Eight years ago, filmmaker Ric Burns set out to uncover the story behind the construction of New York City's famous skyline. 
The final episodes of the resulting 400-year history, "New York: A Documentary Film," were ready to air when two hijacked jetliners struck the World Trade Center towers, changing the skyline forever. 
Watching the film now, "you see things which feel like foreshadowings," Burns said. "Every crucial theme that has come up in the course of the city's history is at play in the events of September 11." 
The last two installments, which will air as originally planned on PBS Sunday and Monday, detail another period in the city's history when it faced challenges that seemed insurmountable - the social turmoil of the post-World War II period and New York's fiscal crisis of the 1970s. 
"The message, of course, is that the city is simply too strong, too resilient, too important," Burns said. "Of course, it's going to recover." 
Burns made no changes to the film, though he revised the ending credits. Instead of irreverent commentary from writers Fran Lebowitz, Brendan Gill and Spalding Gray, there will be sober reflections about New York's role as a global capital, he said. 
He also plans an eighth installment looking at the impact and meaning of the World Trade Center tragedy. 
"It seems inevitable now that we've lurched unexpectedly and so horribly into a new phase of the city's history that we reconvene the experts," he said. 
Though New York has faced tragedies before, Burns said there has been nothing in its history on the scale of the World Trade Center devastation. 
"The only way the past helps us deal with it is that New York is so experienced in dealing with unprecedented events," said Burns. "It's been on the cutting edge of creation of a modern global culture for hundreds of years, and what that has meant is that problems tend to happen here first." 
Younger brother of filmmaker Ken Burns, Ric Burns caught the filmmaking bug when his brother asked him to work on the 1990 documentary, "The Civil War." 
More than 20 million viewers watched the first five parts of "New York: A Documentary Film" when it first aired on PBS in the fall of 1999. 
"New York has always had this sense that the sky's the limit," Burns said. "That tremendous, overarching ambition has sponsored some of the greatest things about the city and also brought us face to face with calamity. ... If you reach that high you're exposed that much more in many more ways." 
Burns' documentary does not shrink from the dark side of the city's history, from colonial slavery to bloody Civil War draft riots and the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire that claimed 146 lives. 
The city survived past civic tragedies because people recognized their common bonds, Burns said. After the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire, for example, New Yorkers came together in an extraordinary consensus and approved government controls on workplace conditions. 
"What's been not at all surprising but so moving to see was that happened virtually instantaneously" after the World Trade Center attack, he said. "As a terrorist attack, it's been unsuccessful, absolutely, in its principal aim. It's not brought us down, it's expanded the community and level of emotional commitment." 
The twin towers had few fans when they were under construction, he said. 
"They came at the tail end of a big building boom in American history, and people were getting tired of it," he said. Sentiment changed once they were completed, though. 
"That skyline is the most well known image in the world," said Burns. "Those buildings, the skyline and the culture the they stand for are really the possessions of a worldwide constituency." 
