This morning brings a flood of emotions and memories.

Each year, as 9/11 recedes further into history, it comes back with immediacy and pain on this September morning. We recall where we were, what we were doing, and how we responded as we watched the first plane, and then the second, strike the Twin Towers.

As I watched the second tower fall, huddling with colleagues around a small television in a conference room in Trenton, I instructed everyone to go home and be with their families. Then I drove to the daycare center at the YMCA to pick up my daughters, aged 1 and 4. There was nowhere to park, so I pulled into the handicapped spot and ran inside to collect my children. When I came out with them, I found a parking ticket on the windshield of my car.

Two days later I was riding NJTransit into Penn Station to start my new job at RPA. From the Meadowlands I looked out the window and saw the smoke rising from Lower Manhattan. In the days and weeks that followed, we were talking with other civic groups, business leaders, public officials and citizens, all asking ​“What can we do?”

Everyone wanted to find a way to help. Governor Pataki created the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, chaired by John Whitehead, to work alongside the Port Authority to create a plan for the memorial and rebuilding. That became our vehicle, the institution that would make the decisions, so those were the plans we wanted to shape.

In the weeks and months that followed, we collaborated with other civic groups, such as New York New Visions and Imagine New York, and Bob Yaro convened the Civic Alliance to Rebuild Downtown New York, which became a clearing house for groups to share their research, proposals and recommendations for rebuilding. In February of 2002, the Civic Alliance hosted a forum at the South Street Seaport with a group called AmericaSpeaks, run by Carolyn Lukensmeyer, who had developed innovative techniques to engage citizens in dialogue and participation through curated conversations and instant polling.

The forum convinced us to run a larger program that summer at the Javits Center, with almost 5,000 participants listening, learning from each other, and sharing their goals and aspirations for the rebuilding process. Participants listened to presentations about the rebuilding plans, discussed those plans with each other, and voted on how they felt about them. After those sessions, during which participants expressed strong displeasure with the direction of the rebuilding plans, the LMDC pivoted to engage planning and design teams in a competition which eventually selected Daniel Libeskind’s master plan and combined it with Michael Arad’s stunning memorial. For anyone interested in learning more about the event, a powerful documentary, 9/11: Reclaiming Ground Zero, has been released today on Amazon Prime.

Looking back from 25 years on, I am very proud of the work that the civic community did to open up the planning process and achieve a vision for the World Trade Center site that would memorialize the lost lives, rebuild a commercial district, restore infrastructure and create a neighborhood bounded by new residential buildings and public spaces. Yes, there are things we didn’t get completely right. The streets should be more lively, there should be more housing, the retail should be more diverse, and the PATH should connect to Newark Airport. But the structure of the plans and design of the buildings — the memorial, the cultural institutions, the office towers, and the public spaces — are aspirational and provide the armature for a successful district that has now recovered from Superstorm Sandy and the Covid pandemic. Hopefully with time the community will continue to fill out, just as the Swamp White Oaks planted in the memorial plaza grow taller and provide more shade.

My most powerful memory from those early days after 9/11 was a memorial ceremony that Princeton University hosted on the lawn behind Nassau Hall. I took my daughter, who had classmates in pre-K whose parents did not come home that day. Princeton President Shirley Tilghman reminded us about the ties of humanity that bound us together and historian James McPherson put the tragic day in historical context. But it was Toni Morrison who reached into our hearts to remind us what mattered most, reading a poem she had written for the occasion. Each year on this day, I re-read that poem, to remember the power of grief and love and connection — and release.