Something new can grow out of painful moments

The events of September 11, 2001 shaped New York like perhaps no other event before or since. The city that never sleeps, which seemed to shrug off whatever hit it, was paralysed and wounded. Its most important landmark besides the Statue of Liberty was destroyed, and the Big Apple’s “invincibility” was gone.

The new One World Trade Center feels more like an act of defiance against the destruction of the Twin Towers. The memorial at its foot, by contrast, is a place to remember the people who died.

Fritz Koenig’s large sculpture, The Sphere, stood between the two towers from 1971 until September 11. Surprisingly, the attacks did not destroy it: it remained in one piece amid the collapsed towers. That allowed it to be set up again in Battery Park (shown here), before it found its new home in Liberty Park, near the 9/11 Memorial, in 2017.

The Sphere in Battery Park, New York, December 2008.

To me, it forms a bridge between the past, the terrorist attack and the present. It gives hope that even the worst moments cannot destroy everything.