A Lost View

Wherever I go, I look for a view from something tall. Late in the summer of 1983, I couldn't pass up the World Trade Center for a view of New York. I was impressed by the view all around, but of course my recollection is a little fuzzy after a quarter-century, and I took no pictures and made no notes. It was a sunny day, and there was a fair amount of wind. This amateur video, despite its technical flaws, captures a tourist's sense of the experience on a bright summer day pretty well.

More memorable, actually, was the view from the Empire State Building, which I saw at night both times. I also visited the site of the World Trade Center when the scar was still pretty fresh, in early June 2002. I attended a panel discussion at on a middle floor of Two World Financial Center, which had a view of the 16-acre pit that had once been the twin towers.

"It was hard to visualize that anything had been there," I wrote at the time. "It looks like a vast construction site -- broad & deep. Men & earthmovers set the scale: they were tiny, the hole in the ground was enormous. The panel discussion was about the cleanup of the site & redevelopment plans. Most interesting were the engineers who worked on the cleanup."