A City Without a Compass

It’s as if the Santa Monica Mountains were suddenly to dissolve into dust, erasing the boundary that so many use as a guide.

For three decades, the two jutting skyscrapers at the tip of Manhattan formed a kind of exclamation point at the end of this frenetic borough, a towering landmark that gave New Yorkers a sense of how they fit in the world around them. Pedestrians used the buildings as guideposts as they wended their way through lower Manhattan’s compact grid. Pilots used them as a navigation device because the lights on top were visible from as far as Trenton, N.J. Countless movies and television shows relied on images of the skyscrapers to signify the city’s magnitude.

When hijackers destroyed the 110-story World Trade Center, they also warped this city’s internal compass, shifting the landscape in a dramatic fashion and leaving many unsettled and disoriented.

Last week, people emerged from the subway and spun around several times, momentarily forgetting which direction is south. Commuters driving in from Long Island squinted at the horizon, unable to discern where the land dipped into the river between Manhattan and Brooklyn. A dazed woman stood on 6th Avenue staring at the space the towers used to fill, as if the steel-framed structures were simply hidden behind a late summer storm cloud. “They used to be right there,” people reminded each other as they walked down streets once in the shadows of the giant towers. Space feels different here now, as if there is nothing left to anchor the bottom of the island and keep it from drifting away.

“Everything seems out of place,” said attorney Harvey Zeichner, standing before a police barricade on Canal Street, looking down at the void in the skyline. “There’s sort of a disproportionate feeling about the whole area.”

The last wisps of smoke from the wreckage have disappeared, removing the last marker in the sky of where the towers used to be. And as people attempt to fall back in some sort of routine, they are continually thrown by the absence of the neck-craning skyscrapers that once hovered over the city.

Television producer Kelly Moseley, who used to see the towers every morning as she walked down 5th Avenue, is haunted by an uneasy sensation that she doesn’t know where she is.

“Almost anywhere in Manhattan, you would see them, and they gave you a sense of where you were on the island,” said Moseley, standing in Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village, which once afforded a clear view of the skyscrapers. “To not see them now is disorienting on many levels. It’s not that I don’t know where south is. But it feels like I’m in a different city.”

Mark Wigley, a professor of architecture at Columbia University, said the destruction of the towers has shaken New Yorkers’ sense of where they live--and, by extension, who they are. “The role of the World Trade Center was to act as a witness to our lives in New York,” said Wigley, who lives three blocks from the rubble. “In that sense, they were New York. ... If you could see those towers way up in the air, you knew you were a New Yorker.”

Even those who disliked the boxy high-rises have the sense that the city is incomplete. “I always thought they were grotesque,” said Carol Dudek, a paralegal who could see the trade center from her apartment roof in the East Village. “But it’s absolutely disorienting that they’re not there. The first thing you see is the vacuum.”

Much of the public mourning in New York is dedicated to the city’s lost guidepost. Photos and posters of the fallen towers are pasted everywhere, surrounded by piles of flowers, handwritten letters and candles. Some firefighters have inked out the towers on the image of the skyline in their department patches as a memorial to the fallen buildings. Vendors are running out of postcards bearing the image of the World Trade Center.

“You can’t help but miss it,” said Kendal Ridgeway, who used to work as a secretary on Wall Street, blocks from the center. “It was a defining physical structure, one you used to gauge where you were. There’s a sense of imbalance now.”

Moseley is struggling to hold on to the images of the Twin Towers in her mind, but the landscape has already shifted.

“I look up now, and I don’t remember where they were,” she said. “You rely on something like that so much when you walk around the city that when it’s gone, it’s completely out of context. I knew where they were when the smoke was really obvious, but as soon as that settled down, it was like, ‘Where did they stand again?”’