NEW YORK—I moved into my first New York apartment, a small two-bedroom in the West Village, in the winter of 1992. It was narrow and crumbling and the radiators went full blast all night, but in one way, at least, it was the perfect first stop for a newcomer to the city: It had a great view.

The two front windows faced southeast; looking out at night felt like looking at a movie set of the city. In the foreground there were the Village’s low-lying apartment buildings, topped chaotically with those two signatures of old New York, fire escapes and water towers. Behind them, over them, lighting them up like a man-made moon each evening, were those great signatures of modern New York, lit warmly from within through the night, the Twin Towers. On weeknights I would come back from my pay-the-bills office job, sit down, and do nothing more than take in that view. It was a reminder of something that still seemed unbelievable to me: I was in New York. Whatever job I had to hold down now to make it happen, that view alone let me know why I was here, and that it was worth it.

In those days, the city was seen as a place apart by much of the rest of America. That had been true since the calamitous, “Ford to City: Drop Dead” 1970s. But the attitude became more intense during the New Gingrich-inspired culture wars of the 1990s, that era’s “family values”-based version of Tea Party politics. The city was too liberal, too sinful, too European, too socialist, too single to really be part of the USA. We didn’t even particularly care about the USA's national religion—I'm talking about college football, not Christianity. (Of course, those reasons were exactly why many of us moved to the city in the first place.) During that time, I regularly drove west out of the city and into Pennsylvania to visit my parents. Somewhere around 1995 or so the state erected a sign at its eastern border that read: “America Starts Here.”

If 9/11 had a positive effect, it was that it put an end to all of that. The deadliest attacks happened in New York, but people all over the country recognized that they’d been attacked as well. People all over the country expressed their solidarity with New Yorkers; people all over the country signed up for the battle. New York was no longer faintly foreign—it was the center, it was Ground Zero. The first time I drove back to Pennsylvania, I saw that the state had dismantled its sign. Everyone knew, finally, where America started.

Time goes on, and the solidarity of the months after 9/11 gave way to the old trumped-up divisions. I can even imagine a tabloid headline screaming, “Perry to New York: Drop Dead” in the not-too-distant future. New Yorkers stopped being so polite again, the proposed new, bigger, shinier tower never got built, and the flags that people put out in front of their houses went ragged and were finally taken in. There was one block near my neighborhood in Brooklyn, though, where Old Glory continued to fly. It’s in a working class area, with a big Irish bar on the corner, where cops and firefighters gather and there's one beer and one beer only on tap, Budweiser. For 10 years, I drove down that block to get to my tennis club; seeing the flags, faded and worn but conspicuous in their pride, always made me go quiet. But this summer, when I got back from Wimbledon and went to play for the first time, the flags weren’t there. They’d finally been taken in. And that made sense, too. Ten years is a long time. It’s good to remember, but it’s good to let go. Even without a flag in front of our house, even without cars to drive or lawns to mow or college football teams to obsess over, New Yorkers know what country we belong in.

Something was gained after 9/11, and something lost. What was gained was the memory of the time immediately afterward. Now, when we think of that day, we think about the smoking towers and we mourn the 3,000 dead. But we remember how we acted toward each other afterward, in that brief time when, as that archetypal American Andy Roddick put it last week, “there were a few ‘pleases’ and ‘thank yous’ thrown in there.” We couldn’t keep it up, of course, but we know it happened, and we know it’s possible. There’s still pain and terror in those three numbers—9/11—but there’s dignity, too.

What was lost, to me, were the Twin Towers, those friendly, futuristic beacons that drew me here and reminded me, whenever I forgot, that I was in a great place—a great, difficult, sometimes dangerous place, one that had always seen itself as the center of the universe, that had always dared to build the tallest buildings in the world. I moved from the West Village to Brooklyn long before 9/11. The apartment where I currently live should also have a view of the Trade Center. But now the skyline downtown looks like any other big American city’s, and when I come from work and look out my window I see nothing but sky.

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