inkgrrl's inkblog

I watched the World Trade Center memorial service this morning before coming to work, and through it all I kept flashing back to the GhostBuildings section of Lilek’s site. He put together a great collection of shots of buildings around NYC that still show the scars of their former neighbors – bricked-up fireplaces hanging in thin air, soot seemingly streaking out of nowhere and disappearing into nowhere a couple of stories up the side of an apartment complex, the shadow of a stairwell traced in zig-zags along the outside of an old hotel. I wonder what kind of ghosts will be left visible at Ground Zero after we rebuild. I remember walking across the World Trade Center Plaza years ago and stopping to stare at the bronze statues of office workers, waiting for them to move. After the Towers fell, the ash-covered statues that remained evoked the bodies at Pompeii – no longer frozen in a moment of life, but permanently stilled, as if life itself had been sucked from the bronze by the vacuum that flashed over the site when the Towers imploded. Same shape, different disaster.