I just saw yesterday’s Corner post by Stephen Miller quoting Donald Trump on the World Trade Center, a week after its destruction: “To be blunt, they were not ‘great’ buildings . . . . They only became great upon their demise last Tuesday.”
This sounds kinda bad out of context, but I can testify that it represents a genuine local perspective. I was living in NYC on 9/11, and was pretty close to the WTC when the attack happened. (I was on the A train, reading Martha Bayles’s book on rock music. If I had found her book just slightly more engrossing, I would have missed my stop and been under the WTC exactly when the second plane hit.) One of the funniest things I ever heard in NYC was shortly after 9/11. A guy in a deep New York accent said (I think it was on 34th Street, not quite sure after all these years): “Sure I hated the World Trade Center, who didn’t? That’s not the point.”
FWIW, I always loved the World Trade Center (which probably cements the fact that I was always a tourist in NYC for my 15 years there, and never a genuine New Yorker). The last time I visited the WTC was less than ten days before 9/11. I grew up loving Eugene O’Neill, and was inspired by the fact that this great temple of American free-market aspiration was built on the very site of Jimmy the Priest’s bar, which was the setting for The Iceman Cometh, my favorite, and utterly heartbreaking, O’Neill play. (Heartbreak followed by aspiration is the message of America, and a pretty good description of how we as a nation responded to 9/11.)