ABSTRACT
Now that the world trade center has been destroyed, and the sixteen-acre platform on which it stood has been forcibly flattened into the small-scale, almost medieval, street plan of Lower Manhattan, we can grasp more clearly what the place once meant to us and what it could mean to New Yorkers in the future. Ugly, awkward, functional—like the city itself—the Twin Towers made their great impression by sheer arrogance. They took over the skyline, staking their claim not only as an iconic image of New York but as the iconic image of what a modern city should aspire to be: the biggest, the mightiest, the imperial center. Once we gazed upon this site as a landscape of power, but since September 11, we have viewed it in sorrow—as if it holds both the dark side of grandeur and our unspoken fears of decline.
