Image: Don Emmert/AFP/Getty

As everyone here experienced or read about or saw or felt, it was seven and a half years ago that the Lower Manhattan towers fell, and a labyrinthine and frequently bonkers process of power grabbing and forcible removal, public competitions and private dealings, murmurs and rumors, began. All in the name of rebuilding, all for the force of healing. For a few short years, all everyone ever talked about was what would or might happen, and then, over a few short months, the chatter subtly died, replaced with speculations about the High Line, the MoMA tower, the future of the death of the expensive glass box.

All the while, relatively unobserved, work chugged along. The Freedom Tower—Tower One to you, Sir!—was designed and engineered, the temporary PATH station opened, and surprise among surprises, progress was made. Still, they asked us what was happening. Would the towers be rebuilt? Where was the money coming from? Was the tower really going to be that high and that tall?

David Dunlap has the answers, and the New York Times an interest in expanding their multimedia platforms. Just this morning the bow-tied reporter—whose pen was out and notebook in hand at every press event during the earlier headier days, so boyfriend knows what he’s talking about—inaugurated what will be a series of videos covering construction for the next few years (just in case anyone was worried about the Times’ public stance on their future). And it was good.

It’s no Project Rebirth—a video work devoted to documenting the entire World Trade Center reconstruction through twelve cameras that have been on and running since 2001 and will continue until at least 2015—but Dunlap’s coverage is a ground-up and reported and welcome addition to Rebirth’s artiness and image saturation and placenta-evoking (sorry!) name. Let’s just hope the Financial Pigf*ck of Epic Proportions doesn’t rain on anyone’s lens.

When Are They Going to Build the New World Trade Center? Just Look Up [New York Times]
Trailer [Project Rebirth]