25th Hour | 9/11 Memorial, Liberty Street — The Window Over the Pit

Halfway through the film, Frank Slaughtery stands at his window with the blinds up and the World Trade Center site directly below him — floodlights, cranes, trucks hauling steel out of a hole sixteen acres wide. Jacob asks him to close the blinds. Frank refuses. The Times says the air down here is bad, he says, and stays where he is. The whole argument about whether Monty deserves what is coming to him plays out with the pit in frame, and Spike Lee shot it in 2002 while the clearing was still going on, because he had decided the city this film was about could not be photographed with the wound edited out.

Where Frank looked down, there is now the National September 11 Memorial. Two square voids sit in the footprints of the towers, water falling thirty feet down four walls before dropping again into a smaller centre void with no visible bottom. The names are cut clean through bronze parapets around the rims — nearly three thousand of them, arranged by where people were and who they were standing with. Around the pools, eight acres of swamp white oaks.

The plaza is free and open every day. Come in from Liberty Street along the southern edge, which is roughly the angle the camera had. The water is loud enough to erase the traffic, and that is the one thing no visitor arrives prepared for.