City of Stars

See the latest information on Manhattanhenge.

What will future civilizations think of Manhattan Island when they dig it up and find a carefully laid out network of streets and avenues? Surely the grid would be presumed to have astronomical significance, just as we have found for the pre-historic circle of large vertical rocks known as Stonehenge, in the Salisbury Plain of England. For Stonehenge, the special day is the summer solstice, when the Sun rises in perfect alignment with several of the stones signaling the change of season.

For Manhattan, a place where the evening matters more than the morning, that special day comes on May 28; one of only two days in the year when the Sun sets in exact alignment with the Manhattan grid, fully illuminating every single cross-street for the last fifteen minutes of daylight. The other day is July 11th. Had Manhattan's grid been perfectly aligned with the geographic north-south line, then our special day would be the spring equinox, and if we so designated, the autumn equinox—the only two days on the calendar when the Sun rises due east and sets due west. But Manhattan is rotated 30 degrees east from geographic north, shifting the days of alignment elsewhere into the calendar. Upon studying American culture, and what is important to it, future anthropologists might credit the Manhattan alignments to cosmic signs of Memorial Day and, of course, the All-Star break. War and baseball.

Because Manhattan is so small (13 miles long) compared with Earth's distance to the Sun (about 93 million miles), the Sun's rays are essentially parallel by the time they reach Manhattan, allowing the Sun to be seen on all cross streets simultaneously, provided you have a clear view to the New Jersey horizon. Some major streets cross the entire island from river to river without obstruction, including 14th, 34th, and 42nd Streets. While the May 28 sunset qualifies as the exact day for this auspicious moment, the surrounding days will also work, as the sunset point migrates slowly north from day to day along the horizon, bringing with it ever-lengthening daylight hours.

Sunset on Manhattanhenge begins at 8:10PM, at a cross-street near you.

Rising a quarter of a mile into the sky, the World Trade Center's twin towers were about five blocks tall.

I live four blocks from where they stood. I saw them ablaze. I saw them fall. All from my dining-room window, which, within ten seconds of each tower's collapse, offered less than one inch of visibility while the opaque dust cloud of pulverized concrete rolled by. From that same window, blue sky now appears where the twin towers used to be.

The World Trade Center was a veritable vertical universe. I think about it often. I think about the people who worked in the towers, the tourists who visited the observation deck, the diners at Windows on the World. I think of all those who lost their lives.

When I look hard for a peaceful way to remember the towers, I cannot help but think of them as observatories. On the top floor, you could type greetings into a computer that would transmit your message into space via the north tower's radio antenna, for all eavesdropping extraterrestrials to decode. The towers were so tall that for someone on the observation deck, the horizon was forty-five miles away. This distance was far enough along Earth's curved surface for the Sun to set two minutes later for the person on the observation deck than it did for someone on the ground floor. If you could have run up the stairs at one flight per second, you would literally have stopped the sunset. Alas, you'd eventually have run out of breath or run out of floors. In either case, at that moment you'd lose the Sun for the night, as it set gently below your horizon.

New York City's twin towers have lost the Sun forever. But I take comfort in knowing that the Sun will rise again each day, as it has done a trillion times before.