At 25, we are all New Yorkers, again

Every year, for 25 years, I’ve written on the observance of this anniversary. Some years, it’s been for me, some years it’s been for the people who’ve been with me along the way. Some years, I didn’t know why I was even doing it any more. But this year, for the first time in a long time, I can feel exactly what story I want to tell.

Right from the day of the attacks, that evening, I remember people all around the world saying to us, “Today, we are all New Yorkers.” It was so earnest, a statement so sincere, that I am still surprised how much it moved me. It might be hard for folks to imagine now, but it felt so real, that people everywhere — including people across America — felt like they loved us in New York City, and they were grieving with us, and cared about us.

And now we’re here in 2026, where it’s been wondrous to watch the world, for the first time since then, tell us once again that… their hearts are with New York City. This time, not in grief, but in joyous celebration. Celebration of our victories: Knicks in five! The Liberty and Gotham FC were champs less than two weeks after that! The World Cup lit the city up! Hip hop fans in the city came together for career-cappers by Wu-Tang and Jay Z. Countless festivals popped off, parades were more alive than ever, and nearly every one of those festivals and parades featured a shout-out to, or appearance from our wildly popular mayor Zohran Mamdani.

There are so many more highlights of how our city is serving us: the rollout of universal child care for 2-K, expansion of school safety zones to slow traffic for our kids, fixing up playgrounds, tickets for kids to go to Broadway and regular folks to go to the U.S. Open, repairing the BQE, $100 million in tips rightfully going to delivery workers, simplified paperwork for small businesses, the launch of the offices of Deed Theft Prevention, Insurance Affordability, Worker Power, and lots more.

The city is the safest it’s been in the 400 years since Europeans arrived.

And every single one of these triumphs, greeted by our friends and supporters around the world cheering for the progress our city is making, encouraging our successes. Rooting for us like they were 25 years ago, happy for us in good times, not just in our sorrow.

Perhaps more importantly, it’s showing how we can lead by our example: with compassion and care for one another, with open hearts and an abiding desire to lift one another up. It’s the same impulse I saw in abundance on the afternoon of 9/11. I have said many times that the afternoon after those attacks was one of the most beautiful displays of humanity I’ve ever seen, with strangers caring for each other on the sidewalks and in the streets; the spontaneous hugs between strangers in the street after the Knicks clinched the championship was a mirror of that feeling, with communal love being openly expressed, but without needing profound grief to catalyze it.

I’ve seen New York show its heart openly a number of times in the years since the attacks: The blackout in 2003, after Hurricane Sandy, that first cruel wave of Covid. But all of those were born of struggle and pain. Today, we still have folks greeting each other with “Knicks in five!” Something has changed.

The Great Rebuilding

I point out all this joy because it’s important to understand what it represents. As I’d pointed out last year, the abandonment of our principles in America, our embrace of authoritarianism, our discarding of the rule of law — these represent a victory for those who sought to attack us that day. They validated so many of the critiques they leveled about the American empire and the American way, even if they could never justify the hatred or bigotry of their ideology, or the cruelty and senselessness of their attacks.

We gave them a win when we turned to fascism, and for a long time that made me despair.

But I knew that there is so much good in us, because I’d seen it in this city, and I knew that the solution would lie in rebuilding. Not just in a physical rebuilding, like the kind that so many focused on in the days and year after the attacks (I was so sick of hearing those who didn’t give a damn about our neighborhoods talk about “build the towers back exactly as they were!”, without regard for whether that was actually good for the community), but a deeper communal and cultural rebuilding. The sort of thing a caring heart might describe as replacing “the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism”.

Many wonder how, or if, the United States will find its way out of authoritarianism. The only possible way is if people are joyfully running towards a better option, not fearfully backing away from the worst of what they face today.

That’s a fragile hope. But it is a hope. And the moment we are having in New York City right now gives so many a chance to see exactly what a possible future looks like. We’re not just happy about a good mayor who makes fun social media, or a winning basketball team, or the lowest crime ever. We’re not merely celebrating the economic revitalization of a neighborhood that survived an unimaginable attack. We’re not simply repeating the same pizza-and-bagels platitudes.

We are joyfully, purposefully building a future together here, where we lift each other up, and celebrate each other. We’re caring for those who are lost, or afraid, or vulnerable. And then we’re caring for those who care for them. We’re not reciting platitudes about how our diversity makes us better; we’re just living our diversity and letting the dividend speak for itself.

I Love New York

This isn’t just another excuse for me to say “I love New York, it’s the greatest city in the world”, although it’s also that. It’s a bit of a paternal embrace to the young man I was back on the day of those attacks, too. I’m reaching back half a lifetime ago for me, now, with less than half of my life left. And I can see the turning point. On the day, I said, “today’s the day when everything changed”, but I didn’t know how right I was at a personal level. In just the few weeks and months that followed, I met my wife, embraced a new group of friends who would define my social circle for the years to come, and committed to building the purpose and life that I still live.

In many ways, my life started that day, and it’s part of why I have such a deep and abiding love for this city. Just a few weeks ago, I was at an event where someone asked why I’ve served on the board of a community organization for many years, and without thinking, my immediate response was, “Because this place saved my life.” I’d never articulated it that way before, and didn’t think about my answer before I said it, but it felt like the most obvious thing in the world.

It’s just true. When you see what community, real community looks like, it heals you and inspires you. Of course New York City doesn’t have any kind of monopoly on that. But the combination of our communities with our outsized global impact has a resonance far beyond these few islands.

The signs are still there

In the days just after the attacks, every flat surface around Manhattan was plastered with MISSING posters showing images of those lost. For a few days, there had still been hope of recovering survivors. After it became obvious that there weren’t going to be any more rescues, many places began putting up an updated version of Milton Glaser’s famous “I Love NY” logo, now appended to say “More Than Ever”. These posters took their place next to, or sometimes in place of, the “missing” posters.

Every once in a while, I’ll go into a bodega or a coffee shop, especially downtown, and I’ll still see a faded “More Than Ever” poster up in the window. What’s strange is, it doesn’t instantly take me back to that time.

It keeps me right here. Joyfully looking toward what’s next.

In Previous Years

Last year, 24 is After the Fall:

Despite all this, New York City is still the New York that permanently became a part of my heart that day. We will embrace the young Muslim man who will, inshallah, be our mayor soon. We will hold the line on remembering that day as it actually was, and caring for each other now as we did then. If Manhattan has to be a figurative island as much as a literal one, then that’s what it was always born to be.

Two years ago, 23: What was 9/11?:

The majority of people in the world were either not born, or not old enough to be aware of what was going on, and then many who would recall are either gone or their memories have faded. But I was in New York City on September 11, 2001, and I can say definitively: The constructed cultural narrative around the day bears almost no resemblance to the actual lived experience of anyone I know who was here that day. So maybe it’s worth telling a little bit of what I actually saw.

Three years ago, "It's unrecognizable":

[M]aybe I keep coming back because I am hoping that others might still recognize the little glimpses of humanity that I saw on the day of the attacks, and that I saw in abundance, in New York City, in the days that follow. It wasn't a myth, it wasn't just wishful thinking, there really was kindness and care in this place that I love so much. I don't think those who tell the loudest stories today would even recognize it.

Four years ago, "There Is Nothing To Remember"

So it's clear that the events of that day have fully passed into myth, useful only as rhetoric in a culture war, or as justifications for violence. Nothing epitomizes this more than the fact that, while the memory has faded in culture broadly, it's only brought to the fore in situations like those where most New Yorkers would be targeted.

Five years ago, "Twenty is a Myth":

I can't change how society overall sees this event. To my eternal regret, I couldn't change how we responded in any meaningful way. But I did get to make personal changes, permanently and for the better, and the loss and grief of that day does still motivate me to try to honor the moment by pushing for justice, and care, and an earnest engagement with the world.

Six years ago, Nineteen is When They Forgot

I do have the experience of having seen this city bounce back from unimaginable pain before. I have seen us respond to attacks on our public life by rebuilding and reimagining public space. I have seen us grieve our losses and rally behind those who cared for those injured, and preserve space in our cultural memory for their pain and sacrifice. By no means have we done enough for all those lost, but it is absolutely true that we can rebuild. We’ve done it before.

Seven years ago, Eighteen is History

There are ritualized remembrances, largely led by those who weren't there, those who mostly hate the values that New York City embodies. The sharpest memories are of the goals of those who masterminded the attacks. It's easy enough to remember what they wanted, since they accomplished all their objectives and we live in the world they sought to create. The empire has been permanently diminished. Never Forget.

In 2018, Seventeen is (Almost) Just Another Day

I spent so many years thinking “I can’t go there” that it caught me completely off guard to realize that going there is now routine. Maybe the most charitable way to look at it is resiliency, or that I’m seeing things through the eyes of my child who’s never known any reality but the present one. I'd spent a lot of time wishing that we hadn't been so overwhelmed with response to that day, so much that I hadn''t considered what it would be like when the day passed for so many people with barely a notice at all.

In 2017, Sixteen is Letting Go Again

So, like ten years ago, I’m letting go. Trying not to project my feelings onto this anniversary, just quietly remembering that morning and how it felt. My son asked me a couple of months ago, “I heard there was another World Trade Center before this one?” and I had to find a version of the story that I could share with him. In this telling, losing those towers was unimaginably sad and showed that there are incredibly hurtful people in the world, but there are still so many good people, and they can make wonderful things together.

In 2016 Fifteen is the Past:

I don’t dismiss or deny that so much has gone so wrong in the response and the reaction that our culture has had since the attacks, but I will not forget or diminish the pure openheartedness I witnessed that day. And I will not let the cynicism or paranoia of others draw me in to join them. What I’ve realized, simply, is that 9/11 is in the past now.

In 2015, Fourteen is Remembering:

For the first time, I clearly felt like I had put the attacks firmly in the past. They have loosened their grip on me. I don’t avoid going downtown, or take circuitous routes to avoid seeing where the towers once stood. I can even imagine deliberately visiting the area to see the new train station.

In 2014, Thirteen is Understanding:

There’s no part of that day that one should ever have to explain to a child, but I realized for the first time this year that, when the time comes, I’ll be ready. Enough time has passed that I could recite the facts, without simply dissolving into a puddle of my own unresolved questions. I look back at past years, at my own observances of this anniversary, and see how I veered from crushingly sad to fiercely angry to tentatively optimistic, and in each of those moments I was living in one part of what I felt. Maybe I’m ready to see this thing in a bigger picture, or at least from a perspective outside of just myself.

From 2013, Twelve is Trying:

I thought in 2001 that some beautiful things could come out of that worst of days, and sure enough, that optimism has often been rewarded. There are boundless examples of kindness and generosity in the worst of circumstances that justify the hope I had for people’s basic decency back then, even if initially my hope was based only on faith and not fact. But there is also fatigue. The inevitable fading of outrage and emotional devastation into an overworked rhetorical reference point leaves me exhausted. The decay of a brief, profound moment of unity and reflection into a cheap device to be used to prop up arguments about the ordinary, the everyday and the mundane makes me weary. I’m tired from the effort to protect the fragile memory of something horrific and hopeful that taught me about people at their very best and at their very, very worst.

In 2012, Eleven is What We Make:

These are the gifts our children, or all children, give us every day in a million different ways. But they’re also the gifts we give ourselves when we make something meaningful and beautiful. The new World Trade Center buildings are beautiful, in a way that the old ones never were, and in a way that’ll make our fretting over their exorbitant cost seem short-sighted in the decades to come. More importantly, they exist. We made them, together. We raised them in the past eleven years just as surely as we’ve raised our children, with squabbles and mistakes and false starts and slow, inexorable progress toward something beautiful.

In 2011 for the 10th anniversary, Ten is Love and Everything After:

I don’t have any profound insights or political commentary to offer that others haven’t already articulated first and better. All that I have is my experience of knowing what it mean to be in New York City then. And from that experience, the biggest lesson I have taken is that I have the obligation to be a kinder man, a more thoughtful man, and someone who lives with as much passion and sincerity as possible. Those are the lessons that I’ll tell my son some day in the distant future, and they’re the ones I want to remember now.

In 2010, Nine is New New York:

[T]his is, in many ways, a golden era in the entire history of New York City. Over the four hundred years it’s taken for this city to evolve into its current form, there’s never been a better time to walk down the street. Crime is low, without us having sacrificed our personality or passion to get there. We’ve invested in making our sidewalks more walkable, our streets more accommodating of the bikes and buses and taxis that convey us around our town. There’s never been a more vibrant scene in the arts, music or fashion here. And in less than half a decade, the public park where I got married went from a place where I often felt uncomfortable at noontime to one that I wanted to bring together my closest friends and family on the best day of my life. We still struggle with radical inequality, but more people interact with people from broadly different social classes and cultures every day in New York than any other place in America, and possibly than in any other city in the world. And all of this happened, by choice, in the years since the attacks.

In 2009, Eight Is Starting Over:

[T]his year, I am much more at peace. It may be that, finally, we’ve been called on by our leadership to mark this day by being of service to our communities, our country, and our fellow humans. I’ve been trying of late to do exactly that. And I’ve had a bit of a realization about how my own life was changed by that day. Speaking to my mother last week, I offhandedly mentioned how almost all of my friends and acquaintances, my entire career and my accomplishments, my ambitions and hopes have all been born since September 11, 2001. If you’ll pardon the geeky reference, it’s as if my life was rebooted that day and in the short period afterwards. While I have a handful of lifelong friends with whom I’ve stayed in touch, most of the people I’m closest to are those who were with me on the day of the attacks or shortly thereafter, and the goals I have for myself are those which I formed in the next days and weeks. i don’t think it’s coincidence that I was introduced to my wife while the wreckage at the site of the towers was still smoldering, or that I resolved to have my life’s work amount to something meaningful while my beloved city was still papered with signs mourning the missing.

In 2008, Seven Is Angry:

Finally getting angry myself, I realize that nobody has more right to claim authority over the legacy of the attacks than the people of New York. And yet, I don’t see survivors of the attacks downtown claiming the exclusive right to represent the noble ambition of Never Forgetting. I’m not saying that people never mention the attacks here in New York, but there’s a genuine awareness that, if you use the attacks as justification for your position, the person you’re addressing may well have lost more than you that day. As I write this, I know that parked out front is the car of a woman who works in my neighborhood. Her car has a simple but striking memorial on it, listing her mother’s name, date of birth, and the date 9/11/2001.

In 2007, Six Is Letting Go:

On the afternoon of September 11th, 2001, and especially on September 12th, I wasn’t only sad. I was also hopeful. I wanted to believe that we wouldn’t just Never Forget that we would also Always Remember. People were already insisting that we’d put aside our differences and come together, and maybe the part that I’m most bittersweet and wistful about was that I really believed it. I’d turned 26 years old just a few days before the attacks, and I realize in retrospect that maybe that moment, as I eased from my mid-twenties to my late twenties, was the last time I’d be unabashedly optimistic about something, even amidst all the sorrow.

In 2006, After Five Years, Failure:

[O]ne of the strongest feelings I came away with on the day of the attacks was a feeling of some kind of hope. Being in New York that day really showed me the best that people can be. As much as it’s become cliché now, there’s simply no other way to describe a display that profound. It was truly a case of people showing their very best nature. We seem to have let the hope of that day go, though.

In 2005, Four Years:

I saw people who hated New York City, or at least didn’t care very much about it, trying to act as if they were extremely invested in recovering from the attacks, or opining about the causes or effects of the attacks. And to me, my memory of the attacks and, especially, the days afterward had nothing to do with the geopolitics of the situation. They were about a real human tragedy, and about the people who were there and affected, and about everything but placing blame and pointing fingers. It felt thoughtless for everyone to offer their response in a framework that didn’t honor the people who were actually going through the event.

In 2004, Thinking Of You:

I don’t know if it’s distance, or just the passing of time, but I notice how muted the sorrow is. There’s a passivity, a lack of passion to the observances. I knew it would come, in the same way that a friend told me quite presciently that day back in 2001 that “this is all going to be political debates someday” and, well, someday’s already here.

In 2003, Two Years:

I spent a lot of time, too much time, resenting people who were visiting our city, and especially the site of the attacks, these past two years. I’ve been so protective, I didn’t want them to come and get their picture taken like it was Cinderella’s Castle or something. I’m trying really hard not to be so angry about that these days. I found that being angry kept me from doing the productive and important things that really mattered, and kept me from living a life that I know I’m lucky to have.

In 2002, I wrote On Being An American:

[I]n those first weeks, I thought a lot about what it is to be American. That a lot of people outside of New York City might not even recognize their own country if they came to visit. The America that was attacked a year ago was an America where people are as likely to have been born outside the borders of the U.S. as not. Where most of the residents speak another language in addition to English. Where the soundtrack is, yes, jazz and blues and rock and roll, but also hip hop and salsa and merengue. New York has always been where the first fine threads of new cultures work their way into the fabric of America, and the city the bore the brunt of those attacks last September reflected that ideal to its fullest.

In 2001, Thank You:

I am physically fine, as are all my family members and immediate friends. I’ve been watching the footage all morning, I can’t believe I watched the World Trade Center collapse… I’ve been sitting here this whole morning, choking back tears… this is just too much, too big. I can see the smoke and ash from the street here. I have friends of friends who work there, I was just there myself the day before yesterday. I can’t process this all. I don’t want to.