It is good that after so many years of being empty, new skyscrapers are rising at the site of Ground Zero. Mark Steyn famously and sagely observed that the 9/11 attacks were inflicted upon New York, America, and the world, but the lengthy delay and bickering over building anything on the site is something “we did to ourselves.”

I still marvel that a building that I visited as a grade schooler is not there, and that while a new skyscraper is rising, that site, that view, that experience will never occur again. It is likely that some day I’ll take my sons to the new tower, and I’ll have the dreaded conversation, attempting to explain the unexplainable to them. As they grow older, the lower Manhattan skyline will look “normal” to them; I suspect for many of us, it will always look “wrong.”

I came across this ad for the World Trade Center’s observation deck in the late 1980s archives of Spy magazine: