The rebirth of New York and the World Trade Centre

New York. At the World Trade Centre, the stages and chairs are ready for the ceremony to read out the names of the 2,983 victims of 11 September, and this year too – as has been the case every year for the past 25 years – guests and relatives of the deceased find something new in that space in Manhattan’s financial district, which is constantly being rebuilt. This time, to reach the two monumental pools commemorating the sites where the Twin Towers once stood, one passes by murals that conceal a newly opened building site. The novelty is that this is expected to be the final phase – the one destined, after a quarter of a century, to complete the reconstruction of a place that seeks to maintain a link with what stood here from the 1970s until 2001, but is now something entirely different. The building site is that of ‘2 WTC’, a skyscraper whose construction began just a few days ago and is due to be completed in 2031. It was designed by Norman Foster’s practice and will rise to a height of 374 metres, not far from the Freedom Tower which dominates the area (541 metres including the antenna, but actually around 415 metres tall, like the old Towers).

World Trade Centre Buildings 1 and 2 were once the twin towers, whilst all around them stood buildings numbered 3 to 7, which were completely destroyed. The new WTC has a different centre of gravity: the memorial is at its heart, surrounded by skyscrapers with numbering similar to the past, but in a different layout. It is the result of years and years of planning and discussions, dating back to the initial designs commissioned from architect Daniel Libeskind. ‘2 WTC’ will be the headquarters of American Express; it will stand alongside the imposing Oculus, the railway station designed by Santiago Calatrava, and, with its green terraces, will complete the image of the 21st-century World Trade Centre – an area that now recalls the last century only in the faded photographs at the memorial.

In a sense, the Foster+Partners skyscraper marks an entry into the New York of the coming 1930s – the city that Mayor Zohran Mamdani has been shaping for the past nine months. A city that seems to have regained the lustre it lost in the post-Covid years and, more generally, during the terms of Bill de Blasio and Eric Adams. It has now returned to being the dynamic, energy-filled city it once was. 9/11 has not been forgotten; on the contrary, it has become part of the city’s narrative, and the twenty-fifth anniversary evokes genuine emotion. This is evident in Bryant Park, the park in the heart of Midtown, many kilometres from the site of the terrorist attack, where the commemoration consists of 2,753 chairs arranged on the large lawn, one for each of the victims of the World Trade Centre.

New York has not forgotten, but the twin towers now exist only in a skyline consigned to history and which has since changed profoundly. While the second skyscraper at the WTC is still in the works, the latest structures to reshape Manhattan’s skyline are the 423-metre tower housing JP Morgan Chase on Park Avenue, the Steinway Tower overlooking Central Park, the Vanderbilt adjacent to the timeless Art Deco spires of the Chrysler Building, and the Hudson Yards skyscraper complex.

Mamdani, the smiling, socialist mayor, cannot yet be regarded as the architect of an urban transformation that began long ago, but he deserves credit for having restored a certain sense of enthusiasm to the city. A Siena University poll in August showed his approval rating in the city stood at 69 per cent, higher than when he took office last January. New York is in the midst of a honeymoon period with the young mayor who shot to fame thanks to social media, just as America seems, by contrast, to be growing increasingly intolerant of another famous New Yorker, Donald Trump, who is languishing below 40 per cent in the polls. This may well be why Mamdani arouses sheer anger amongst Trump supporters. Take Rudy Giuliani, for instance – the heroic mayor of twenty-five years ago, now a disbarred lawyer – who does not hesitate to play the ethnic-religious card to attack his successor: “He shouldn’t be taking part in the 9/11 ceremonies; it offends me that he’s there.” The fact that, for the first time, a Muslim is presiding over the ceremony as mayor has prompted Giuliani to compare him to the nineteen Islamic terrorists who carried out the attack on America, saying that they “at least weren’t trying to hide what Mamdani wants to hide” – that is, according to the former mayor, a deep-seated hatred of America.

The current mayor reacted in his usual manner, smiling and recalling that in 2001 he was a nine-year-old Muslim boy and that it was not easy growing up in the city in the aftermath of 9/11. But the episode is symptomatic of the irritation Mamdani is causing in many quarters for having restored New York, for the time being, to the energetic atmosphere that characterised Michael Bloomberg’s three terms as mayor following the attack on the Twin Towers, from 2002 to 2013. Today’s New York, seeking a rebirth, is largely the city shaped by Bloomberg and his deputy for urban development, Daniel Doctoroff. This is also true of the city’s preservation of the enormous inequalities which, in Manhattan, far from disappearing, are widening to such an extent that in New York people no longer even speak of the 1 per cent who control the bulk of the wealth, because in the meantime that control has passed to an even smaller group, the ‘0.1 per cent’.

The fight against inequality is the area where Mamdani should be at his best, but his track record has had its ups and downs. He secured a rent freeze by placing loyalists on the board that oversees it. He has completed the first phase of nursery reform, but the promise of free nursery places from six weeks to five years of age is currently hampered by the need to find six billion dollars a year. Free buses are still not a reality, although the number and quality of services have increased, along with cycle lanes and pedestrian zones. The necessary funding must come from New York State, and relations with Governor Kathy Hochul are far from idyllic.

Mamdani can demonstrate better results on security, an area where all mayors stake their future. Here too, however, he is partly resting on his laurels: in 2025, before he took office, New York recorded 688 shootings – a record low – representing a 24 per cent drop on the previous year. However, the first half of 2026, with him in office, saw even better results, with crime down by 5.8 per cent and homicides at an all-time low. This is also why tourism has returned to record levels. Last year, the city welcomed 65 million tourists, representing a 98 per cent recovery to the pre-Covid levels of 2019, and this year all signs suggest that visitor numbers will exceed pre-pandemic figures.

The growth was almost visible to the naked eye last weekend, during the American Labour Day bank holiday. From Times Square to the pedestrianised Broadway in Midtown, from the streets of Dumbo to those of Williamsburg, from the boats on the bay to the jazz clubs in the Village, from the crowded lawns of Central Park to the cafés on Orchard Street in the Lower East Side, everywhere in New York is teeming with visitors. Crowds fill the major museums and the terrace of the more exclusive Whitney Museum, designed by Renzo Piano, from where one can look out over other bustling spaces—those created by the Bloomberg administration which are now realizing their full potential: the High Line, Hudson Yards, and the streets of Chelsea and the Meatpacking District, packed with restaurants and luxury brands (Gansevoort Street is now a second Fifth Avenue). And there are new iconic spots such as Little Island, the West Side’s answer to the attractions of the South Street Seaport on the East River, from where ferries set sail (Governors Island is particularly popular) and helicopters take off in a steady stream, highly sought after by those who dream of nothing more than taking photos for Instagram.

A tourist frenzy that might seem out of place amidst the atmosphere of the commemorations marking the 25th anniversary of the attack on America. Were it not for the fact that the memorial remains a destination for emotional pilgrimages and is the most visited site in the city. This time, whilst reading the 2,983 names, one’s gaze will fall upon the construction site of a skyscraper due to be completed in 2031, thirty years after the attack. On stage, for the first time, will be a Muslim mayor who was nine years old in 2001. At his side will be Vice-President J. D. Vance, because Trump has chosen to go to the Pentagon: he wanted to give a speech at Ground Zero, but politicians have been banned from speaking at the ceremony for fifteen years and no one was willing to make an exception for him.