The mayor, an architecture buff and avid photographer, had done his research, consulting books both borrowed and bought over the years. And this is where his speech either lost people, or helped them grieve:
"As David Plowden, in the introductory essay for his book Grain Elevators, eloquently noted:
Pyramids they are not. They are hard evidence of another time’s achievements. Like portraits of our ancestors, they too remind us why we are the way we are, that we have all walked in someone else’s footsteps. It is well to remember that nothing was ever done in the past, only in someone else’s present. True innovators, it has been said, do not destroy the past, they amplify it. In this age of remarkable scientific achievement, it is often hard not to indulge in the arrogance that we shall be the only ones to have made history.
We are not, clearly. The men whom we lost in this terrible tragedy made history for us. They died working in this place, this place which has defined us for so long. We remember them today, and we will remember them tomorrow. Thank you."
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