Horizon dept.: lights out.(The Talk of the Town)(memorial of lights at Ground Zero)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 15-APR-02

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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

When the idea of evoking the towers of the World Trade Center by projecting two powerful beams of light into the sky was first proposed, right after September 11th, John Bennett, one of the architects who came up with the notion, said, "It will definitely not be a tourist attraction." He was wrong. The lights went on for the first time on the night of March 11th, six months after the towers fell, and every night since then crowds have been swarming to the corner of West and Murray Streets, in Battery Park City, just a block or so from Ground Zero, where eighty-eight enormous searchlights point upward. Bennett thought that people would want to see the lights from afar, but they seem to be drawn to the...

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