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| 44th and 8th Avenue, 2010 |
And as I told her I wanted to go back to revisit the places in lower Manhattan I remember, with a shock, I just realized.
It's happened again.
For the third time in my lifetime, a great American city that I thought was invulnerable and would be there forever, has been devastated and totally changed by disaster.
New York, 2001. New Orleans, 2005. New York, 2012. The Jersey shore, 2012. These are the places I know. I realize that in my lifetime other great cities - not my own - have also been devastated. Detroit, for one.
New York will recover, so too will the shore. But it is frightening to realize that in our lifetime, these irreversible changes have taken place.
Hold fast to your memories, and cherish them. Work to preserve the infrastructure of our great cities. Our libraries, our historical buildings. These cities are the repositories of our American culture. Let's not let them die.
Looking at the photos of the tunnels and entrances filled with water is shocking. I've been there, although I never lived there.
ReplyDeleteLuckily, sometimes things do change for the better. (I'm thinking of the fall of the Berlin Wall.)
I was there for 2001.
ReplyDeleteI'm afraid we're changing the world for the worse, and the profits involved with that will prevent us from doing anything about it until it's too late.
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Things are never the same when you go back. Either our eyes look at them differently, or they have changed in subtle ways we may not at first notice.
ReplyDeleteIn 2001, somehow it was immediately clear that the world, for us, had changed forever. My head knows that this is the same magnitude of change. My heart isn't quite big enough to hold that truth yet.
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