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Christmas in Manhattan, 2001 By David R. Zukerman, NYC and Winsted 1, 2, and 3 These photos of Ground Zero were taken on December 26 from an office window on the 46th floor of 1 Liberty Plaza, which had been closed for many weeks following September 11. There had been concern as to whether this building was structurally sound after the attack. To the right (north) of the site, next to the white building with the stepped roof, a crowd of people can be detected (if with a magnifying glass).

These remembrances had been left on the sidewalk outside St. Paul’s Church, on Broadway at Fulton Street. This Christmas, crowds were also drawn to the site of the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan. A second area where a significant number of memorial tributes are still enshrined is at Liberty Plaza. There are also other places where tributes can be found, but these two are by far the largest remaining sites for such expressions of remembrance and consolation. (At Union Square Park, booths for vendors selling holiday items and seasonal gifts have been set up on the site of the great memorial shrine that had earlier been “cleaned up” by city workers.) On Christmas Day, military personnel on lower Broadway kept a fire going in a wastebasket in an effort to keep warm. Crowds filled Rockefeller Center and visited other traditional holiday destinations on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, as in days gone by. In this view, the tree in Rockefeller Center is visble behind our flag. Wooden soldiers atop the marquis at Radio City Music Hall were bowled over by a cannon (to the right) on Christmas Day. This larger-than-life soldier drew notice as it stood outside an office building on Sixth Avenue. Christmas Day visitors look towards Ground Zero from Greenwich Street at Park Place.