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Showcase: The World, as of 9/10/01
The outpouring of comments about this post reminds us how eager people are to share their stories of the World Trade Center. We invite those of you with pictures of the twin towers before Sept. 11, 2001, to share them, too.

For Seolbin Park, the curator and director of the SB D Gallery in Manhattan, and her husband, Chang W. Lee, a Times photographer, the World Trade Center was a landmark in many ways.

The twin towers were, first of all, a literal landmark on the distant skyline when the couple drove back from their regular fishing trips to New Jersey. “We would see them at night and say, ‘We’re home,’” Mr. Lee said. He recalled looking at the trade center one evening and marveling to his wife that they now lived where there would be no earthquakes, no floods and no enemy missiles. (”When we grew up in Korea, that was a very scary thing,” Mr. Lee said.) “We are in a safe place,” he told Ms. Park that evening, “and we are so blessed.”

The next day was Sept. 11, 2001.

“I still remember that smell, that smoke,” Ms. Park said. She could not bear to look at pictures of the attack. “It’s still hard for me,” she allowed. And the passage of years made it no easier, she found, especially when the anniversary came around.

So she set out on a search — through Facebook, the New York Press Photographers Association and the Asian American Journalists Association — for images of the trade center taken Sept. 10, 2001, or earlier. It started as a means of personal recovery, she said.

Forty-four photographers and artists responded to the call. And as Ms. Park curated the exhibition, “Twin Towers Once Stood,” which opens Friday and runs through Oct. 15 at the SB D Gallery in Manhattan, and edited an accompanying book of the same title, she found her spirits lightening. “I was smiling all the time,” she said. “I was very happy.”

[The CameraPlanet Archive, a video collection that is being donated to the National September 11 Memorial and Museum, includes footage of the trade center before the attack.]

The “Twin Towers Once Stood” book will sell for $50. Ms. Park has pledged any and all profits to the September 11th Families’ Association. She hopes her project will help “relieve and heal our souls.”

Andy Levin’s photographs in the show were taken about 25 years ago, almost a decade before the first terrorist attack on the trade center, a time when it was a great deal easier for photographers to move around in the city’s skyscrapers.

His picture of long shadows in a lobby (Slide 5) will almost surely conjure, for anyone who knew the buildings, the restless sense of the place; its extravagantly high ceilings, its purposeful streams of foot traffic, its acreage of carpeting, its many elevator lobbies where cars were announced by a gently insistent “ding-ding-ding.”

The photo conjures something else for Mr. Levin. “It has a haunted feeling,” he said. “I felt that before the tragedy. And after, it had a feeling that this was a doomed place. It’s the sense of looking at the Titanic. And you’re inside it.”

As he explored the trade center that long-ago day, on the prowl for unusual views or angles, Mr. Levin made a point of looking at the emergency stairways. Even now, he remembers his reaction: “I couldn’t believe the stairs in such a huge building were so small.”
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To help her own healing in a post-9/11 world, the curator Seolbin Park invited photographers to send their pictures of the twin towers before the attack.
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Dallas man stands outside mosque holding 'You Belong' sign
A Dallas man showed his support for Muslims and a united country by standing outside a mosque holding a sign that read "You Belong."

Justin Normand said he stood near the Islamic Center of Irving last weekend because he wanted to do or say something about the hatred directed at Muslims during the recent presidential election, won by Donald Trump.

Normand, 53, held the sign last Friday and Saturday for approximately 90 minutes each day. The Islamic Center of Irving had previously been the target of armed protesters.

"Like most everyone I know, I have been in a malaise and at a loss since Election Day," Normand wrote in a lengthy Facebook post earlier this week. "What to do? With myself? With my time? To make things better, or even just to slog through?"

Letters say Trump will be 'Hitler' to Muslims going nationwide

Normand, who works for a sign-making business, decided to make his own sign that read: "You Belong. Stay Strong. Be Blessed. We Are One America."

He said he drove to the nearest mosque and stood on the sidewalk "to share the peace with my neighbors. My marginalized, fearful, decent, targeted, Muslim neighbors."

Normand, who said he is Presbyterian, said this was not about "expressing agreement." And he said it wasn't about "demonstrating my outrage to right-wing drivers driving down Esters Road in front of the mosque. I can never, and will never, change any of the haters. It’s not about them. Not this time, and not here."

"This was about binding up the wounded," he continued. "About showing compassion and empathy for the hurting and fearful among us. Or, in some Christian traditions, this was about washing my brother’s feet. This was about my religion, not theirs."

Mosques sent letters warning Trump will be Hitler to Muslims

Normand concluded his Facebook post, which has been shared more than 25,000 times, by saying that "We ARE one America."
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assistant: A Dallas man showed his support for Muslims by standing outside a mosque holding a sign with the words "You Belong."