"As the wife of a 9/11 survivor I wish to see the Towers rebuilt as they were. This will greatly ease the void left in my husband’s heart when our precious towers were restored."
- Prudence Vignapiano, March 3, 2006
When Minoru Yamasaki set out his vision for the World Trade Center, he called it “a living symbol of man’s dedication to world peace.” For nearly three decades, the Twin Towers carried that meaning and many others. To people across the United States and around the world, they stood for ambition, for home, and for a skyline that felt permanent. After September 11, 2001, they also came to stand for loss.
In the years that followed, a broad public movement called for the towers to rise again. In February 2005, an informal MSNBC online poll of nearly 3,500 readers found that 80 percent preferred new Twin Towers to the design then planned for Ground Zero. The Twin Towers Alliance, a grassroots coalition that campaigned alongside the Twin Towers II proposal by structural engineer Kenneth Gardner and architect Herbert Belton, gathered more than 9,000 signatures and comments. Its signers included September 11 families and close friends, New Yorkers, service members and their families, architects and builders, and citizens of other nations. For many of them, rebuilding was an act of remembrance and resilience: a refusal to let one morning permanently define the skyline.
This website presents that archive in full. Comments are reproduced as their authors wrote them and reflect their own views. That conviction was never the only one. Many bereaved families held the opposite view with equal sincerity: that the ground where the towers stood is a place of rest, and nothing should be built upon it. Both convictions are honorable. Neither is ours to overrule.
The World Technology Center is proposed for Chicago, not Lower Manhattan. The footprints at Ground Zero remain undisturbed as the National September 11 Memorial. What the project carries forward is the towers’ silhouette and spirit, reimagined as a campus for science, education, and international collaboration. Kenneth Gardner, whose Twin Towers II design inspired this initiative, now advises on its structural design.
The project does not claim to speak for all who mourn. It offers a way to carry the towers’ meaning forward that asks no one to give up their own.
Since then, people across the country and abroad have sent their own statements of support. Many of them were too young ever to see the original towers. You can add yours below.
