The iconic Twin Towers through the years

They should've just rebuilt it, with extra reinforcements. Make it look exactly the same. Show them their efforts were futile.

I completely agree R1.

I watched the second tower sink out of sight from my rooftop in the west 20s and immediately felt they should be rebuilt - as did Mayor Koch. When people thought that would have been in bad taste, I replied that if they had taken out the Empire State or Chrysler building we would all want them rebuilt exactly as they were.

The Trade Center had become an iconic part of the skyline, and NYC has never looked the same. The new tower is totally unremarkable.

Ok, obviously the skyline has never looked the same, what I mean is it still doesn't feel like New York without them.

Damn! Will never forget that day. Or that week.

Agree with R1 & R2.

How wonderfully appropriate that the tape of Bill Clinton speaking in Australia on September 10, 2001, “just hours before the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon,” should have emerged from the sink of time at the same moment as reports of the death of Theodore Van Kirk, navigator on the B-29, “Enola Gay,” which dropped the first atomic bomb on Japan sixty-nine years ago yesterday. Here’s Bill, according to Fred Barbash of The Washington Post:

“And I’m just saying, you know, if I were Osama bin Laden … He’s a very smart guy. I spent a lot of time thinking about him. And I nearly got him once. . . “I nearly got him. And I could have killed him, but I would have had to destroy a little town called Kandahar in Afghanistan and kill 300 innocent women and children, and then I would have been no better than him. And so I didn’t do it.”

But then for Bill, as for so many of the generation of narcissists to which he (and I) belong, experience of the world hardly exists except as it relates to to himself and his ambitions. Over the years I have once or twice made mention of an incident reported by David Maraniss in his biography of the former president in which, while at Oxford in 1968, he went up to Stratford to see a production of King Lear. It must have been the one with Eric Porter (remember him as Soames from The Forsyte Saga?) in the title role, Patrick Stewart as Cornwall and Ben Kingsley as Oswald. Our Bill found the play deeply moving, reported his Oxford contemporary Darryl Gless — because it “prompted Bill to talk about his eagerness to go back to Arkansas” and involve himself in politics. The rest, as they say, is history.

r1, define "them".

Were you also volunteering to work on the 100th floor of one of them, OP? Tough gig.

The most impressive thing about the WTC towers was there were two of them. They should have built back three.