TRANSCRIPT: Leader Schumer Address “From Terror To Triumph”: Marking The 25th Anniversary Of The 9/11 Terror Attack

New York, N.Y. - Today, Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) delivered a speech marking the 25^th anniversary of the 9/11 terror attack, demonstrating how the city's recovery was assisted by federal aid and support. Below are Leader Schumer's remarks as prepared:

We're gathered here on the eve of the 25th anniversary of 9/11.

Back then, I don't think anybody in New York City could have conceived of what the next few days looked like - much less the next 25 years.

When the Twin Towers fell, they brought down with them a shroud between the comfortable normalcy of the past and the uncertain and fragile future.

Every year on 9/11, we remember the dead, we remember their families, and we honor the immense loss of that day. Tomorrow, we will again gather to honor those we lost.

And we reflect today on how far we've come since that dark day.

As one of the few elected officials still in office who fought in the trenches of so many policy battles that ensued after 9/11, I want to take this opportunity to tell the story of what we achieved together. Because it is a triumphant story. A story of resilience. A story of cacophony and conflict. A story of re-imagination. A story - ultimately - of profound and sustainable resurgence.

This is not just my story - it's the story of how this city, and in particular Lower Manhattan, came back. Propelled by federal support, but in full partnership with the city and the state and the authorities and the private sector.

Today, I will concentrate on the massively impactful federal role - because that is my lane, of course. But none of what I say takes away from the impactful roles played by those at the city and state and private sector levels of the solemn mission to resurrect Downtown New York.

After 9/11, there were a lot of smart people, serious people, people I respected, who said Lower Manhattan would never recover. The whole debate was whether the ghost town would extend north to Canal Street or Chambers. There were all kinds of talk that the financial services industries would leave for other places, a trend already underway before 9/11. Many said that former residents would be traumatized and never return. They said that Lower Manhattan was finished. Done.

With the benefit of hindsight, we can now see just how inaccurate and pessimistic those pronouncements turned out to be.

But that isn't due to some happy accident. It wasn't inevitable. And it was not luck. As the great Brooklyn Dodger GM Branch Rickey said: "Luck is the residue of design."

25 years later, I want to take a moment to look back and assess how we achieved the impossible and proved the doubters wrong.

It was a fight. A years-and-decades-long fight - dollar by dollar, program by program - against inertia, against bureaucracy, against regionalism, against the forces that push against the bipartisanship that this mission required, against a White House that made a promise… and then tried to get out of it. More than once!

We had Republican partners in this mission. Of course, at the start, the mayor and the governor were both Republican, and members of our delegation, including Rep. Pete King and others were always supportive.

But the sad reality is that there were many national Republican legislators who were simply anti-New York - they would vote for disaster relief for their own states, but not ours. Others were fiscal hawks who just didn't want to spend any money on anything.

I was proud to lead the fight for New York, and that's why I'm going to tell you how we won it, step by step.

But first, I want to tell you about my experience that day.

I was in Washington, working out in the gym on the House side of the Capitol. Even though I had been elected as a U.S. Senator a couple years earlier, I preferred working out there to recruit members to run for the Senate.

So, there I am exercising in the gym with some colleagues, working them over, honing my pitch - and of course, there were TVs hanging on the walls.

And all of a sudden, we saw a plane hit the World Trade Center on the TVs.

At first, we weren't sure what to think. We thought it might have been an accident, a smaller plane.

But 30 minutes later, once we saw the second plane hit the second tower, we knew we were under attack.

I showered quickly and got dressed and got into my car to drive to my office a few minutes away. And as I was driving, I heard the news of a plane that had just struck the Pentagon. I thought, "Oh, boy - it's World War III."

I called my wife, Iris, as soon as possible to figure out how to get in touch with our daughter, Jessica, who went to Stuyvesant High School in the shadow of the World Trade Center. We actually looked in the almanac to estimate the distance between the Twin Towers and the school to calculate if the buildings fell this way or that, would they fall on the building. This was before Google Maps and AI!

The school had evacuated, but unbeknownst to us at the time, our daughter had stayed behind to help an elderly teacher get down from the 9th floor and she was totally unreachable. We didn't locate Jessica for five hours.

Thank God, she was OK. But my God, the anguish of not knowing! It was just a shadow of what the families of the victims went through.

The next morning, Senator Clinton and I traveled up to New York in a plane provided by President Bush. We were surrounded by F16 jets. We were the only planes in the sky. It was eerie.

We took a helicopter from the airport to the West Side helipad and then we drove down the West Side Highway to Ground Zero.

The first sight we saw as we approached the entrance to Ground Zero was literally hundreds of people on both sides of the street holding makeshift signs with pictures.. "Have you seen my daughter, Mary?" "Have you seen my husband, Joe?" The anguish on their faces and the tears in their eyes will live with me forever. It was gut-wrenching.

And of course, since so few survived, every one of those faces on those signs belonged to someone who had died in the most unimaginable circumstances. This so moved me that I got several of the signs into the 9/11 Museum.

I will never forget how I felt standing at the smoldering ruins of Ground Zero for the first time. There was a hole in the ground the size of a few city blocks, still smoking, still burning in places.

The smell was searing to the soul. A witch's brew of plastic and plaster board and paper combined with electronics and jet fuel. Anybody who was there remembers that acrid smell of total carnage and destruction.

The entire scene was devastating.

That night, we gathered at the police academy on 20th Street - City Hall wasn't an option because downtown was a total wasteland.

Senator Clinton and I were there with Governor Pataki, Mayor Giuliani, and all of their people. At the time, we feared as many as 50,000 people could be dead.

President Bush had called for $20 billion for relief and recovery nationally. I asked the governor and mayor's people if the damage in New York was $20 billion - because just looking around, it seemed so.

Somebody had calculated it and said $20 billion, at least. Probably closer to $40 or 50 billion.

Privately, I resolved to ask the president directly for an additional $20 billion for New York alone.

But I kept it to myself. I didn't want word leaking out to the president's people so that they could have time to prepare and triangulate my ask.

The next morning, we went to the Oval Office - Secretary Clinton, the Virginia Senators, and me.

President Bush spoke first and expressed his condolences. I was next to speak. I told him how bad it was, what I saw. I told him what the governor and mayor's teams had said about the scale of destruction. And I said, "Mr. President, that's why I'm asking for an additional $20 billion for New York."

I fully expected him to hedge - to say he'd have to check with his budget people, get me a memo, some kind of dodge.

But to his everlasting credit, he didn't hedge. He said, "Is it really $20 billion?" I said, "At least that." He looked me in the eye and he said, "You got it." He committed, right there, to delivering at least $20 billion for New York alone.

There were others in the room, but this was still a commitment made in private, and we needed more than that.

So, when we went in front of the TV cameras after the meeting, I concluded my remarks by saying, "That's why I'm so honored President Bush committed an additional $20 billion to New York."

I saw the collective jaws of his staff drop. Many of them were very conservative and didn't want to give New York any money beyond the bare minimum.

But it was done. That's what locked in the $20 billion. A promise made in front of the cameras is a lot harder to walk back than one made in a back room.

That was the easy part. The hard part - the part that took years - was making sure Washington actually cut the check.

There were many conservatives in the White House and Congress who - despite the fact that this was a national tragedy - didn't want to give New York a nickel.

After we secured the initial emergency package, we had to fight for the next installment. And then the next.

At one point, we had to attach $8.2 billion to the must-pass defense appropriations bill because that was the only legislative vehicle we could get moving - so that's the vehicle we used.

It was a struggle to get the money and it took several years. But securing the money was only step one. The next was even harder.

We had to figure out how to spend it effectively and impactfully.

President Bush wanted me as the lead negotiator representing New York. On his side of the table, he turned to someone he trusted and who he knew was smart: Mitch Daniels, a rock-ribbed conservative from Indiana who was head of OMB, and who had the credibility to convince spendthrift Republicans in Congress.

Despite his politics, Mitch got it. He understood why it made sense for the federal government to invest heavily in New York's recovery. And we worked incredibly well together.

It is worthwhile to note how different our national politics were then. There were partisan challenges to be sure. Huge ones. But working in good faith with local Republicans and with certain willing actors in a Republican White House, we were able to forge a coalition capable of supporting substantial direct federal aid.

As compared to today's hyper-polarized environment in which disaster aid itself is now subjected to punitive politics and rank partisanship rather than the public interest and the imperative that we ought to be, ultimately, as Americans, our brother's and sister's keeper.

In this fight, behind me, I had the newly elected Mayor Bloomberg and his team, led by Dan Doctorof; and Governor Pataki and his team. Together, we worked in harmony to identify what New York needed and then turned that into new federal programs and appropriated dollars.

There are so many who were part of this broad team who do amazing work. Some who I recall are Carl Weisbrod, John Whitehead, Madelyn Wils, Lew and Bill Rudin, Bob Douglass and John Zuccotti. Steve Plate and Alan Reiss from the Port Authority. There are so many, so please forgive my oversights . . .

This mission wasn't easy, and it really bears repeating - there was no outpouring of support for New York after 9/11 in the Republican-led Congress. Despite the shock of what happened, the worst terrorist attack on American soil - some powerful leaders didn't want to spend any money helping New York recover.

But by the time all the dust settled - quite literally - the federal commitment grew to nearly $21 billion in total aid for New York.

Every single appropriations cycle, I was back at the table - together with Senator Clinton, Rep. Nita Lowey, Rep. Nadler and others - reminding whoever needed reminding that New York had been promised this money by the President of the United States, and New York was going to get it in full, one way or another.

I'm proud we were able to overcome every obstacle and deliver nearly $21 billion to New York. Now the challenge became: what to do it.

But before we went down that path, I must note we in Congress took almost immediate action to create the Victims Compensation Fund.

This was so critical to setting the stage for what followed because we created a no-fault system that would provide quick and adequate compensation to the victims and families of 9/11 . . . while protecting the grounded U.S. airline industry from catastrophic financial liability. And on both counts, it worked very well.

We will return to this important program when we address the lingering health issues that were not apparent at that moment in time.

Following addressing this issue, I turned to the challenge of what to do with Ground Zero in particular, and Downtown NY in general . . .

I fought for what we called Liberty Zone tax incentives for businesses that stayed in or moved into Lower Manhattan. Special tax-exempt bond financing, accelerated depreciation, wage credits, and more.

There was a cacophony of voices with competing notions of what would become of Ground Zero. Some wanted mostly housing. Some hotels and retail. Some commercial office space. Some absolutely nothing at all, a pure memorial for the whole site.

There was an extensive and productive grassroots public outreach effort that helped guide and shape the direction of plans.

I felt strongly that the whole community of Downtown needed a balance between commercial office space, residential development, retail, a solemn memorial and open space.

But I also felt very strongly that the World Trade Center site itself should be substantially balanced between the memorial and rebuilding a large amount of commercial space.

In New York, our offices are our factories, and they attract and sustain the jobs, jobs, jobs that are key to driving our regional economy and building a larger and more robust middle class. This is especially true of a site like WTC because it is adjacent to two major transportation hubs - the PATH and Fulton Street subway complex, not to mention other lines that literally go underneath the site - the R and the 1.

On 9/11 we lost nearly 30 million square feet of office space. It was imperative to me we make a gargantuan effort to replace a sizeable portion of that.

We secured $8 billion in Liberty Bond tax-free financing authority under the Job Creation and Worker Assistance Act of 2002, of which $700 million went to finance 7 World Trade Center

• $1.63 B went for 3 WTC
• $1.25 B for 4 WTC

Eventually, $3 billion went to the Port Authority for the Freedom Tower,

$3 billion in federal dollars went toward the Calatrava and PATH station, and $847 million in recovery grants funded Fulton Center for the MTA subways. $250 million went to Brookfield Place.

And the very first building to rise from the ashes of Ground Zero is the one we are standing in right now. 7 World Trade Center, built on spec by Larry Silverstein, aided greatly by 700 million in Liberty Bond financing, opened in 2006.

This was a hugely gutsy call on the time and great bet on the future of Downtown and New York City. Kudos to Larry Silverstein for doing that. He led at a key moment. And it mattered. Other buildings would follow. 1 WTC. 3 and 4 WTC.

Today, there are 10 million more square feet of office space; and half a million square feet of retail. And those office buildings are filled with a new mix of employers in addition to the financial firms, like Goldman Sachs, which built its own new HQ right here.

They are advertising, legal, publishing, media, technology, non-profits and more.

• GroupM
• Wilmer Hale and Dorr
• Studio Gang
• StubHub
• Droga5
• Conde Nast
• Spotify

The rebuilding and redevelopment of the World Trade Center site was just one half of the equation - you also need people to live in buildings throughout Downtown, aka FiDi.

That's where the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation - or LMDC - came in.

In conjunction with New York State, we stood up the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation as the vehicle to get dollars directly into rebuilding not just the office towers and infrastructure but also supporting people - giving financial relief to residents of downtown and hopefully stabilizing and boosting the population.

The LMDC Residential Grant Program put cash directly into the pockets of people who lived below Canal Street, to convince them to stay, to convince new people to move in, at a moment when the trauma of the event and the presence of Ground Zero was still an open wound.

This was pretty revolutionary stuff at the time when it came to disaster relief. There were a lot of people in Washington who didn't like the idea of giving cash grants to individuals and families for the very fact of where they lived.

I told them: if nobody lives down here, there is no neighborhood to rebuild. You can put up the shiniest tower in the world, but if it's empty, you haven't rebuilt anything meaningful.

I drove the Liberty Zone package to passage. This included critical 421-g tax abatements for commercial-to-residential conversions (hat tip to Carl Weisbrod), commercial rent tax exemptions, WTC site rent subsidies of $5 per square foot, and sales tax exemptions on build-out costs.

LMDC Programs were launched to incentivize developers to convert older commercial office buildings into residential buildings. That process is still happening and still working.

And together, those two programs did something I don't think people fully appreciate today: they kept Lower Manhattan from becoming a ghost town during the years when it would have been the easiest thing in the world for businesses and families to simply leave and never come back.

The proof is in the pudding: The Downtown population has tripled! Over the past 25 years and now has nearly 37,000 apartments - up from 13,000 before the disaster. And the population is up from 22,000 to 70,000. This was essential to creating the dreamed-about 24/7/365 community we have today.

But there was another piece of this equation that isn't discussed much nowadays but was in fact central - insurance.

After the worst terrorist attack on American soil, how could we actually finance the rebuilding of Lower Manhattan at a time when private developers and insurers were extremely wary of the risks of investing in a neighborhood with a huge hole in the ground? They thought there would be another attack.

Within weeks of the attack, insurance companies stopped writing terrorism coverage. They didn't raise the price; they pulled out altogether.

Without terrorism insurance, it's impossible to finance an office tower. Lenders won't touch it.

So even with the $20 billion promised by President Bush, we had a real problem on our hands. Without a functioning insurance market for development in Lower Manhattan, there was a risk that the area around Ground Zero would sit as vacant lots for a generation - not because we lacked the will to rebuild, but because Wall Street's own risk models made it impossible to finance the rebuilding.

That's why I made it a priority to pass the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act - TRIA - a federal backstop that made terrorism insurance available again, which in turn made construction financing available again.

It's not a glamorous piece of legislation. Nobody's ever put TRIA on a bumper sticker. But without that federal backstop, the World Trade Center site itself might still be an empty pit today because nobody could have borrowed the money to build on it. I continue to push to this day to keep TRIA in place, just this year leading a bipartisan reauthorization so this critical protection does not lapse.

But to make sure these people and businesses would stay for the long term, we had to invest in neighborhood services - starting with how people got in and out of Lower Manhattan every single day.

Before 9/11, the transit network under Lower Manhattan was a mess of disconnected stations; a rat's nest of different lines intersecting each other, but never quite working in harmony. The IND and IRT and BMT legacy issues haunted planners and straphangers.

You'd come up out of one subway line, walk a few blocks - in the rain, if you were lucky - and go down into another.

The destruction caused by the collapse of the Twin Towers, which wiped out the PATH station and damaged so much underground infrastructure, presented an opportunity to reimagine the public transit system in Lower Manhattan and fix decades of poor planning.

That translated to a brand-new PATH station at the World Trade Center - the Calatrava-designed transportation hub, this soaring white structure that people now call the Oculus, that some folks thought was too expensive, too ambitious, too much. It was controversial. But many of us felt that to have something special.

I said: We have to build it right. This is the front door to Lower Manhattan for millions of commuters and tourists every year. It should make a statement - that New York is still a place of limitless ambition. As Senator Moynihan always reminded us, to reach high with public architecture is a worthwhile thing. Aesthetics of public spaces matter.

And it should functionally connect the PATH with the subway system underground in a way that makes cohesive sense for straphangers.

Together with the Oculus, we rebuilt the mind-boggling confusing Fulton Street station, connecting nine subway lines that used to require you to go outside, cross a street, and go back underground - now you can seamlessly transfer between them under one roof thanks to the Dey Street Passageway and the Rector Street Connector.

And the station entrance itself is just beautiful. Presenting a proud bookend to the Calatrava Station at the end of Fulton Street.

These were not always headline-grabbing projects, but - from new ferry stations to interconnected transit lines - they finally stitched together a transit system that had been fractured for a hundred years.

I fought to make sure federal money paid for that stitching, because I believed - and I told anybody who would listen - that the future health of our national economy depended on the dynamism and vitality of Lower Manhattan, the beating heart of American finance and commerce and culture and government and communication and education and creativity.

So that's the public transit piece of the puzzle. We managed to get people in, around, and out of Lower Manhattan much more efficiently.

We also wanted to improve the quality of life of Lower Manhattan residents, attract fellow New Yorkers to the area, and also increase its attraction to tourists, by improving the parkland in the neighborhood. Back then, I called for the creation of a "Central Park to encompass the whole waterfront of Downtown" - on both the east and west sides. (It got great coverage as my Sunday press conference.)

Before 9/11, big stretches of the Lower Manhattan waterfront were cut off, industrial, or simply neglected. As the rebuilding progressed through the 2000s, I made the case that Lower Manhattan's recovery could not just be about office space and transit. It had to include green space. It had to include a waterfront that people could actually walk along, sit on benches to enjoy the view, and bring their children.

That meant directing federal resources toward completing and connecting the waterfront parkland that today wraps nearly the entire tip of Manhattan - from the Battery up the West Side into the beautiful Hudson River Park, and around to the East River esplanade.

Twenty-five years ago, a lot of that space was fenced-off construction sites and crumbling piers.

Today, it's a non-stop stream of runners, cyclists, walkers, gawkers, selfie takers, families with strollers, tourists taking pictures of the Statue of Liberty. It really is amazing. And it is about to get even better as many Sandy-disaster aid elements of this effort are nearing completion. (That one is the fodder for a different speech!)

As the rebuilding slowly took shape, we realized we also needed to contemplate how to protect what we rebuilt using a new and different approach to ensure that 9/11 would never happen again.

Despite the fact that New York was hit hardest that day, Homeland Security dollars were being handed out to every small town and rural county in the country, with New York getting barely more than a rounding error's worth of extra attention.

That was unacceptable to me. That's why I created the Urban Area Security Initiative - UASI - a dedicated stream of federal Homeland Security funding that actually recognized that a dense urban core with a subway system carrying millions of people a day is not the same security challenge as a rural highway interchange.

UASI funding has helped pay for radiation detectors at bridges and tunnels, coordinated intelligence-sharing, hardened infrastructure, and the kind of counterterrorism capability that this city relies on every day.

Since 9/11, we have experienced 25 years of relative security - and that's not because the threats went away. On the contrary. We just got better at protecting ourselves, thanks to robust federal support for great local law enforcement operations like the NYPD that continues to this day.

These are all the forward-looking investments that we made in the physical and human infrastructure of Lower Manhattan.

But let's not forget there was a debt that needed repaying - to the people who ran toward the burning towers instead of away from them, and who are still paying the price today.

For years after 9/11, we watched firefighters, police officers, construction workers, and ordinary residents and office workers who breathed that air get sick from cancers, respiratory diseases, illnesses that took years to show up - and even longer for Washington to acknowledge were connected to that day.

People didn't realize at first, didn't connect the dots about these rare cancers that were popping up in first responders. Sen. Clinton and Rep. Nadler were early advocates on this issue.

Thanks to the tireless efforts of so many first responders like my friend, Ray Pfeifer of the FDNY, who even in his dying days was walking the halls of Congress; thanks to police, fire, EMT and building trades unions; and thanks to the advocates like Ben Chevat and John Feal, who knew how to strike fear in the hearts of cowardly legislators, we were able to put this issue on the front burner.

I made it my mission, together with Senator Gillibrand and our colleagues in the House - Carolyn Maloney, Jerry Nadler, Peter King - to make sure the federal government did not turn its back on these people the way it initially tried to with the rebuilding money.

And yet, it took years of walking the halls of Congress with sick first responders at our side, some of them in wheelchairs, some of them too weak to make the trip more than once, to finally pass the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act - named for an NYPD detective who died from a respiratory illness linked to his work at Ground Zero. It came down to a very emotional face-to-face meeting that I had with Senator Tom Coburn, who was head of the relevant committee, to get him to fund the program for five years to - in his words - "to see if it worked."

And that's why we had to come back in 2015 when it was set to expire. With the help of our courageous first responders and their advocates, Senator Gillibrand and I didn't just extend it - we made the WTC Health Program permanent, funded for 75 years, and we fully funded the Victim Compensation Fund for years to come.

No first responder or survivor or their families should ever again have to wonder whether Washington is going to remember what they sacrificed.

That fight - honoring the sacrifice of our heroes, and all those whose health was profoundly impacted by 9/11 - is the part of this whole twenty-five-year story that I'm proudest of, and it's the fight that took the longest of all to finally win.

On September 10, 2001, there were 23,000 people living in Lower Manhattan. Today, there are more than 64,000. Tens of thousands of families call this neighborhood home, raising kids who go to schools that didn't exist 25 years ago.

We have an incredible complex of World Trade Center buildings that are leased out to the world's leading companies. Silverstein Properties and American Express just announced Amex's investment in 2 WTC as their flagship corporate headquarters. It was long and winding and lonely road for the development of 2 WTC - but with this gob-smacking announcement, and its 2 million feet of office space, and tens of thousands of workers, and 2,000 union jobs, we are surely there. It is very exciting!

There's a world-class performing arts center steps away from Ground Zero. The September 11 Memorial & Museum is one of the biggest tourist attractions in all of New York City. Tourism to the area is up to 8 million visitors a year. Astounding.

Tourists and New Yorkers alike visit and revisit the solemn, contemplative and compelling memorial: Reflecting Absence.

It is sublime. For me, it ranks right up there with the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in DC as prefect artistic realizations of collective grief in a deeply important sacred public space. It captures heartbreak and humanity and loss and the unfathomable scale of the tragedy - and it is at once communal and deeply personal. I am moved every time I visit.

Nobody in the fall of 2001 would have believed any of this if you told them.

That economic vibrancy, commercial energy and artistic endeavor, and retail activity, and tourism, and public grieving, and going to the supermarket to get food for the week could be made to coherently exist in dynamic balance.

But that is the positive and optimistic reality of the rebirthed and reimagined Downtown New York City. One that was fueled by bold and proactive and long-term federal investment and federal policy, and one that was deeply collaborative with state, local and private sector partners.

This happened only because three levels of government - federal, state, and city - fought through an almost unbelievable tangle of bureaucracy, competing agencies, competing priorities, and frankly, competing egos, to get this done.

We secured the federal money, we rebuilt the public transit infrastructure, we unlocked private investment, we attracted businesses, we incented builders, we attracted residents, we set aside the resources to protect all of it; and we honored the sacrifices of those murdered that day and we protected the health of our first responder heroes.

During that time, I spent more hours than I can count on the phone with the White House, my colleagues in Congress, the federal agencies, the LMDC, Larry, the Port Authority, the MTA, City Hall, the Governor's office - making sure that nobody's red tape or parochial interests were going to hold up a family's ability to move back into their apartment, or a small business's ability to reopen its doors, or a construction worker's ability to get healthcare for a cancer he developed from clearing and rebuilding Ground Zero.

In closing-

Twenty-five years is a long time.

Long enough that there are adults living in and working in and walking around Lower Manhattan today who weren't alive on September 11, 2001.

Long enough that some of the fights I've just described surely feel like ancient history to people just moving into this neighborhood.

But these are things worth remembering, if only to remind us of what our government is capable of achieving when we have bold goals, when we dedicate real resources, when we plan wisely, and when we work together.

It was messy at times, it was not linear progression, it was sometimes ugly-the slow boring of large holes in thick boards is NEVER easy; it is not supposed to be - there were plenty of setbacks along the way, but we kept fighting - and we triumphed.

And - inspired by a look back on this journey from Terror to Triumph - if I have a civic and ecumenical prayer to offer it is this: I pray that the same sense of common purpose that infused this city and this nation after we were attacked will again be possible. And that this glue will again enable us to work across regions, across layers of government, across party lines, across competing profit motives, and across every other barrier that might separate and divide us, to work together to plan and finance and execute on big, bold plans that have lasting impact on our economy on our civic culture and on our sense of who we are as New Yorkers as Americans and as human beings.

It looked impossible when we started. But we forged alliances with people of good faith, we forged alliances based on shared self-interest, we forged alliances, above all, with those people, like me who believe from the very bottom of hearts in the greatness of this city. And we never gave up.

Lower Manhattan is reinvented and alive and dynamic and flourishing today because so many people in City Hall, in Albany, in Washington, in their businesses and in their homes refused to let the nihilism and violence and hate of 9/11 be the last word. I'm grateful to all of them.

May the next 25 years see Lower Manhattan, and all of New York City with it, reach new heights.

Thank you, God bless you, God Bless the greatest City in the world - New York - and God bless the United States of America.

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