Lanterns and Light Catchers

They looked like that a child might draw: dual, flat-topped rectangles, 110 stories each (an acre per floor!), a daytime city of 50,000 souls rising above the steeples and turrets of lower Manhattan, orienting us from the eddies of New Jersey and from 42nd Street. Derided for a simplistic urban plan by distinguished critics, scaleless, monolithic, touted as the tallest buildings in the world until superceded by Chicago's Sears Tower, the twin towers of the World Trade Center embodied New York's and America's 20th-century economic preeminence-unsubtly and pawerfully. they could not be ignored.

    As time passed, they became marked by human experience, from working conference and courtyard
festivals to lazy Sunday afternoons at Borders and celebratory dinners at Windows on the World. Aesthetically, as our early perceptions evolved in our consciousness, the towers subtly changed from arrogant markers to anchors, glowing stakes in the schist of an island continent. Not beloved, perhaps-certainly not personality-filled-but lanterns and light catchers, their ribbed sides reflecting sunlight and moonglow, their walls blooming in a vertical ribbon of evening twilight. Sundials, casting shadows.

       now there are gone, and the scale of the city has shifted. Somehow, in their absence, the sky looks bigger and the remaining buildings seem smaller in over view. We can she that the towers lent scale to the whole island, much as an arm does to the body. Gone in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye. Robert Ivy