Dress Rehearsal in Light

Every year these apparently infinite beams of blue dancing with silver flecks are astonishingly healing. If the city does take over the work of the LMDC as the Mayor wants, will there be any attempt to continue this transcendent project?

Every year more New Yorkers reflect on 9/11 and what happened. Will we ever know?

I think this is by far the best tribute to 9/11 there is. It’s a nice, quiet, but not small, show of remembrance that everyone can see and take a moment to themselves to reflect. No politics, no arguing over how big or how small or where or when or who’s paying – just peaceful. I happened to be flying back to New York from the West Coast one year on 9/11 and we were landing around 11PM. As the plane approached the city, we could see the lights from many miles away with the city glowing underneath. The Captain pointed it out and as we all moved over to the left side of the plane to see, he thanked everyone for flying that day. I hope the powers that be find a way to make this a permanent tribute.

These twin beams of light should have been all that was done as a memorial. It’s a whole lot cheaper, and way more powerful than the folly of builidng a hideously ugly skyscraper that no one will want to work in.

Every year I notice the Tribute in Light, it makes me feel why we don’t have the Twin Towers rebuilt. In a way, it does seem to sound as if the skyline is restored just by looking at. It’s a shame that they couldn’t do this every night until the Twin Towers would get rebuild due to cost. When I first saw them when going off the Queensboro Bridge, I almost thought that they were back.

Neotropical songbird migration is reaching its peak this month. And fall migration is HUGE – all the songbirds – more than 200 species most of which you have probably never seen – of the great northern forests of Canada are flying south to Central and South America and the Caribbean right now, along with all their newly fledged young. To avoid predators, these small birds fly at night, guided by the stars and/or the earth’s magnetic fields and each other’s flight calls.

Tall brightly lit structures and searchlights attract and disorient neotropical migratory birds. Thousands of them die when they are pull off course by these lights, and then become exhausted from flying around and around searchlights and brightly lit skyscrapers. Migratory songbirds that survive in a city until sunrise often die when they collide with walls of mirror-like glass windows or are run over by city traffic.

The twin beams of lights should be turned off between 11 PM and sunrise to prevent the senseless slaughter of thousands of songbirds. Go to Toronto’s FLAP website (Fatal Light Awareness Program) to learn more about this issue. Or read “Songbird Journeys”.

The Towers of Light are an very inspired idea, that should be made permanent, while the Freedom Tower project is abandoned in its entirety. The latter has become a symbol not of freedom but of paranoia (10 floors of solid concrete) and bureaucratic infighting that took away any semblance of architectural interest and turned it into a banal reminder that New York is no longer the center of the universe, let alone the capitol of skyscrapers.

Beautiful and moving as the twin beams are, they DO pose a grave hazard to countless thousands of birds that migrate at night, as Joan Bryan wrote above.

Rebecca wrote about seeing the Tribute from many miles away as she flew toward the city one year. Night-migrating birds see it, too, and because the evolved over many millennia when there was NO light coming from the ground at night — only from the sky above — they find the beams immensely disorienting.

In years when Sept. 11 falls during a new moon, many thousands of birds become behaviorally trapped inside the shafts of light for hours, exhausting themselves by flying in circles. 2004 was such a year. Fortunately, this year the moon will be above the horizon for most of the night, so if the weather is clear, I am reasonably confident we won’t have a disaster.

But even when conditions are favorable, I have watched birds leave the beams only to return. (I imagine it’s like the reverse of leaving a movie theatre after a matinee, when you’re blinded by the light. But the birds are blinded by the darkness, so they return to the light.)

As one who values the natural world, I have to wonder whether it’s correct for us to imperil other species for the sake of our memorial, however moving it may be.

Still miss you.

This is not meant to be sarcastic: I really can imagine a time when many people will have their own individual twin beams of light, on a smaller scale, and they will light up the night sky every year at this time.

I caught a glimpe of the testing last night, entering my roof top, and had to sit. It brought me right back 2001 and all of the loss felt. I work at Cantor Fitzgerlad and live in downtown and the lights are a brilliant yet sublte reminder. Please keep the lights on for the fallen. They help us take that NY minute and unite.

The twin beams are the most moving remembrance and should BE the memorial. It is like no other one we have. No more stone chairs, flames, or fountains. It reaches to the heavens and is a beautiful tribute to friends, children, siblings, and parents.

I’ve loved the tribute lights. But had never, frankly, given any thought to how it would affect migrating birds until I watched Fox5 News at 5 p.m. today and they played a clip showing the lights illulminated while hundreds and hundreds of birds circled aimlessly, lost in the lights.

Upon reflection, it seems inappropriate that we remember the lives of those who were lost by using something that causes death among nature’s creatures. I certainly wouldn’t want to be memorialized that way, nor would I want a family member to be memorialized by endangering wildlife.

Surely we can come up with a memorial just as moving without this deadly danger to all the birds! Please, let’s look at alternatives for next year…

To all who lost family and friends at the Twin Towers, the Pentagon and on the field in Shanksville, my thoughts and prayers are with you.

God Bless America!