The missing towers
By Alan Caruba
web
posted September 2, 2002
One gets a very strange feeling as they drive the looping curve of road that leads to the entrance of the Lincoln Tunnel from the New Jersey side. From here, particularly when the traffic was going slow, you could always look over to your left and see the whole of lower Manhattan laid out in all its splendor.
These days, one searches for the two gleaming towers that dominated the tip of the island. Surely it is a dream. Surely, this time they will be there. They are not.
As September 11, 2002 approaches, I keep thinking we should build those same two towers again.
I
keep thinking of lunches and dinners in Windows on the World, the splendid
restaurant that topped out one of the towers and, from which, walking
the full perimeter of the floor, one could look out at the extraordinary
urban landscape that is New York City and its boroughs, and across the
river, New Jersey. Down below, one could see the Statue of Liberty, looking
very tiny in the harbor.
It makes me angry.
It makes me angry to think that two planes, filled with innocent people, were turned into flying bombs that literally decimated these two great structures, these monuments to the economic vitality of this nation.
I want those towers back!
Forget about the new designs. They have already been dismissed and an international search is on for still more. I say, take out the architectural plans for the Twin Towers and rebuild them! Tell the crazed Islamists that they did not achieve anything and will not achieve anything. They have signed the death warrant for fanatical, fundamentalist Islam.
Many years ago, I visited the Arizona Memorial in Pearl Harbor. I was a child when the Japanese sneak attack awoke a sleeping nation, an isolationist nation, to the reality that it had real enemies. Ironically, the boat I took to get out to the site was filled mostly with Japanese tourists. What struck me, once we got there, was that they would pause to pray in front of the names of those who died that day, December 7, 1941, "a day that will live in infamy."
The Arizona Memorial is a place of silence broken only by the waters that lap at the twisted, rusting metal of the ship below and the beautiful arching structure above.
I want the new Twin Towers to be a bustling, noisy place, filled with people coming and going. Most will have been born after 9-11 and perhaps some will pause to look at a wall filled with the names of the more than 2,800 who died there on a long ago day in 2001.
I want the Towers back! I want them because this is America and we will
not be defeated. 
Alan Caruba writes "Warning Signs", a weekly column posted at www.anxietycenter.com, the Internet site of The National Anxiety Center. (c) Alan Caruba, 2002
Other related stories: (open in a new window)
- Why we must build
bigger and better on the World Trade Center site by Sherri R. Tracinski
(July 22, 2002)
Architect Sherri R. Tracinski wants to see a memorial at the site of the World Trade Center but she doesn't want that to be the primary focus. She also wants to send a message to those who destroyed it
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