How many differences can you spot?
Manhattan Skyline

October 2010

October 2011

These photos were taken exactly one year apart. Last October, I gazed at Manhattan's awesome skyline in the bright autumn sunshine and revelled in all its metropolitan glory. But since my first trip to New York City occured many years after the September 11 attacks, I was only able to imagine, not remember, how it would have looked with its twin towers standing tall over everything else. Locals probably look at this expanse and see the void. I see something fantastic.. a view that differs immensely from the reserved buildings that exist near my own address... I'm aware that there is a void but I'm not missing it firsthand.

I realised on my most recent jaunt to the Big Apple that I am now witness to the reconstruction of Manhattan's skyline. I have captured an image of the interim. Like seedlings pressing up out of the soil and towards the sun, the structures of the World Trade Centre are slowly growing out of the flattened earth. Not recreations of the originals that, like the lives who were lost along with them, can never be replaced. But the next generation, if you will. What was once twin towers will now be four relatively modest towers - two of which are already visible in my second picture above. And at the site itself, a sad, gnarled, crippled frame has been replaced by a smooth, placid waterfall eliciting a shared sense of calm.

It is intriguing to have recorded evidence of such a transformation and I look forward to seeing the next chapter when I am once again visiting the great, tenacious New York borough that is Manhattan.