Musings on the Ugly Beauty of the World Trade Center

Musings on the Ugly Beauty of the World Trade Center

Let’s face it, the World Trade Center, actually a complex of seven buildings with the centerpieces the towers which once stood majestically in Lower Manhattan, wasn’t exactly an architectural beauty.

They were even called ugly.

The two primary towers, one rising to 1,368 feet, the other to 1,362feet, dominated the landscape and were a source of boundless pride and tributes to the supremacy of American commerce for politicians and builders even as most New Yorkers regarded them as impressive but essentially unattractive oblong boxes reaching into the skies.

My family and I visited the World Trade Center in 1988 along with an aged uncle from Ireland. My uncle, terrified of heights, stood petrified against the back wall of the Top of the World observatory and understatedly remarked that the view was “very nice.”

Soaring a full hundred feet above the Empire State Building, the WTC did indeed provide a “very nice” panorama, remarkable, breathtaking views for miles in every direction, in fact, even if the design of the towers was less than pleasing. Those vistas and the pride New Yorkers and all Americans felt for the World Trade Center fully compensated for the towers’ stark severity, described by one architect as “glass-and-metal filing cabinets.”

Despite all their architectural and aesthetic flaws, I still miss the strange, symmetrical elegance of those “filing cabinets” and, despite the passage of ten years, I freely admit that I still weep over the events of September 11th, 2001.

None of us could have anticipated the devastation wreaked on America by Islamic terrorists on that brilliantly-bright morning.

What happened that day didn’t simply involve the destruction of of human life and of buildings. It didn’t merely represent a shocking, unprovoked attack on our homeland. It involved much more than the resultant phenomenal costs, disruptions, and upheavals.

Obviously, the greatest loss was the 2,753 lives snuffed out but not to be forgotten either was the loss of Americans’ illusory senses of invulnerability and indestructibility, the loss of our collective national innocence.

Those attributes were barely shaken by the failed Muslim attempt to knock down the towers in 1993 primarily because they failed. Eight years later they succeeded. What could never happen, happened.

The incomprehensibility of 9/11 was perhaps best illustrated in the reaction of a WTC survivor. . .
(Read more at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=5387.)