The World Trade Center

When I was a kid, my mother and father got divorced and my father rented an apartment about 15 minutes from New York City. It was about 1972, and I was about seven years old. On weekends my brother and I would go stay with our father, and in an attempt to entertain us, he would take us into the city on Saturdays. The Twin Towers were still under construction(If I remember correctly, the one tower was complete and the other was still being built), and we would go down to lower Manhattan, pay 10 cents and ride the Staten Island Ferry from Manhattan to Staten Island and back again. It is a wonderful vision that I have never forgotten. You Know, it is funny how most people reacted to the Towers when they were new. The common view was that were an eyesore on the NYC skyline, two big boxes with no character, not like the Chrysler building or the Empire State Building. It took a long time for people to accept the new buildings. I remember when the 1976 remake of King Kong came out and got criticized for using The Trade Center instead of The Empire State Building. Eventually the Twin Towers took their place amongst NY's other Landmarks, and they looked over harbor for another 25 years. I moved south in 1995 and began working in construction, One sunny warm September day, a man that I didn't even know asked me if I had heard what was going on in New York. I turned on the radio and listened for a while, and decided that I just needed to go home. I called my relatives in Jersey to make sure that none of them were in the city, and I went home to watch the news coverage. It is a strange thing, in one lifetime I watched the buildings rise and fall, I watched people that hated them,cry over their absense, and I saw a country become more united than I could ever remember. That December I went to ground zero and it was one of the saddest experiences of my life. I don't know why I thought of this today, or if anyone else is interested, but I just felt like posting it.