“Where were you on September 11, 2001?”

Everyone, of a certain age, has a story.

And so it begins.

Nine years after that first unimaginable Tuesday morning, Keith Michael, from his West Village neighborhood, noticed the new One World Trade Center construction finally growing above the surrounding buildings of downtown Manhattan. With his cell phone camera, he unintentionally snapped the beginning of a three-year documentation of the emotionally freighted tower rising.

For 1000 days, nearly every morning from September 11, 2010 to September 11, 2013, while walking his Pembroke Welsh Corgi, Millie, he took the same photograph from the same spot along the Hudson River. As the tower soared and assumed its place in the New York City skyline, photographing the tower generated its own cathartic momentum.

Whether shimmering above a salt marsh from 25 miles away in Freeport, Long Island or caught as a reflected mirage in another glass tower across the street, One World Trade Center has become a tacit bystander on which to bestow our collective histories and aspirations.

One World Trade Center.

This is one history—one very personal view.

314 pages. 1,177 color photographs.