Fred A. Bernstein

Published in The New York Times, October 11, 2001

The other night, standing outside a Broadway theater during intermission, I found myself looking up at the Empire State building. The top of the building was shrouded in fog. I've seen it that way hundreds of times, but this time I panicked, imagining for a spilt second that the floors I couldn't see were missing.

After Sept. 11, how could I be sure they weren't? I waited until the fog cleared, relieved to see the building's red, white and blue crown intact.

"If anything happens to that building, I'm leaving town," said Laurie Lambrecht, a photographer who lives in the East 30's -- expressing the affection millions of New Yorkers feel for the midtown skyscraper.

To Manhattanites, the Empire State Building -- again the city's tallest structure -- is an intimate, its top visible from every point on the compass, its base as approachable as the corner store.

Vatche Simonian, an interior designer, chose his apartment in a tall new building near Madison Square because it offered views in both directions. Since Sept. 11, His focus has shifted to the north. "Looking downtown now is disconcerting," he said.

Ted Porter, an architect who spends time on eastern Long Island, said: "Driving back from Sag Harbor the other day, I realized that the Empire State Building was the focal point again."

For three decades, New York was bipolar. To residents of SoHo, Greenwich Village and Chelsea, the opposing peaks were navigation aids: the Empire State Building signifying uptown, and the World Trade Center, downtown.

Last weekend, I was on the Brooklyn Bridge late at night, looking at the Empire State Building, glorious even from four miles away. Suddenly all 1,450 feet of it went dark. I shuddered, until I realized that it was midnight. The lights, I remembered, always go off at midnight.

Since then, I've been thinking of calling the building's owners and asking them to keep the lights on until dawn. Funny, I've never needed to sleep with a nightlight before.

[Three days after this article appeared, the owners announced that they would keep the building lit all night.]