I would say the Statue of Liberty is “the” symbol of NYC - the entrance to NYC and by extension the entrance to America. Can all that many people even pick out the ESB from a montage of pictures of various tall buildings? I think the name Empire State Building symbolizees NYC but I just think many people wouldn’t be able to distinguish it from another tall building just by looking at it.
FWIW, since he went on CBS, David Letterman always crowned the top of his Christmas tree with a Empire State Building model, a pizza, and a meatball. 
Did the NYC souvenier shops have WTC models along side Statue of Liberty, and ESB models back in the day? I’m guessing maybe so, but I’d be willing to bet the SoL & the ESB were the main sellers by a wide margin…
There might’ve been a short time when this went unspoken out of ‘respect for the dead,’ but I don’t think people ever liked the buildings all that much. They blocked people’s view, they weren’t very attractive… I think the first time I heard someone say this was the spring of 2003.
I notice the Chrysler building more often than the ESB in film & TV, for all the latter’s importance as a skyline feature.
There’s a great symbol no one’s mentioned yet: Central Park! (And esp. the Great Lawn, used for concerts, protests, etc.) CP is the most striking, instantly recognizable urban park of any major city in the world. You could say it throws the great buildings into greater relief – negative capability and all that – in side views, although The Park is best appreciated from above, in direct-overhead shots of the city. You see that big friggin’ green (or, in winter, brown-grey-white) rectangle, and you know it’s NYC.
As a non-New Yorker, to me it was the whole skyline that was iconic, rather than any single building.
About the only really touristy thing I’m planning on doing when I visit for my first time next year is to take a harbor cruise, mainly to get a good view of that skyline.
Definitely. There are a few specific locations there that keep popping up in movies over the decades. I don’t know the name of the specific spot, but there’s a bridge that one sees in just about every New York movie, as well as the pedestrian underpass through which Jack Lemmon and Sandy Dennis went in the original version of The Out Of Towners. Another frequently used locale is that running track around a lake. That’s not the lake, is it? I always thought that looked more like a reservoir.
Casey1505:
I honestly can’t think of any other time anyone ever sugested the WTC as a “symbol” of NYC. I have nothing against it, and of course I wish the destruction and its attendant loss of life had never happened, but that said, no one I know EVER thought of it as being iconic in any way. It shows no uniqueness of design. It was the same as any other building, just BIG. Symbols and Icons are generally associated with some unique quality.
The Space Needle is no longer the tallest structure in Seattle, but none of those others have become symbols or icons of that city.
Yes. It’s the one with a giant stainless-steel penis on top of it.
After seeing that giant ape climb it about a million times, having visited it many times myself while my brother lived in Brooklyn (I was a photonut for NYC at that time, let me tell ya! Too bad he moved), and seeing it represented countless times in many different ways, from logos to movie plot lines and settings, I can say… Yes. This non New Yorker could pick it out easily. Imagine what a native could do.
Several New Yorkers confided their architectural disapproval of the WTC in me in very hushed, diffident tones soon after 9/11. I guess I made a good father confessor by being Canadian.
I lived in or around NYC for 25 years, including the construction of the WTC. At the time, everyone absolutely **hated ** it, because it dwarfed the rest of the skyline, not to mention its unimaginative design; its only redeeming characteristic is that there were two of them.
But in time, everyone learned to accept the Twin Towers, especially since they were so visible looking down several of the Avenues, and from other vantage points. And it was a neat experience to go to the observation deck at the top of Tower 2 (I’d been there several times). But none of this diminished our love for the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings.
But nevertheless, it’s so heartbreaking to be in NYC after 9/11, and not seeing the towers where I had gotten used to seeing them for so long. The Lower Manhattan skyline just looks like a generic skyline now, not **the **skyline. But it actually has more pleasing proportions now - at least until the new tower goes up.
Minor nitpick: when people refer to the NYC skyline, what they are usually referring to is the Lower Manhattan skyline, as seen from, say, the Staten Island Ferry. The Empire State Building is in Midtown, with a quite different skyline. Though from certain angles, you can see the Midtown skyline in the distance, way behind the Lower Manhattan skyline.
Oh, I never said New Yorkers HATED the World Trade Center (some may have, but I never heard anyone say so). I simply said that New Yoprkers never felt an emotional connection to the WTC.
The Statue of Liberty? Yes. The Empire State Building? Sure. But the WTC was just another tall building (and it wasn’t even the world’s tallest building for long enough to grab much prestige).
Apparently, foreigners (like Bin Laden) saw the WTC as a symbol of America in a way that Americans (and New Yorkers in particular) didn’t.