Most victims were falsely accused of crimes and never had a trial. Some were guilty of nothing more than saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. When hijackers plowed commercial jetliners into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center Sept. 11, they did more than kill thousands and bring the nation to a halt. They assaulted city life, public space and the sense of safety Americans have long considered a birthright. The skies no longer seem as safe.
Every tall building brings to mind images of crashing jets, fireballs and doom.
In place of the Trade Center Other New York skyscrapers could make you swoon with their beauty, but the World Trade Center never won kudos for being pretty. Instead, the twin towers bowled you over with their height and might, with the steely sheen of their glinting facades, with the blunt power of their boxy shapes, rising a quarter mile into the sky over the lower Manhattan financial district. Now that they're gone, it raises the inescapable question of what to build in their place. N othing could seem more distant from the terrorist attack on the United States last Tuesday than an exhibition of abstract art at the Cleveland Institute of Art. But last week's events give a strange and special rel evance to the rigorous, eye- tingling geo metric abstrac tions of Julian Stanczak, Northeast Ohio's greatest living painter.