City Desk: Towers Still.(World Trade Center Towers become icon)(Brief Article)

It has been brought to my attention that the icon for this column is inaccurate, since the skyline formed by the steam that rises from the coffee mug beside the typewriter still includes the World Trade Towers. Of course the typewriter is also inaccurate -- it is years since even National Review had such machines. But their passing was not a matter of public record. It would have been crass to remove the Trade Towers immediately: like airbrushing Trotsky or Lin Piao. A friend told me last fall that he had a grim fantasy of a doorman at the Empire State Building putting out a sidewalk signboard that said, "now renting! Tallest bldg in NYC." But how long should we keep pictures of the formerly tallest buildings? How long should we recall the departed?

The week after 9/11 my wife bought me a tourist tchotchke, a crude imitation Limoges box with the Statue of Liberty, the Trade Towers, the Empire State Building, and a tree on its lid. Everything was out of scale: Lady Liberty was bigger than Godzilla, and even the tree was 40 stories tall. Reaching for something in the clutter of my desk, I knocked it over. The Empire State Building now has a chipped top: art not imitating life. That knickknack was from pre-9/11 stock. My wife bought it, and I valued it, thinking such things would soon be exhausted. But they march on.

Not surprisingly, the Ground Zero site attracts vendors who sell booklets of photographs of the Towers and their destruction. When I take a subway going uptown, I see tourists from the Midwest or Germany gravely paging through them. I can feel a moment's irritation: This is news to you, pal? But, for all the magic of television, if they do not live here and this is their first recent visit, then it is in some sense news to them, and they should take away memorials of their experience.

A thoughtful tourist-service economy has spread such items citywide. At any large newsstand, among the ranks and files of headlines, superheroes, and thighs, stand racks of postcards that, among their landmarks and night scenes, offer views of the Trade Towers. Some of the Trade Tower postcards are simple unadorned shots, ID cards for buildings. Others are kitsch -- in the foreground, the Statue of Liberty, a stony tear streaking one of her cheeks. Some postcards carry slogans: Land of the Free, Home of the Brave; Liberty and Justice for All. The newsstand business being what it is, most of the vendors are from the Indian subcontinent, and many of them are probably Muslims. Who would have thought that in the capital of blue America immigrants would be selling patriotic imagery while in North Carolina the native- born would be compelled to read sanitized Korans?

One of the many ...