On this September morning, as Lower Manhattan commuters snake through the Oculus and sunlight glints off the glassy new towers, a quieter vision of the World Trade Center lingers in the city’s consciousness. Photographer Baldwin Lee’s early images—now resurfacing in a rare gallery show uptown—capture the Twin Towers not as icons or memorials, but as bold newcomers disrupting the city’s skyline in the late 1970s.
Lee’s first major project, now on view at the Midtown Gallery through October, presents the towers at street level: their silver columns rising from a landscape of newsstands, city buses, and impromptu chess games. His lens lingers on the mundane—construction workers pausing for coffee, families craning their necks to glimpse the towers’ summits, the play of shadow and light on plaza concrete. These images, taken when the towers were still controversial, remind viewers that architectural landmarks are first lived-in spaces, not just symbols.
“People forget, the towers were the new kids on the block,” says gallery director Simone Chen, pointing to a 1976 print of office workers lunching on the esplanade. “Baldwin caught them before they became mythic.” The photos, unearthed from Lee’s archive, resonate especially this week as the city marks another September 11, blending memory and daily routine.
For many New Yorkers, the images prompt a double take—the vertical lines of the original towers echoing in the glass of One World Trade, the posture of passersby unchanged even as the skyline has evolved. Lee’s work offers a reminder: every New York landmark, no matter how monumental, starts by surprising the city it inhabits.
As the autumn sun sets over Lower Manhattan, the exhibition joins the city’s ongoing conversation with its past, showing how the everyday shapes what endures. For those passing through Fulton Street this week, Lee’s photographs offer a window back to a city still getting used to its own reflection.
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