The sight of the Freedom Tower is a sobering highlight of the U.S. Open experience

NEW YORK—For many of us who have spent the last two weeks working at the U.S. Open, each day has ended with a late-night, or sometimes early-morning, bus ride from Flushing Meadows to Manhattan. It’s a dark and quiet trip. The lights in the bus are turned out, and Queens offers only scattered landmarks along the way: The Paris Hotel, with its miniature Eiffel Tower on the roof; long rows of brick apartment complexes; billboards advertising jewelry, watches, TV shows, Hamilton; McDonalds arches. It’s also a bumpy ride. The bus swings and sways and bounces as it takes its roundabout route toward the Long Island Expressway.

From this vantage point, Manhattan looks like a mythical, Oz-like metropolis in the distance. Its towers—some gleaming, some murky, some in full color—are spread across the horizon. As the bus follows the Expressway’s curves, the buildings shift with them. A set of lights that was visible in one window at the beginning of the ride will reappear in the other window, on the other side of the bus, a few minutes later.

At the southern tip of this man-made constellation is the Freedom Tower. It’s a new entry in the night skyline, but it already feels something like its North Star. The tower isn’t the gaudiest or most spectacular structure in Manhattan, but the light at the top of its spire—exactly 1776 feet above the ground—serves as a subdued and somber beacon for everyone traveling on the roads around the city.

On the way back from the Open, the tower is the first structure in Manhattan that comes into view. Before the building itself appears, the spire pokes up on the right side of the front window. Even when you see the rest of the structure, though, it doesn’t stand out at night; you can’t make out its distinctive, triangle-shaped walls in the darkness. But you can hardly miss its height. If you’re like me, you also can’t fail to be a little awed by it. By the time the bus begins its long approach to the Midtown Tunnel, the tower has moved to its proper place in the left window. In a downtown increasingly crowded with steel and glass, this skyscraper stands alone.

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Fifteen years after 9/11, and roughly two years after it was completed, the Freedom Tower—officially known as 1 World Trade Center—is going through a transition in how it is perceived in its hometown. It’s the same transition that hundreds of important buildings undergone in the past: Elite disdain has begun to give way to a popular embrace.

When the tower opened in 2014, Michael Kimmelman, the architecture critic at the New York Times, ridiculed it as a soulless corporate concoction.

“One World Trade speaks volumes about political opportunism, outmoded thinking, and upside-down urban priorities,” Kimmelman wrote. “[It’s] symmetrical to a fault, stunted at its peak...There’s no mystery, no unraveling of light, no metamorphosis over time, nothing to hold your gaze.”

Worst of all, from the New Yorker’s perspective, “It looks like it could be anywhere.”

At first, from a distance, I could see his point. In an age when technology and new materials are making skyscrapers ever sleeker and slimmer, One World Trade looked bulky and clunky. A tennis partner of mine who works at an architecture firm said he that wished the equally tall, but more eye-catching, new skyscraper at 432 Park Avenue had been designed for Ground Zero instead. But seeing the Freedom Tower up close changed my mind. Its inverted triangles were like nothing I’d seen before, and its glass reflected the constantly passing clouds. The bulk made sense, too. We wanted something study to rise from ground zero, right?

Now, two years after the Times helped set the tone for the tower’s negative reception, the paper reports that it has begun to find favor among the city’s everyday citizens. Under the headline, “1 World Trade Center Gains Popularity in the Pantheon of Kitsch,” the Times describes how it has started to replace the Twin Towers as a “simple, graphic representation of the complex idea of New York.”

The Freedom Tower’s likeness now appears “in movies and logotypes, on knickknacks and letterheads,” on dinner plates, paperweights and shot glasses. It’s outselling the beloved Chrysler Building in souvenir shops in Times Square. And while the New York Fire Department’s logo still includes the Twin Towers, the FDNY replaced replaced them with the new World Trade Center on its 150th-anniversary patch in 2015.

“It got bad a for while,” a Brooklyn pizza maker named Joseph Campagna told the Times. “But seeing the new tower being built was like seeing a light at the end of the tunnel.” An image of the tower is imprinted on his pizza boxes, complete with an American flag flying from the spire.

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One World Trade may look it could be anywhere, but New Yorkers are starting to think of it as their own. For Campagna and the rest of us who live here, the real indignity was that for so long, we looked to where the Twin Towers had once been and saw nothing at all. Without them, the downtown skyline really did seem like it could have been in any mid-size American city. That was obviously never going to cut it.

More than that, there was pain in that empty space. It was a wound of omission, a constant reminder of the possibility that what can built can also be taken away by force. That’s not a feeling Americans are used to having. Even if what was eventually built there was compromised and conservative—as well as, in its name and 1776-foot height, unnecessarily jingoistic—the Freedom Tower has a look of solidity and strength, and that may be all that the New Yorkers who look in its direction every day needed to see. The tower’s existence alone is a testament to resilience, Big Apple-style: It took too long, cost too much and required cutting through a skyscraper’s worth of red tape, but it’s there.

Only at this time of year, during the two weeks of the Open, do I see the tower every day. Taking in the skyline as I ride the bus to the Open each morning, I can see that One World Trade’s architecture has none of the historical resonance, or dazzle, of the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building. With the fall of the Twin Towers, those two 1930s grand dames became even more important to the city. One World Trade, which so far has sat largely empty (the Empire State Building did for many years as well), hasn’t tried to steal any of their well-earned spotlight.

Yet over the last two weeks, as the bus has approached Manhattan, I’ve ignored the classic skyscrapers of midtown. My eye has been to drawn to One World Trade instead. It’s not floodlit, and the lights from its windows are dim; compared to the city’s more exuberant buildings, it looks modest and retiring—melancholy. Maybe someday, when its floors are full and 9/11 loses some of its power to pull us back into the past, the tower that was built to heal a wound will look bright and colorful and exuberant. For now, though, melancholy works. The fact that it’s there is all that matters.