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Introduction by David Halberstam

The date, September 11, 2001, now has a certain permanence, graven on our collective memory, like a very few others, December 7, 1941, and November 22, 1963, dates which seem to separate yesterday from today, and then from now. They become the rarest of moments; ordinary people will forever be able to tell you where they were and what they were doing when they first heard the news, as if the terrible deed had happened to them, which in some ways it did.

Up until that moment America had been spared the ravages of the last century of modern warfare. The bombing of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon ended an amazing historical period in American life, one which I place at 87 years, beginning with World War 1 (we actually entered it three years late) during which we rose to unwanted superpower status, became the most powerful nation in the world, and yet none of the terrible carnage of that era took place on our soil. We had come to believe as a people, protected as we were for so long by our two great oceans, that we were immune to the awful dangers and cruelties and viruses of the rest of the world.

That sense of immunity, as these photographs so dramatically show, ended on September 11, 2001; for New Yorkers more than most Americans, what happened was particularly personal. The World Trade Center was a unique landmark for us, a wanted and needed guiding beacon, to be seen, when we had been out of the city, and were making our return, a sign that we were finally approaching the city in which we lived.

Each tower was in its own way a marvel of what man can do in reaching to the sky from a city where space was always of the essence; each reflected the talents and sheer hard work of thousands and thousands of men and women who never knew each other but were bound together in something larger than themselves; each became in the end a symbol of what man can do to man when he acts upon his cruelest impulses.

Each building was also in its own way a universe, a small self-contained city. To understand why the rubble is so enormous, imagine if you will ten skyscrapers of twenty floors each, destroyed in one stunning, frightening moment.

Each tower was in some way a part of our lives. I, like almost all New Yorkers, had not just been guided back to the city by them, but had been there often, eaten at their restaurants, grand and lowly, from those with three stars to those which offered only slices of pizza. I had attended business conferences there, had interviewed a visiting VIP for a book there. For several years I worked out at a gym in an adjoining building, a building which itself may not last and may have to be torn down.

All of us have certain earlier memories of being there, and of the wonder of what the buildings represented architecturally: I who am fearfully and pathologically acrophobic can remember about ten years ago giving a lecture there, and finding to my extreme discomfort that it was scheduled for the very top of one of the Towers. I was so terrified that I held on to the table in front of me as if for life itself for the full hour.

And now those two buildings are rubble, and New York is not the same, and in that part of our brain where we have catalogued the other clips of our saddest moments -- the Zapruder film, and the film clips of the Challenger disaster -- we place the images of this moment, ever real, forever immediate, never to be forgotten. We also add the phrase Ground Zero to our language.

I am reminded as I write this, about something that has always moved me in our society, the nobility of ordinary people in times of great crisis. The people who were the architects of this attack sought among other things to show the rest of the world how weak and decadent a nation we had become. Yet in the immediacy of the crisis, firemen and police sacrificed their own safety (and the security of their own families) in order to save complete strangers; as they did that, they provided the evidence which was the exact opposite of what the architects of violence hoped for.

As I write, it is only 16 days since it happened, and the city, always, I think the most energized place in the world, is slowly and steadily coming back, returning to its million smaller daily human concerns and crises. Being a New Yorker is as much a condition as it is a geographic description of where you choose to live. Millions of us are people who have come here from all over the world, most of us I think by choice, more often than not, among the newer and poorer among us, because they want to be here, and because they believe, that unlike in the place where they originally started out their life's journeys, if they work hard here, they can rise above what they were when they were born, and most assuredly their children can rise even higher. That makes it ironically enough, freedom's place, and I cannot think of a stronger force with which to bond people together.