aliyaskie

I lived here for a few years after college and met some of the greatest people I’ve ever known. The weather is great pretty much year-round (except that pesky hurricane season), and the beaches are beautiful throughout the county.

Way, way too many people. The tree is pretty every year, and if it’s not too crowded, it can be fun to watch the ice skaters. But the sheer number of people makes it not worth doing more than once.

The first time I went to the WTC site was not long after the WTC site became the WTC site (and was no longer the World Trade Center). We still get close enough to see anything that day, but just the thought of what had happened, knowing what had happened that day, was too much to bear, and we quickly high-tailed it out of lower Manhattan.

The next time I went to the WTC site was a few years later, November of 2005. I was going into the city to see a show with my father, and a friend of mine put me on the PATH train from Newark, which arrived into the (recently reopened at the time) WTCPATH station. The new WTCPATH station has a huge glass window overlooking the site, and may very well be the closest thing to actually being onsite (at least it may have been at the time). I was completely unprepared that day to look into the huge hole that is the site itself. There were all sorts of construction vehicles and debris still in the site, and I must’ve stood there for 20 minutes (already late) unable to look away, but desperately wanting to. I’ve come into that PATH station again since, and every time it reminds me again what happened that day, how quickly the world changed.