It will be difficult to watch tonight.
Two years ago, Public Broadcasting aired a five-part documentary history of this city, dating from explorer Henry Hudson's landing here on another September 11th in 1609 - through the opening of the Empire State Building in 1931. In an extraordinary, even ironic coincidence, six months ago, the network selected tonight to run the new sixth installment of the series, and tomorrow, to run the seventh.
In their sudden, unforeseeable datedness, they will be heart-rending to those here who watch. The narration describes New York, at the end of the second world war, as having "emerged from the world's greatest conflict virtually unscathed... its great walls of stone and steel untouched by the horrors of war."
It even has a clip of Mayor Rudy Giuliani describing his predecessor Fiorello LaGuardia as "the mayor of New York City during the most difficult time ever to be the mayor of New York City."
Nothing in the four and a half hours of film mentions The World Trade Center, its construction, or its destruction. It is as if it had never been here. And a New York television station will show that to its still reeling viewers. Tonight.