2,977 Lights, Two Towers, One Unfinished Memory There are buildings that occupy a city, and there are buildings that become part of its memory. The Twin Towers belonged to the second kind. They were steel and glass, certainly, but they were also coordinates in the collective imagination of New York: two vertical marks against the sky, visible from the harbor, from bridges, from distant boroughs, from the windows of trains crossing the city. When they disappeared, Manhattan did not simply lose two buildings. Its skyline acquired a wound. Twenty-five years later, New York briefly filled that wound with light. On September 9, 2026, 2,977 individual…