The Oculus

There was no dingy mall anymore. The Astrodome was blown up. The great hall where the people mixed and emptied in to the plaza was gone.

In its place was a cathedral, brilliant and white, with arched ribbed walls that formed a nave and reached up in curved arcs to touch at the east-west crest. The ribs were close together, and through them one could see the city behind in brilliant blue sunlight, but only obliquely, never full on. Always part of the skyline was blocked by the spacing of the ribs, almost frustratingly, making you ache to see the whole thing, but that was physically impossible. Even glimpsing the entirety of the new tower was not a simple feat.

It was the just like it used to feel, when you stood between the towers. They seemed to arch right over you, with a gap in the top of the arch. It was an optical illusion from the fact that the towers both rise and straight shafts out of the ground, without any tampering all the way to the top.

Now inside this brilliant structure, the people were going there says to various places again, but on multiple levels, with stairs, and pleasant sunlit mall around the mezzanine level.  The entrances to various subways were in a wide side entrances with ample room to feed into the main room. To escalators to the PATH train were gone. Instead one descended a few pleasant stairs, going out of the sunlit hall into a ground floor where one picked among various ways to descend to the platforms.

I was so pleased at it all. It was so much better than I thought it would be. It made me ache for the beauty of it.

I would have stayed and lingered in there, appreciating the view through the ribs of the vault, but my group, two of whom had already seen this new structure, were pressing on. We found the escalators upward and soon we were out into the sunlight of the plaza.