Opinion

We will always come back to New York

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In New York's little square in Sheridan Square, where Seventh Avenue and Christopher Street intersect, there was a newsstand stationed at the underground exit where I would religiously buy the first edition of the next day's New York Times every evening. From that point, the two gigantic lighthouses in the Manhattan night were close by and in their splendour, always lit up, as if the activity in the offices of the World Trade Center never stopped. A symbol in every sense of Manhattan's feverish life. The Twin Towers were a vital guide to the great metropolis. The updated symbol of the capital of the world, which had its classic references in the Empire State and the Crysler Building, surpassed by the extremely minimalist lines of an architect of Japanese origin, Minoru Yamasaki, who gave the city its aesthetic passport to the 21st century. Barbarism was determined to prevent them from reaching their symbolic destination and to project a trail of black smoke over the head of the Statue of Liberty, located only metres away, at the mouth of the Hudson.

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The duplicate towers had given NY a much-needed boost when the city had entered the depression that followed the oil crisis. They were a beacon in front of the ageing buildings surrounding the New York Stock Exchange where the world's money is made. They also offered the best view of the New York Bay, adorned by the Brooklyn and Verrazano bridges that looked like their garlands at night. They named the restaurant "Windows of the world", as if they already knew that it would be the eyes of the whole world that would be gazing at the greatest tragedy of the new millennium. It was one of the great new luxuries of the city, to be climbed with a certain respect. Not only because of the altitude sickness, which made it necessary to make the journey in two or three actors in sections, but also because of the clothing required. In cowboy country, it was not acceptable to go up in jeans!

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Like a light piano, you could see in the background the luminous lines of the towers lit up by floors until dawn. The Port Authority, which controls the port of New York, had its offices there. Also the Secret Service, to whom you had to apply as journalists for accreditation for access to security centres or for coverage of state visits. It was not only the roof of Manhattan since the seventies, it was also the most cathedral-like of New York's sumptuous skyscrapers, offering grand spaces such as the Rockefeller (with its overwhelming murals by the Spaniard Josep Maria Sert) or the celestial fantasy that tops the vault of Grand Central Station. It was a hall decorated by the light that its large windows let in, silent despite the bustle of its soft carpeted floors, and with access to its batteries of lifts with minimal security controls. No one thought in those eighties of attacks on American soil, while we were surprised on our return to Europe to find Spanish police well armed with visible weapons or Italian carabinieri wielding deterrent machine guns. Unthinkable in Manhattan.

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With the material excavated for the foundations of the Towers, an extension was even gained for the overpopulated island of Manhattan, and while new buildings were being built and planned, artistic montages and protest concerts were held in that space, such as the No Nukes, against nuclear power plants, after the accident on Three Mile Island in 1979. The obsolete elevated highway that ran parallel to the Hudson River, the West Side Highway, was cut off right there, now devoid of car traffic, but suitable for cycling along it looking out over the water and the towers. Pleasure rides in the open air outside the crowded streets of Manhattan. The urban outmoded rubbed shoulders with the new landmark in the south of the island.

New York's unstoppable drive for renewal wanted to leave behind its new symbol, and each year it added a new totem to its skyline. Chinese architect I.M. Pei placed his monumental ATT on Madison Avenue, shortly before the telephone company was chopped up and the building lost its corporate function. Citicorp Bank erected its metallic pencil sharpener that saved an old church at the foot of the thickest column imaginable. Another architect created a lipstick, an architectural lipstick, etc., etc., etc., in those roaring eighties when the city saw no limit, not even in the sky.

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Then came, unexpectedly, the day of infamy, when New York - and the world - were deprived of their shining beacons, to plunge us all into the dark ages. The exhilaration of the fall of the wall, of the new era of freedoms after the long and absurd cold war, was frozen.
Twenty years on, with a more redeemed New York, back in business, with more skyscrapers built in recent decades than ever before, the reward for what we have suffered has not been enough. And the stigma that the ideological instigators of that infamous action are now celebrating their return to power by firing machine guns leaves our stomachs churning and our minds perplexed.
We know that New York was and is the capital of the world, because it is more active and modernising than any other metropolis; but above all because despite all the circumstances, the fears that have arisen and the threats that are impossible to stop, New York does not stand still, just as neither the heart of the world nor its freedom can stand still.

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There is now a new light in South Manhattan. A living flame that remembers the fallen, a permanent wind that blew away the smell of burnt skin that so long permeated the area and a renewed spirit that has taken the city to new heights of development that no one imagined at the time of the great cataclysm. 
The anthem of New York says in its first stanza: "I am gone today...". But those of us who have been citizens of that place - and today we are all citizens of the wounded world - promise that we will "always come back", because the future of the world and freedom are at stake. 

Javier Martin-Domínguez

A journalist, he was a correspondent in New York for a decade.