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Twin Towers linger in images of Brooklyn exhibition

BY DANIEL MCDERMON | amNY.com

September 8, 2006

For nearly three decades, the Twin Towers symbolized New York City on posters, business logos, and store awnings. In the months after September 11, folklorist Kay Turner began to collect those images -- mementos of the city skyline before it was irrevocably scarred.

In a new exhibit called "Here Was New York," the Brooklyn Arts Council is presenting a collection of those images, in addition to pictures submitted by amateur and professional photographers that illustrate how the attacks have been memorialized in the city and around the world.

With more than 300 images, the exhibit echoes the "Here Is New York" show that ran in Manhattan immediately after the attacks.

The pictures on display run the gamut, from a forearm tattoo to a coffee can logo; from a tanker truck emblazoned with an image of the towers aflame to an intimate home shrine lit by candlelight.

With the final arrangements for the permanent World Trade Center memorial still in flux, the show offers a glimpse of the thousands of public and private memorials that have been constructed in the last five years.

"In effect, we've taken charge of doing something that the city and the state and the developers just can't seem to get it together to do," Turner said.

One of the most vivid photographs on display was submitted by Kitty Katz, 61, of Sunnyside, who captured a memorial to first responders in a Chinatown shop window.

Katz hopes visitors will be moved, and "stop using the callous phrase 'getting on with our lives.' I think I heard that too much after 9/11. As though it were something that could be put behind one. I don't think it can or should."

Photographer Paul Margolis, 54, who witnessed the attacks near his job downtown, spent about a year documenting the traces of the towers.

"It was my own way of dealing with these towers just vanishing," Margolis said. "I knew that the images would also disappear."

The exhibition "Here Was New York" runs through September 30th at a dozen galleries around Brooklyn. For more information, log onto www.brooklynartscouncil.org