Does anyone else feel sad that the longstanding DKNY mural at Houston and Broadway is now gone?

Since September 11th I’ve been hoping they were going to leave it there forever.

I was always fond of that mural as a symbol of a woman not only making it, but soaring into NYC fashion and commerce. And I loved the simple black and white image of all that would fit in a photo from uptown Manhattan: Brooklyn, Roosevelt Island, Queens and Staten Island, with the Statue of Liberty in the foreground and the Trade Towers in the distance.

Yesterday when we were having a conversation about architecture, my daughter told me she thought the Twin Towers were much warmer in feel than the Empire State Building. It’s taken her more than seven years to be able to talk about September 11th and her thoughts and memories are only now slowly starting to tumble out.

I can remember appreciating the Towers as a geographical anchor, but finding them cold and impersonal otherwise. Now they’re the most personal buildings in our country’s history.

The DKNY mural became an inadvertent sympathy card for the city that wanted to hold onto it for sentimental reasons and to help us remember.

Now it’s a big flat beige Hollister wall; the gateway to NYC as a mall.