Berlin, documenting the redevelopment of the former border zone.
In 1996 I photographed a billboard standing directly where the Wall once ran -- a cigarette ad with Pall Mall Light printed over an image of the Twin Towers. The Wall had once been regarded as a permanent fixture of global politics -- now it was gone. Little did I know that in just a few years, the Twin Towers would also crumble, and geopolitics would be similarly transformed.
A decade after 9/11, ground zero remained a battleground of interests and a highly charged political symbol. To some it was hallowed ground, a graveyard. Today it is both a memorial and a museum that coexist uneasily. I began photographing the site in 2007. After years of excavation and underground foundation work, there was evidence, finally, of progress being made above ground.
In October 2012, a category 3 hurricane rolled up the Atlantic Coast making landfall just to the south of New York. By the time Hurricane Sandy reached the city, its winds had dissipated substantially, but it pushed a storm surge into the harbor that flooded streets and tunnels, blacked out most of lower Manhattan, and in the end, resulted in 53 fatalities. Even Liberty Island in the Upper Harbor failed to escape the floodwaters, which inundated the caretaker’s cottage, part of group of support buildings not usually seen by visitors to the Statue of Liberty.
Two tragedies visited New York in just over a decade: one, a diabolical plot engineered by a shadowy figure of human malignancy -- the other, a natural force of supreme indifference exacerbated by global warming. New York still exhibits its street-wise swagger, but both events exposed a vulnerability that, caught unawares, can be spied in the busy, hurried eyes of its citizens.
When the Twin Towers went up in 1974 they dominated the skyline in almost every direction. They were ubiquitous, poking up and between other buildings visible from countless different vantage points. It helped, of course, that there were two of them, and the vertical pin striping of the skin – the vulnerable exoskeleton of the towers – seemed always to lead the eye upward.
One World Trade Center, despite its height, can seem lost in the crowd compared to its double progenitors. But as before with the Twin Towers, One WTC appears at its most commanding from across the Hudson in New Jersey. I am ambivalent about the building itself – it could have/should have been better. I have to admit, however, that I was one of those New Yorkers who wanted a tall replacement for the Twin Towers. One World Trade fills the hole in the sky successfully, but it does not, I’m afraid, fill the hole in my heart left by 9/11.
New York moves forward, new towers climb skyward, and a new generation claims the old neighborhoods. The rapidity of change rattles even the newcomers who feel history slipping through their fingers as they fumble for their keys.
Here is New York. E. B. White wrote about the city in another time of great anxiety: The subtlest change in New York is something people don’t speak much about but that is in everyone’s mind. The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. We who live here know that all too well.
Let us then look back at what is gone -- reflected towers in a pool of water. Philippe Petit on a slender wire. The names. The faces. Rising steel. The beginning of what comes after.
WTC is a book about the Twin Towers, their presence and absence, and the rebuilding of the city after 9/11. The book is available for purchase on my website.
— Brian Rose