You are currently browsing the stories about the World Trade Center neighborhood
One Wheel, Two Towers
by Raphael Lasar 08/19/2018Neighborhood: Lower East Side, World Trade Center
They say everything happens for a reason. Construction began on the World Trade Center in August of 1968. Some months before that when I was in the second grade, our teacher, Miss Spellman, handed out a Weekly Reader, an eight-page magazine with short articles designed to encourage the habit of reading in elementary school […]
See You in New York
by Olivia Sjostedt 03/19/2017Neighborhood: Central Park, Manhattan, World Trade Center
As the wheels hit the ground and the pilot stopped the airplane at Newark airport, I felt right at home. I was landing in the city that was going to be my new home, at least for a couple of years. People had always told me that I should live in New York once, but leave […]
Primary Day
by Sam Roseme 09/13/2011Neighborhood: Brooklyn Heights, Lower East Side, World Trade Center
I stumbled bleary-eyed out of my building still hours before the sun would rise over the East River. Allen Street was black and still. The bars were closed and the morning rush hadn’t yet begun. The homeless slept soundly in the street-median park. Waiting in her car in front of my building was Maggie, 40ish […]
Staying
by Randi Skaggs 09/13/2011Neighborhood: West Village, World Trade Center
I’d just spent a month back in Kentucky, trying it on like an old outfit to see if it still fit. I was unemployed, unattached, poor, frustrated, and I wanted to make sure living in the most complicated, and challenging, city in the world was still worth it. I contemplated this as the plane bisected […]
Ten Years Later
by Connor Gaudet 09/11/2011Neighborhood: All Over, World Trade Center
In 2002 we published Before & After: Stories from New York; a collection of stories in two halves – the first taking place in the city before the 9/11 attacks, the second being comprised of testimonials from the day itself and its immediate aftermath. Recently, we asked for submissions for the site, to explore the […]
Dear Jon
by erika 09/11/2011Neighborhood: World Trade Center
September 2010 Dear Jon, They want to build a mosque where you were murdered. I want to do the right thing. So I’m having a debate in my head taking on the two sides. What would you want I wonder. See, that’s the hard thing. I’d think after knowing you for such a long time, […]
Guided Tour
by Susan Volchok 09/11/2011Neighborhood: Uncategorized, Upper West Side, World Trade Center
I was born in Manhattan, have lived there most of my life, but my last look at the twin towers of the World Trade Center was from the front deck of a Staten Island ferry moving through the dark waters after a Staten Island Yankees night game, July, 2001. I’d boarded the boat alone, was […]
She Looked Like She Was Dancing
by C. R. Lofters 09/11/2011Neighborhood: Uncategorized, World Trade Center
She was my cousin, in that by-the-way, six times removed way that a lot of cousins seem to be in the Jamaican-American Seventh-day Adventist community. You find one another when you’re 12 or 14 because everyone migrates to the same part of New York, belongs to the same cluster of churches, drive upstate every spring […]
Another Visit
by Peter F. Eder 09/11/2011Neighborhood: World Trade Center
An Update to my April 2002 story, The Visit. For me, a native Manhattanite who has never in my 72 years been off the island for more than two consecutive months, normalcy has never returned since 9.11. There’s a permanent emptiness in the skyline – the towers missing from the views from the Throgg’s Neck […]
Photographic Memories
by Christie Grotheim 09/11/2011Neighborhood: World Trade Center
The thing that intrigues me about photographs is not the spontaneity in which they’re taken, nor the way they freeze time, but the fact that in the split second when the shutter snaps, one doesn’t know which moments will become meaningful until much later. Capturing chance moments and random events, we can’t know the value […]
5 Years Later: Talking About the Jumpers
by Kelly McMasters 09/16/2006Neighborhood: World Trade Center
Their hands were clasped. She had on a skirt suit and he had a tie around his neck. In my mind, their arms are down, right hand holding left between the balls of their hips. But I know this can’t be right. Another impossibility: her hair. It was long, brown, and fell below her shoulders. […]
Photographs of the World Trade Center, Before and After
by Nathan Chaffee 06/04/2006Neighborhood: World Trade Center
These pictures were taken from Spring Street and Lafayette Street. And some from "before…"