Amid a Painful Year, U.S. Remembers the Deadliest Attack in Its History

Then, in a broad, tree-lined plaza where reflecting pools have replaced the towers, a slow recitation of 2,983 names — the people killed at the trade center, the Pentagon, aboard Flight 93 in Pennsylvania and in an earlier 1993 bombing at the trade center — began.

President Biden is in attendance with the first lady, Jill Biden. So are former President Bill Clinton and former first lady Hillary Clinton, former President Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama, and Michael R. Bloomberg, the former New York mayor who is now chairman of the 9/11 Memorial and Museum.

None of the dignitaries are speaking at the ceremony, which is otherwise open only to the families of the victims. For two hours, the only words heard will be the names of the dead.

But it may well be the mess, not the memorial or the office towers — half conceived to reignite the economy, half as middle fingers raised to Osama bin Laden — that has ended up being the ultimate retort to Sept. 11 and the emblem of New York’s resilience.

City-building in a fractious democracy is a slow, lurching, multipronged process, after all. The southern tip of what the Lenape called Mannahatta has been contested territory and a civic petri dish since the September morning in 1609 when a community of Lenape watched a Dutch ship, carrying Henry Hudson, sail through the Narrows.

In the wake of another September morning, New York has become less Manhattan-centered since the attack on the twin towers, less a hub with spokes and more multi-nodal, hastening the booms in Brooklyn and Queens. The old model of urban economics, agglomerated vertically in a clutch of downtown skyscrapers, has gradually ceded to a broader vision of mobility, remote access and live-work neighborhoods. After Sept. 11, proponents of walking, cycling, public transit and public space began to find allies on Wall Street and in City Hall, ones who recognized Lower Manhattan’s viability depending on more than a memorial and commercial skyscrapers where the twin towers had stood.

It involved attracting highly educated workers who were increasingly gravitating to lively streets, rejuvenated waterfronts, signature parks, bike lanes and loads of restaurants and entertainment.

“For us and many of our friends who started walking across the bridge,” as Manfredi puts it, “9/11 fundamentally changed how we envisioned the city.”

For 20 years the tragedy of that day has transformed American Muslim life, in deep and conflicting ways. The terrorist attacks unleashed a deluge of anti-Muslim hate and misinformation that persists today. In 2016, Americans elected a president with an anti-Muslim platform, and a surge in violence against American Muslims led a rise in hate crimes against all groups.

Yet the struggle birthed a generation determined to define their place in American life on their own terms, in ways that were unfathomable 20 years ago. Last year Ramy Youssef won a Golden Globe Award for his portrayal of a young New Jersey man struggling with his identity. Americans elected Muslims to Congress for the first time, starting with Keith Ellison and André Carson, African American converts, and then Rashida Tlaib, the daughter of Palestinian immigrants, and Ilhan Omar, a refugee from Somalia who successfully challenged the 181-year rule banning headwear in the House chamber.

Islam has been part of the American story since enslaved African Muslims first arrived, but the past 20 years have forced a coming of age with sweeping public awareness, said Zeenat Rahman, executive director of the Institute of Politics at the University of Chicago.

“I’m not sure we’d have gotten here as quickly had it not been for the relentless microscope,” she said. “This is not just about one community. This is about what this one community teaches us about who we are as Americans.”

“For 10 years, I didn’t think about it and I didn’t talk about it with anyone,” said Tim Lingenfelder, 56, who was working on the 52nd floor of the North Tower.

He still remembers the sharp physical pain of having to walk down 52 flights of stairs, he said, and seeing a body on the roof of the Marriott World Trade Center next door.

He had nightmares and flashbacks for months afterward, he said, and survivor’s guilt ate at him for years. Eventually, in 2004, he moved back home to Minneapolis, Minn., at his friends’ urging.

John Cerqueira, 42, escaped from the 81st floor of the North Tower five minutes before it collapsed. He still vividly recalls looking up as people jumped, then realizing the building was starting to crumble. He ran, but he was caught in the dust cloud of debris. He remembers not being able to breathe.

“That was the closest I remember being to facing death,” he said.

He, too, eventually moved back home to Raleigh, N.C., in 2003, wanting to prioritize being near people he knew and loved.

Jim Farmer, 70, still lives in the same Tribeca apartment that he lived in that day, seven blocks from ground zero. For six months after the attacks, he and his wife refused to use their fireplaces because they couldn’t bear to see another fire. Neither got on a plane for five years.

“We had a nightmare every night for a year about what we saw,” Mr. Farmer said.

Physical scars, too, remained. Mr. Farmer was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2013, which doctors told him may have been related to his exposure to toxic air pollutants from 9/11.

All had varying ways of dealing with the day when it rolled around, they said. On the second anniversary, Mr. Cerqueira agreed to go to North Dakota for a work project, believing it was time for him to move on. But while driving down an empty road listening to memorials on the radio, he broke down sobbing. This year, he and his wife will go to a comedy show and spend time with their family.

For a few years, Mr. Lingenfelder said, he spent the day listening to music and tuning out the news. But he’s found it impossible this year to escape the deluge of news specials and documentaries about the attacks.

“It’s been tough,” he said. “Every year is different.”

Susan C. Beachy contributed research.

The anniversary also arrives as the United States is in the throes of another life-changing national loss: a pandemic that has claimed more than 656,000 lives, upended the economy and exposed gaping fault lines in the fabric of American life. In the last week, as many Americans have died of complications from the virus every two days as perished in one fell swoop on 9/11.

And the United States has only just closed the chapter on a costly and devastating war that sprang from 9/11’s wake: a 20-year occupation in Afghanistan that began as a hunt for the terrorists who oversaw the attacks and ultimately ended with 170,000 lives lost — more than 2,400 of them Americans — and the same Taliban militants in power there. More than 100,000 Iraqis and 4,400 Americans were killed in the war in Iraq, also waged in the aftermath of 9/11.

President Biden, who as a senator on 9/11 sought desperately to soothe a panicking country, will start the day by traveling to a New York that bears fresh scars from the coronavirus.

“To the families of the 2,977 people from more than 90 nations killed on Sept. 11 in New York City, Arlington, Virginia and Shanksville, Pennsylvania, and the thousands more who were injured, America and the world commemorate you and your loved ones,” Mr. Biden said in pre-taped remarks. “The pieces of your soul.”

Mr. Biden will first head to ground zero — once a horrifying pile of rubble, now a placid memorial — where families of the victims will converge to honor their loved ones at the place where their lives came to an end.

There, the families will read the names of the victims of the attacks, pausing for moments of silence at the times when the hijacked planes hit their targets and when the twin towers fell. Church bells will ring as the city quiets.

In Shanksville, Pa., former President George W. Bush, who was commander in chief when the attacks took place, will speak to the family members of the crew and passengers of United Airlines Flight 93, who fought back against the terrorists who had hijacked their flight and diverted it from their intended target in Washington.

Mr. Bush, whose legacy has been under renewed scrutiny as the war he began in Afghanistan met an unsuccessful end, will be joined by Vice President Kamala Harris. Mr. Biden and the first lady, Jill Biden, will later arrive in Shanksville for a wreath-laying ceremony there.

At the Pentagon, a flag will be unfurled on the building’s west side, where a plane struck. Lloyd J. Austin III, the defense secretary, and Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, will participate in a morning ceremony to remember the 184 people killed there. Mr. Biden, Ms. Harris and their spouses will later participate in a wreath-laying ceremony to honor the victims.

Throughout the day, there will be other commemorations both small and large around the United States, where moments of silence will be observed and flags in many places will be flown at half-staff, as is custom for collective mourning.

As night falls in New York, the Tribute in Light, in which two columns of light shoot into the sky from the area near ground zero, will shine again. The beams, typically visible for a radius of up to 60 miles and extending four miles into the sky, replicate the shape of the Twin Towers that were destroyed in the attacks.

Conveying the magnitude and the horror of the attacks was the primary objective. There was no question the front page would be topped by a headline across the full width. I advocated for the short, simple, declarative words in bold, oversize type as fittingly stark and dramatic to mark this horrendous event.

The vertical grouping of images running to the bottom of the page was designed to take full advantage of the large scale of the broadsheet format, creating a dynamic contrast to our horizontal nameplate and banner headline at the top.

The selection of photographs was meant to depict various aspects of the story without diminishing the extraordinary, central image capturing the moment the plane hit the South Tower.

We deliberately retained our conventional, dense, narrow column grid to evoke the gritty, immediacy of traditional newspaper composition, but departed with wide measure text to give prominence and authority to the lead story. That also allowed for the inset of the chilling photo of the plane heading toward the tower, providing a visual accent outside the core photo layout.

As always, the first priority of A1 is to communicate the news of the day, but particularly for an event like 9/11, it also needs to carry the emotion and gravity of the day.

When I got back on my bike at the end of the day (actually, hours into the next day) I was completely drained by the grief and horror of 9/11, and the challenge of designing an intricate, 27 page report, but satisfied that our presentation of the news, particularly on the front page, effectively and appropriately captured this horrific moment.

Tom Bodkin is the chief creative officer of The New York Times. He has overseen the look and feel of print and digital platforms since 1987.