August 19, 2021
The first two decades of the 21st Century were bookended by mass casualty incidents: 9/11 and COVID-19. In some ways it’s hard to believe that the sneak attack on the World Trade Center was twenty years ago, but it really was. Probably most of the people sharing your subway car this morning were little kids or perhaps not even born yet on that unforgettable September morning.
And now we’re at the other end of it, in a global pandemic that hit our city earlier and harder than anywhere on Earth. The best thing about NYC is that we have lots of people, but our population density was a feature the novel coronavirus was able to exploit with deadly efficiency.
Last night in Rockefeller Park downtown a couple of hundred New Yorkers came out on a glorious Summer evening to preview Spike Lee‘s latest film, NYC EPICENTERS 9/11➔2021½. The film will premier on HBO this Sunday at 8PM and be available on demand Monday 8/23.
We’re not going to spoil it for readers, who should definitely watch it for themselves, except to say that there are things presented about 9/11 that were news to us. We’re referring to a segment about water that shows an important and often untold aspect of the events on that day of infamy. The dozens of people that Spike interviewed add considerable depth to this pair of familiar stories – 9/11 and COVID-19 – and remind us that we all had our own unique experience of these shared NYC tragedies.
The screening was held just blocks from the site of the original World Trade Center and due to dramatic, low cloud cover last night, the new one took on an almost ghostly appearance. It even disappeared completely into the clouds during most of the screening, perhaps out of respect for the subject matter at hand, we imagined.
“You can’t bring down the Greatest City in the World.” ~Spike Lee
Check out the official trailer here.