In the weeks following September 11th, 2001, many of my colleagues were out on the streets of Lower Manhattan, feeding the firemen and other workers who were combing through the remains of the World Trade Center towers. Other colleagues were in line waiting to donate blood, and volunteering for other activities.

At one point the head of our company suggested that we should come up with a way to help the effort that would make the most of our skills. This gave me an idea: what if there was a web site that showcased the reconstruction of the site. It was clearly a longer term idea, and hopefully might bring some optimism back to NYC.

As soon as I had the idea, I realized I would need a web site for it to live, and so I registered my first ever domains, of www.wtctwo.com and www.newwtc.org. The most obvious URL to me would have been www.newwtc.com, but amazingly someone in India had registered that actually during the day of September 11th. Our discussion, and my idea, didn’t happen until September 16h.

If you recall, around that time the Internet Bubble was also bursting, and we lost some of our larger clients, who had transitioned to creating their sites internally, and the size of the company adjusted accordingly. This meant that there wasn’t anyone available to work on my idea, and it’s taken all this time to start to make progress.

There still isn’t anyone available to do the work, but there have been some technology advances that gave me new ideas about what the site might do. Also, I have had the use of a summer high school intern! Handy thing, those interns...

So, here we are. The site is now just focused on being a virtual walkthrough. Read the Technologies section to find out what you will need in order to use the site, and then visit the Gallery section to try out the walkthrough.