Ground Zero at 25

I just looked down at my phone: I’m writing these words at 8:03 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time on the morning of Sept. 11, 2026. In 43 minutes we will have reached the 25th anniversary of the moment when a hijacked American Airlines Boeing 767 struck the north tower of Minoru Yamasaki’s World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan, to be followed at 9:03 by a second airliner, a hijacked United Airlines 767, aimed at the south tower. The south tower burned for 56 minutes before collapsing at 9:59. The north tower came down 29 minutes later, one hour and 42 minutes after impact.

The attacks, in all, killed 2,753 people in New York that day, including the passengers, crew, and terrorists on the two jets; more than 2,200 people working inside, visiting, or walking into or near the buildings; and 343 firefighters, 37 Port Authority police officers, and 23 members of the NYPD. More than 9,000 people, according to recent figures, have died from illnesses connected to their work clearing the site in the weeks and months following Sept. 11; this includes more than 600 firefighters.

On Wednesday night at the Great Hall at Cooper Union, two miles north of the World Trade Center, Punch List in collaboration with our friends at n+1 and New York Review of Architecture brought together a collection of artists, scholars, critics, and architects, as well as 350 or so New Yorkers, to talk about the 9/11 attacks and, to a far greater extent, the deeply fraught effort to rebuild, which initially followed, and soon diverted in key ways from, a master plan by Daniel Libeskind and his firm.