Original subtitles

for nearly 400 years ever since the soft September morning in 1609 when Henry

Hudson first steered his ship into the shimmering green waters of the upper bay

new york's destiny had been inextricably connected to other parts of the globe

founded by the dutch as a remote outpost in a worldwide network of trading

colonies it had moved in the course of its first 300 years from the far edge of

empire to the very center of the world rising to greatness as America itself

rose to greatness in the course of the 19th century gathering in money and

peoples from around the country and around the world it had emerged by the

dawn of the 20th century as the unofficial capital and supreme laboratory of a new kind of mixed and

cosmopolitan culture in the century to come reaching higher and projecting

farther than any other city on earth it had become the epicenter of a new kind

of global economic order restlessly pushing itself out across the world

until the skyline of New York had become one of the most powerful and instantly

recognizable symbols on the face of the planet and yet in ways that would become fully

apparent only in hindsight by the dawn of the 21st century New York had also

emerged as one of the most strangely paradoxical cities on earth at once bit

wildering ly diverse and cosmopolitan and yet in many ways surprisingly

insular and inward-looking as if the process of globalization had mainly

meant gathering in the world's peoples and riches without involvement in the

world's deep conflicts and divisions and I think the experience of

globalization for Americans in particularly for New Yorkers was very

lopsided they thought they could have the benefits of a globalized economy and

none of the costs they thought you could globalize economics but not politics not

violence and in a sense that the tools

of globalization skyscrapers Jets could only be used for benign purposes the

notion that these tools could be used for destruction in the pursuit of

extreme ideological objectives specifically anti-american anti global

objectives had dawned I think two relatively few people and so it came as

literally a bolt from the blue when it happened though it would be fully

apparent to most Americans only after the great towers had fallen to a

remarkable degree the paradox of globalization would be seen in

retrospect to have come to a mighty culmination in the Twin Towers of the

World Trade Center whose extraordinary 50-year history had it turned out

embodied every theme and issue every tension and value every paradox and

contradiction of New York's long and complex 400 year march to the center of the world

America is part of everyone's imaginative life through movies music

television in the web whether you grow

up in Bilbao Beijing or Bombay everyone

has a New York in their heads even if they have never been there which is why

the destruction of the Twin Towers had such an impact Timothy Garton ash April

9th 2002 from director Rick burns

the center of the world on American experience

my love for the towers was in my relation with them not as an overall

appreciation almost in an architectural sense my love was for their life they

were alive not many people know that the people who build them know that they

were vibrating with the passage of a cloud over the Sun difference of

temperature the wind and the skeleton were actually making noise I I

discovered that and at times the tower where asleep i marinating in a time they

wake up and they cry and they and they almost yell for help I think I love them

from the inside I didn't find them beautiful and interesting at first sight

but as I get to know them as I found out that to build those two monoliths you

you had to add a group of insane designer architects structural engineer

builders hundreds of them for years it becomes something to love

I love their strength and their arrogance somehow they were so

overlooking the skyline of New York somehow anything that his giant and

man-made strikes me in in a awesome way and calls me and I cannot see the

highest hog was being built without wanting to celebrate their birth right

there

for nearly 30 years they stood at the foot of lower Manhattan two of the

tallest and most instantly recognizable structures on earth rising at the heart

of the most ravishing and well-known skyline in the world the mightiest and most ambivalent

monuments of their age and in the end the most tragic

conceived in the giddy aftermath of World War two and rising as America

itself rose to global power in the decades following the war they were

destined to become the real and symbolic epicenter of an economic system that

would come to dominate much of the face of the planet more than any other structures of the

age they would be intimately bound up from start to finish with the awesome

forces reshaping New York in the second half of the 20th century and with the

even greater forces propelling America itself relentlessly upward and ever

outward across an increasingly complex and interconnected globe there was a

real magnetic pull of these buildings hand around the world

and certainly they were a very convenient symbol for those who would

want to destroy us of capitalism of the American system of the 20th century of

modernity of all of those things and

more than any symbol in America they

said to the world not just this is America

but this is a modern place this is a place of the 20th century and that made

them I think a very potent target in a whole different way

the event was not a strike just at New York it was at the heart of New York it

was the place that was the womb of this city it's where this city was born that

bunch of acres at the tip of Manhattan that thing holds all our history

everything down there is a kind of template that was cut geographically by

the Dutch in the English that still exists to this day but it was the city

that made all the rest of the city possible the genius that accumulated and

impacted and collided in those streets that handful of streets below Chambers

Street was the city that created the imagination to first grow up to make a

vertical city out of a horizontal city so that when they hit that they hit

where our civilization began civilization comes from the same root is

a civic and of city if it's a it's a thing that happens in cities and they

came smashing into it vandalizing it

like almost all great skyscrapers it was fated to be a structure at once of its

time and yet partly for that reason poignant ly out of time to rising at the

very end of a great building boom on the cusp of great change raised into the sky

during one of the most tumultuous and complex periods in the city's history by

a unique combination of pride ambition audacity greed idealism ingenuity and

folly the colossal towers were in many ways the last of their kind and a mighty

culmination the stunning climax of more than 70 years of building tall on the

island of Manhattan and the last and most controversial of the massive urban

renewal projects that would transform New York during the post-war period the

effort it would take just to get them off the ground to say nothing of raising the two

largest structures in the world more than a quarter of a mile into the sky

from the tangled streets of the most densely concentrated business district

on earth would require the greatest convergence of public and private power

the city had ever seen and to broil there builders in every conflict and

tension of the age I think you should think of the Twin Towers as in one sense

the moonshot of structural engineering and its skyscraper construction they

were unprecedented in the same way that the NASA program the Apollo program was

in virtually the same era and they had similar ambitions just in terms of

quantity they were the biggest they were 10 million square feet of space nothing

had come remotely close to that number in terms of the amount of real estate in

one complex they were the tallest they were going to have to resist the forces

of the wind and gravity in a way that was of a magnitude far greater than

anything that had been done before I mean you often see projects that are

audacious on a technical level on a political level on a human level this

project was audacious in all those levels it was sort of a multi-dimensional exercise in hubris you

might say in some ways I think they overreached but that's the nature of the game when

you're talking about audacity and hubris and in that sense you just have to say

these things were wonders of the world and we shall not see their like again in

the end the extraordinary 50-year saga of the World Trade Center when and why

it was built how and where it went up what its great towers stood for and how

and why they fell would tell more than most people had ever imagined about the

city and country that was their home embodying along the way the highest

hopes and deepest contradictions of New York century long push into the sky and

of America is astonishing 50-year expansion around the globe well I Rana

CLE as important as the World Trade Center was for those thirty years that

have existed or almost 30 years massive building 50,000 people aren't working in

some ways it's more important to history now that it's gone

it was significant but it's a world event in its absence the interest the

focus of the world and maybe Wars that will happen from millions and hundreds

of millions of people around the world of changing the way they live because of

what happened at the World Trade Center

city lost so much I think the experience

that so many people had of watching either in the television or in the flesh

has caused so much pain in the City of Newark

everyone knows somebody who who died

everyone does and from all walks of life

poor people and rich people executives

and office boys all walks of life and

that that's what it lost we know what they stood for we know that

they stood for something that made them vulnerable to the most horrible fate and

certainly they were a symbol of something dreadful to the people who

blew them up but a new yorkers founded a symbol of New York the New York they

loved and I think that has made this this terrible catastrophe even worse to

bear

from start to finish the story of the World Trade Center would be an

extraordinary parable of American power a parable of the forces reshaping New

York in the post-war period and of those reshaping the globe it wasn't about

consensus back in those days it was about a very powerful agency knowing how

to get its way busting through all obstacles all objections no matter how

valid and that's just the way it worked it's just the way things got done back

then it's the end of the year of great building in a way it's still a time when

even in a complicated municipality like New York you can pull off a project like

that and you can do it the way you want to do it this was the the last great

project I think and of that scale for New York City and you know nothing's

happened like it since and probably won't again it just this is a different

era which the public participates much more in choosing the fate of New York

and not just a small group of men in a back room that are deciding that they want to do something

the idea was born in the triumphant months following the end of World War

two as a new global order based on free and open trade began to emerge from the

chaos of war and as New York itself emerged for the first time as the

undisputed capitol of the world the 1945 was the end of a period of commercial

catastrophe the period in which trade between the great economies of the world

had all but collapsed and the lesson that American policymakers drew from the

disasters of 1930s 1940s was very straightforward the United States must commit itself to

the creation of a global free trade order which would ensure the prosperity

of the United States but also rapid economic growth in the economies of

America's principal allies so after the Second World War you have a creation of trade

monetary diplomatic and military institutions and fundamentally designed

to maintain an open free trading world economy

in the fall of 1946 as delegates to the brand-new United Nations settled on a

site in Midtown for their new home leaders in New York first proposed

building an immense new complex in the heart of lower Manhattan a world trade

center that would exploit the anticipated post-war explosion in international trade and a firm New

York's newfound preeminence within a fast and growing global Empire and the

idea was to have a trade march here that by setting up big exhibit centers and

and inviting people from around the world to come and see their goods and

their weird would further the interests of a growing world trade and with that

mud the state legislature his son to Winthrop Aldrich they had a Chase Bank a

World Trade Center organization ultimately the idea of a complex of

buildings that they would call the World Trade Center got thrown out because the

port interest were still of such clout at that time that that they were able to

say if you're gonna spend money you're gonna build new piers but by the time

David Rockefeller Rises and replaces his uncle Winthrop Aldrich as the chief

executive a chase it's a different place in New York and the port is already on

its way out and something needs to happen in lower Manhattan if it's going

to regain the status that it once held as the the world's financial center and

it was losing it would take more than a decade for the idea of the World Trade

Center to begin to get off the ground and for decades more to fulfill the

lofty promise of its name when it did begin to take hold however in the late

1950s it would be set in motion to a remarkable degree by just two men sons

and brothers of one of the most powerful family dynasties on earth

who would seize upon the idea not only is a glorious symbol of world trade but

as the centerpiece of one of the most controversial and daring real estate

Gamble's in the history of New York City the effort to save lower Manhattan which

less than 10 years after the end of the war had been sent spiraling into a

period of steep decline not only by the waning of the port but by an alarming

exodus of businesses to the middle of the island lower Manhattan which I'll describe is

the two square miles from Chambers Street down to the battery was dying

companies were moving out he did to mid Manhattan were really out of New York

City the only new building built since World War two was the Chase Manhattan

booming and David Rockefeller was then the chairman of the Chase Manhattan Bank

and so David had an idea why not create

using the Port Authority York and New Jersey a World Trade Center whatever

that was there are different opinions about the role and the motivations of

the Rockefellers in lower Manhattan but certainly no one deserves more credit or

blame than the brothers Rockefeller David and Nelson for the changes that

came about in downtown in the 1960s the flagship headquarters of Chase Manhattan

Bank had always been downtown since the 18th century and of course David

Rockefeller is the head of the Chase Manhattan Bank had tremendous interests

in keeping the financial district secure I think one of the fascinating things

about the Rockefellers as a family is that their monopoly capitalists and that

gives them a certain attitude towards planning the Rockefellers thought big

when they built Rockefeller Center they built one skyscraper they built a

constellation of skyscrapers they were in two centers you know they were into

thinking of long-term plans so they applied that mentality everywhere and

the same attitude is transferred when the next generation comes online and

here David is a particularly interesting figure David's got big plans David wants

to expand one of the family banks Chase Bank which worked with big companies and

financed the movement of trade goods around the world and David wants to

expand this and then go beyond the old national boundaries and so to start

thinking internationally but he's got a short-term problem he merges with the

Bank of Hattin companies got Chase Manhattan he buys up lots of little

banks they're scattered all over the downtown area he wants to in fact bring

them together and consolidate but it's in the middle of this kind of sucking

sound with all these businesses being drawn up to where the real action is up

in Midtown the question is are they gonna make a stand are they gonna try to

in fact save lower Manhattan as the financial center everybody knows the Chase Bank may be

the most powerful Bank in the world David Rockefeller might be the second

most powerful person in States after the president they're putting their bets in

Norman that saying lower Manhattan either has to be revitalized and

rejuvenated or it's going to enter into a period of terminal decline

in 1955 declaring lower Manhattan to be the heart pump of the Capitol blood that

sustains the free world David leptin to the frame that November he stunned Wall Street by announcing

that Chase would build a gleaming new 60 story headquarters just one block north

of the stock exchange the first tall tower to go up in the area since before the depression

six months later convinced in private meetings that even that bold gesture

would not be enough to save the financial district he assembled a

powerful coalition of business and real estate leaders called the downtown lower

Manhattan Association and urged them to develop an even more ambitious plan before it was too late

you need bold visions you need bold action you can't take small little piecemeal

things that's not the way they operate Rockefeller Center is not a small

piecemeal action you have to make a profound impact on the environment and

to do it spatially and to do it in terms of the structure of the economy and it's

gonna be big scale it's got to be blazing otherwise it doesn't do the

trick in the fall of 1958 the Rockefeller sponsored group published

its recommendations in a stunning 80 page report a master plan for the

salvation of lower Manhattan and one of the most radical and sweeping urban

redevelopment projects ever conceived it called for the complete transformation

of the entire downtown area and for the eradication of industries that had

defined lower Manhattan for centuries they've been talking about getting rid

of the piers and getting rid of the port and getting rid of the marketplace for a

long time all that had got into abeyance during the Depression in the war now

it's back on the table and David with his own penchant for planning is in fact

in entranced by this the downtown Manhattan area is one of the most

uniquely situated pieces of real estate in the entire world the central core

area of towering skyscrapers is surrounded by acres of marginal

buildings the majority of which are more than a century old and only partly

occupied so what do they want they want a variety of things first of all they

want to go on the attack against contending uses that are down there

because from his perspective were ringed in we're surrounded by what he's now

defining not as important viable manufacturing and commerce and pork

industries but as ancient antediluvian outmoded Sergi dilapidated you know

scuzzy they're a drag we want to get rid of them we want to in fact expand the

financial core and have it take over all of lower Manhattan get rid of these

competing uses that's the only really will be safe and secure would make it a

center a grand center under David's plan virtually no aspect of the old port

district would remain unchanged the fringe of aging finger peers that had

lined the edge of the island for a century would be demolished to make way

for new residential and recreational development the ancient narrow streets

first laid down by the Dutch in the English would be widened to accommodate

the flow of modern traffic hundreds of blocks along the East and Hudson rivers

would be wiped clean and consolidated to make way for gleaming new office

buildings that would house the vastly expanded white-collar services the new

global economy required at the center of it all the anchor and emblem of the

entire 560 block redevelopment program would rise an updated version of the

idea first floated by David Rockefellers uncle 15 years are an idea that in the

months and years to come would become David's most burning ambition the World Trade Center

I think that David Rockefeller was masterful in his introduction of the

World Trade Center idea and that idea was considered brilliant he was called

the billion dollar planner by the New York Times mayor Wagner said it was

wonderful he as all Rockefellers knew how to build a power base and how to

create momentum even before he released the idea to the public and and he did

that and so I think although he only really proposed it the fact that he

proposed it really is why the World Trade Center was built rising from a

site originally located not on the west side of Manhattan but on the east and

dominated in the original drawings by a single 60 storey tower the sprawling 13

acre complex would like Rockefeller Center and the United Nations before it

be an example of what David called catalytic bigness a project whose sheer

size and impact would be large enough to provide the stimulus for further

redevelopment that very scale of course as David had known from the start also

placed it far beyond the reach of even the most ambitious of private developers

none of whom had the power or resources to take on so vast a project how are you

gonna do this well the fact of the matter is you have to bring in the stage

because another thing the Rockefellers are accustomed to doing is for all the

talk about the free markets and getting government off our back that

characterizes some small businessman the big people in fact understand that

subsidies and government support are pretty a crucial part of the story so he

needs a partner that is in fact a heavyweight and he puts together a

concerted program to bring in the one agency which might be able to commit

public monies and to have the power of eminent domain that could clear away

competing uses and provide the funds to construct new uses that are compatible

with this office vision and that's the Port Authority of New York in New Jersey

for much of the 20th century the a banned flow of people and things in and

out of the Port of New York had been shaped and controlled by an immensely

powerful but relatively little-known bi-state agency called the Port

Authority of New York and New Jersey which in its 40 year history and build

our expanded every Bridge and Tunnel along the Hudson River every airport in

the metropolitan region the massive new bus terminal on the west side of

Manhattan and the world's first cargo container ports on the New Jersey side

of the harbor in the years to come under the leadership of its shrewd

publicity-shy director Austin Tobin the authority would invest its power

prestige and immense institutional pride in the ambitious project David

Rockefeller had initiated and soon find itself embroiled in the most challenging

controversial and poignantly star-crossed project of its entire

history of course the Port Authority is a very strange organization it's the

hybrids have private half public and it's in the way it operates in the way

it thinks it's enormous ly powerful it has you know to overstate it somewhat

its own army and as the Port Authority Police Department it has public

authority it is also has been very wealthy

the Port Authority was run by Austin Tobin who was a builder and planner who

I think actually was better than Robert Moses at getting his will he wasn't as

famous as Moses because he operated a little more under the radar

Moses was too passionate about being in front of people and having fights with

them and therefore he lost from time to time Tobin just very quietly behind the

scenes manipulated and maneuvered and got things done and got everything he

ever wanted he identified absolutely with the Port of New York Authority he'd

started off basically as a legal clerk back in the 1920s he'd grown up with his

agency I think he saw the World Trade Center as the apotheosis of his career

and he saw it as something that could represent what he believed was the

greatness of the Port Authority the trouble is is that the mandates for the

Port Authority is trade is the further international trade in the harbor of New

York City and what David wants them to do really is to get into office building

and to make this a financial and real estate center the Port Authority was

never found it to go into the real estate business but it's the most

profitable business in New York and they saw great profits and ways of supporting

their projects which up to a certain point you could understand although I

think they should have not gone into the real estate business to begin with

the questionable fit between the port authorities mandate and David

Rockefellers plan would haunt the project for years to come as fate would

have it however David Rockefeller himself would soon be in a position to

overcome any initial opposition to its involvement at least within the agency

itself on January 1st 1959 his older brother Nelson was sworn in as governor

of New York State and almost immediately began filling the port authority's board

with his own appointees senior Wall Street executives who could be counted

on to share his brother's vision of Lower Manhattan's White Collar future

Nelson Rockefeller of course was hugely important in the Port Authority becoming

the client and the patron of the World Trade Center one needed the endorsement

of the of both states but of course New York was the most powerful of the

partners of the bi-state agency Nelson Rockefeller it was a great and

passionate builder his greatest legacy was building stuff all of us in Albany

and elsewhere and he latched onto the Trade Center as the great project it was

felt that the Port Authority was the agency with the wherewithal to actually

get it built both because it had experience in building large and

complicated projects and because it had enormous bonding power and could finance

this project without anything showing up on the state budget so it made it a real

win-win for Rockefeller in the spring of 1960 as questions about

the propriety of the port authority's involvement began to fade away

austan Tobin at David Rockefellers request instructed his staff to prepare

preliminary drawings for a 5,000,000 square foot complex along the East River

using the immense reserves of public and private power at their command the

rockefeller brothers had managed to make a half billion dollar real-estate gamble

seemed not only plausible but inevitable there was a big fallacy though in this

whole project the real problem with lower Manhattan was not that it didn't

have enough office space the problem was that it was hard to get to particularly

from the suburbs where a lot of business executives and bankers lived and it was

not a particularly appealing neighborhood in the general way and that

there were no places to eat few places to shop no cultural facilities to speak

of no places to live all the things that make a neighborhood interesting and

varied and meaningful as a part of the city weren't there and so the World

Trade Center violated the first law of economics really it added to the supply

of what there was already too much of which was office space without in fact

doing anything to change the demand so it was wrong from its conception but

nobody quite got that

to me it was a sense of building creating something that it's almost at

the limit of what human beings can create you know I like that raw power I

like that sort of feeling that there were our good seller you know that they

stood up there that that they say so why you know we're ugly so wide you know and

they weren't you know cuz they were one thing one minute and there were another

thing the other minute you know so you couldn't pass a judgement on them you

know those would condemn them an aesthetic basis you know we're

absolutely wrong because it depended so much on how close you were how far you

were from them whether you saw them in the late afternoon whether you saw them

in there in the morning where they saw them in winter with a Sun in the summer

so there was always a different feeling about them

I think at some deeper level there was the connection of the water to

the sky and not very strong in mythology

and all of this but I think that played

a very important role here here you saw

that somehow were connected to something not just larger than New York but larger

than the earth itself you know

the original trade center was to be on the East River when the South Street

Seaport is below the Brooklyn Bridge and it moved to the West Side for a very

funny reason the Port Authority is controlled by the governors of New York

and New Jersey so Nelson Rockefeller on his own could not simply decree that the

Port Authority would build it the governor of New Jersey had to go along the Governor of New Jersey

understandably enough looked at this and said well what's in it for me after all

the Port Authority was a bi-state organization therefore half of the

benefits on to come to New Jersey if you had this World Trade Center over on the

other side of Manhattan facing Brooklyn and Europe it seemed unlikely that that

was going to be beneficial to the state of New Jersey and in fact it might draw

both jobs and people away so there was a lot of resistance there

then the Governor of New Jersey figured out what was in it for him

there was a commuter railroad the Hudson tubes was called the Hudson and

Manhattan railroad that ran under the river to a terminal in lower Manhattan

and it was in terrible shape it was going bankrupt and there was huge

pressure on the state of New Jersey to take it over and bail it out well the

governor didn't want the money for that on his budget particularly but

politically he had to do something so he said if the Port Authority would take

over the railroad he would agree to building the World Trade Center that was

acceptable in New Jersey but in New York there was some doubt that funds for the

Port Authority should be put into helping New Jersey commuters come to New

York for jobs and therefore Albany refused to agree to approve the takeover

of the H&M New Jersey then dug in its heels and the question was what could

possibly be done and at this point there seem to be some doubt that the World

Trade Center idea could go forward then someone at the Port Authority realized

that the Hudson tubes came with some real estate came with a big rather

decrepit pair of office buildings in lower Manhattan that had been built over

its terminus on Church Street they were called the Hudson and Manhattan terminal

building and so the Port Authority looked around of these buildings that

were not in very good shape that they really didn't want to have and said why

do we have these things here why don't we put the trade center here now that we

have got this real estate rather than the East River and that idea was then

proposed and it seemed dramatically to meet all sorts of objections Nelson

Rockefeller and the New York State side would get its World Trade Center it

would be built right on top of a major set of subway lines in New York so that

folks from all over New York and Brooklyn to the World Trade Center in addition it

would be built right over path which the Port Authority would take over and that

then meant New Jersey i'ts could get there for jobs or any other kinds of

activities that was then rapidly approved in 1962 both in New Jersey and

in New York and that's how the trade center ended up where it was as the

result of a political deal in the winter of 1962 after more than a decade and a

half of false starts and delays the World Trade Center project at last

seemed to be getting underway having finally found a home for itself

on the west side of Manhattan no one however had yet said anything about

building the tallest buildings in the world

when the World Trade Center was conceived the intention was not to build

the world's tallest buildings in fact the preliminary designs on the east side

were 60 or 70 stories the first Studies on the west side were that and then this

sort of hubris I think took over and it just kept getting bigger and bigger and

they kept thinking they could do anything and nobody said no I think the

combination of David Rockefellers passionate desire to put lower Manhattan

back on the map in a central way in a really important way the governor his

brothers desire to just build bigger and bigger all the time anywhere

and the Port Authority's desire to really be the preeminent powerful civic

authority in the world but alone in New York all those things kind of combined

and as they sort of drifted to the West Side site from an original plan on the

east side it kind of drifted into being the world's tallest buildings

at 6:30 p.m. on the evening of February 13th 1962 the newly elected governor of

New Jersey Richard Hughes signed into law the historic Hudson tubes World Trade Center bill

three weeks later Governor Nelson Rockefeller followed suit but by then

Boston Tobin had already set in motion the elaborate machinery of his 6,000

person agency creating a new division within the Port Authority Empire called

the world trade office then appointing a tireless unswervingly loyal

32 year old engineer named guide - Zoli to oversee every aspect of the massive

operation you can pick the best of the Port Authority Tobin told his eager

young director because this is going to be our greatest project I was given the

job in February of 1962 to plan to design to construct to operate the World

Trade Center of New York and there was only one thing to achieve what David

Rockefeller and Nelson Rockefeller want at the port authority to do I

recommended to the board you could only do one thing you had to build what the

Reader's Digest called the logit spooling project since the Egyptian

pyramids there was no other way in a city because this is the greatest city

in the world and it had to be something that people would pay attention to

second thing we had to consider was it had to be affordable so when they gave

me the job isn't by the way it has to be self-supporting so we're gonna

capitalize every paperclip that Hughes was till I had hanging over me like the

sword of Damocles etc you will make this thing work the risks involved were

enormous from the start as for the challenges many of which grew from the

competing imperatives of the project itself the same charter that required

the complex to turn a profit dramatically restricted the range of its

potential tenants three-quarters of whom would have to be directly involved in

world trade to satisfy the Port Authority's mandate when studies showed the demand for such

space would be modest at best Tobin instructed - Zoli to increase the

buildings program anyway dramatically to an almost unheard-of total of 10 million

square feet nearly five times the floor space of the Empire State Building they

knew that it was going to fail they were told that this was going to fail unless it was enormous

they knew that lower Manhattan was not going to come up again unless they did

something so bold and outrageous that the people of Midtown couldn't ignore

them and the Port Authority listened to that and and they went with it and they

built the biggest buildings in the world because they knew that they had to do

that or else it was going to be a lost investment Austin Tobin's vision of the

project had just begun to expand when the port authority's shrewd 42 year old

public relations director distributed a fateful internal memo it said that the

person who was credited early on in the project for coming up with the idea of

the world's tallest building came out of the publicity department that it was a

woman named Li Jaffe who sent him a memo among the men who were in charge of the

project saying well as long as we're going to make them a hundred stories why

not go that extra a few hundred feet and secure their place as the world's tallest

you know America has always believed in bigness and I think we particularly

believed in it in the 60s when the World Trade Center was conceived you know

bigger and bigger American thing that's bigger and bigger doses of American

power we're gonna solve anything it was the age when all the cars were

gargantuan and had fins it was the age when we were sending troops into Vietnam

the age of going to the moon exactly and it's architectural equivalent was

this notion of bigger and bigger buildings all the time we've always also

romanticized height in a very wonderful way in New York and that's that's very

much part of our DNA is to just build bigger and taller all the time as word

of the authorities vaulting ambitions raced through the corridors of the

agency a kind of feat gripped the members of Austin Tobin's team and so

first thing to do was to find the right architect what I wanted was a great architect it

is had to be the greatest project in a world that were to succeed and we

interviewed virtually everybody in the world of consequence and to the teams

that I sent out to find out what architects did the first stipulation I

gave them was try to find somebody who you think is young enough to live for 20

years because I was sure that this project as we conceived it would take at

least 20 years to finish and it actually took more than that in the end passing

over the entire stable of elite architects in New York says Olli settled

on a relative outsider a complex 49 year old Detroit based architect named Minoru

Yamasaki whose elegantly ornament and structures were then enjoying a kind of

vote and who's designed for the World Trade Center would ultimately become one

of the most controversial aspects of the entire project Yamazaki was a very

strange choice for the architect of the world's tallest buildings because he had

never been a commercial architect and especially of skyscrapers or of

high-rises his his previous building said had been mid rises of 20 or so

stories he was not one of those architects who was particularly emphatic

about a structural engineering solution one thinks of his earlier work more in a

decorative vein he was interested in the play of light and shadow on the surface

of the building so that his previous buildings see almost delicate in scale and wholly out

of proportion to the ambition of the commission of the trade center

he felt that sort of standard-issue modern architecture was harsh and

unwelcoming and cold and he wanted to make architecture warm so he kept doing

these buildings that were sort of delicate a lot of his stuff had these

funny little gothic arches and it looked kind of cute in a weird way the Port

Authority thought if we're gonna build you know such an enormous buildings that

if they could hire someone who could combine the productive modern office

building with an ornamental touch that that was what they wanted they also

wanted someone who was not so old and established and also said in his ways

that they couldn't you know twist his arm and get him to agree to do what they

wanted to do they wanted someone who was creative but they also wanted someone

who's gonna listen to God - Zoli and to Austin Tobin and they got that in

midoryama sake they thought they were actually making kind of a leap to a sort

of high art architect Yamasaki was actually a kind of low end high art

architect he was not one of the more admired ones by architectural historians

and critics but he was nonetheless so - somewhere in the bottom of that group

and this was of course for him the opportunity of a lifetime Minori Yamazaki is hired in the end of

August in 1962 and he's given this negotiable standard by guides as Olli in

Austen's Hoagland which is that the net square foot of rentable space including

offices and retail must be ten million it's called the program and it's

non-negotiable and and he knows that he cannot even you know have a conversation

with guy about this it was a terrifying program from the standpoint of size

yamasaki remembered you just run scared before you get adjusted for months he

searched for the right form for the project working on a scale no architect

had ever before confronted struggling to reconcile his own artistic sensibility

with the overwhelming size of the program experimenting with one model after

another he toyed with the idea of using 10 smaller structures then one gigantic

one but kept coming back to the image of two slender towers one offset from the

other a design he hoped would combine the practical requirements of the Port

Authorities immense program with the sculptural elegance he admired in the

work of his great mentor the German architect Mies van der Rohe son he must

have done fifty or more different models limited by the 16 acre site that we had

and finally he sent word back to me it's time for you to come out I want to show

you the one I like the best he had done twin towers and a Plaza

about the size of Piazza San Marco just a little smaller than that and I had a

hotel and it had a Customs House everything around it was a lovely lovely

design so I said to Yama when I saw that I said it's very find is on but does it

beat my program no he said it's 2 million feet short I said why is that

well he said the towers are 80 floors high so he can't build a building taller

than 84 I said why not well he said because the configuration the elevators

take too much space in the law on its way no one has ever done that and I

remember saying to me you know Jana President Kennedy is gonna put a man on a moon

you're gonna figure out a way for me to build the world's tallest buildings

because that'll get us the other 2 million feet his face looks just like

those towers hiya I'm sure a guy - Zoli he said not he's not high enough a

hunters not high enough how about more space and I think he may not admit it

but my guess is he was cognizant of the fact that the Trade Center was going to

become a real image of New York City he had high aspirations that that be the

case in fact yamasaki continued to resist going up 210 stories and he

ultimately accepted and embraced the towers at their height and began you

know to become the most famous architect of his generation briefly and was on the

cover of Time magazine because he was building the two tallest towers but he

was never entirely comfortable I don't think with the height that the towers

reached despite strong misgivings but the sheer size - Zoli was demand would

compromise the aesthetic impact of his towers yamasaki eventually gave in and

after huddling with his chief engineers finally agreed that the elevator problem

could be solved and increased the height of the two structures On January 18th

1964 when the final design was presented to the public at a press conference at

the New York Hilton the officials and reporters assembled for the occasion

were stunned yamasaki eyes dramatically revised program called for two identical

towers each 110 stories tall a full 100 feet higher than the Empire State

Building with every floor over an acre in size each tower alone contained twice

the floor space of al Smith's Depression era landmark even Nelson Rockefeller was

astounded by the plan gleefully confiding to a senior aide my god these

towers will make David's building look like an outhouse in editorial in The New York Times that

ran the next day took a more sober view their impact on New York for better or

for worse economically and architectural is bound to be enormous

so the twin tower started as one tower they became Twin Towers they kept

getting bigger and bigger and they really became an ego trip suddenly it

became possible for the Port Authority to build the tallest buildings in the

world which is the most ephemeral of all titles it's taken away from you very

quickly and always will be but there is

something that is inside of human beings that wants to reach for the skies and

I'd like to think that it was that romantic and that spiritual and that symbolic

in many ways the release of Yamazaki staggering model marked a crucial

turning point in the story of the World Trade Center within days of the press

conference at the New York Hilton a storm of protest had begun to break over

the offices of the Port Authority bringing to a climax tensions and

conflicts that had been building for years and threatening to halt the

mammoth project before it had even gotten off the ground

I started out not liking the World Trade Center because the World Trade Center

was the conrad veidt of buildings conrad veidt was the man you love to hate the

World Trade Center with the buildings you love to hate I was very much around

when the process of the clearing of the site and the protests above the

destruction of that kind of funky agglomeration of street patterns and

activities around it were there I resented its massive dumbness its huge

size it's the fact that it tipped the balance of the skyline to the West in an

unnatural way if you can call something like a man-made skyline of Manhattan

natural for two full years as the towers spiraled higher in yamasaki x' mind and

as the ambitions of the Port Authority vaulted upward a bitter war had been

raging on the streets down below for the body and soul of lower Manhattan the

trade center was realized at a time when there was what could be described as a

paradigm shift about architecture and urban development preservation was a

growing sentiment among a wide number of people in New York and other places at this time

remember the Pennsylvania Station in protest was 63 the destruction 66 it's

just those years the Trade Center is being hatched and developed so you have

these two models of urbanism or urban growth coming head-to-head in the trades

at the Trade Center side so people were very much divided as to whether this

project should even happen there was great argument about it at the time

people said this is not the business of the Port Authority the Port Authority

should be talking about the port if we're losing the ocean line is what are

we gonna put there and it was a valid argument I thought the opposition came from a lot of

different directions there were many people within the New York real estate

industry who were opposed to the World Trade Centers 10 million square feet of

new office space flooding the market because they legitimately feared that

that space would throw out of whack the whole commercial private market in real

estate in New York when word is clear that the Port Authority is going to

subsidize this enormous trade complex which is now only very marginally has

anything to do with the port because the fact they're moving the port you know so

the old rationale is crumbling you get a complex of interest particularly the

people who own the Empire State Building who say wait a minute foul ball you're in fact using

government public dollars to underwrite a massive new complex of office space

what's gonna happen to the rental market it's gonna not only destroy downtown

because you're gonna build far more office space than you actually need

it's gonna mess up my property up here in the Empire State Building so they

bring suits and they try to stop it the main objection to this project came from

the people who owned the empires they Harry Helmsley and Larry wheat and when

they heard the announcement of our plan which was in 1964 they formed a

committee for a reasonable World Trade Center and they gave them a budget of

$500,000 to prevent the construction of the World Trade Center so I went met

with mr. Han's Lee one day he said Harry I know him he's in Harry could you tell

me what is a reasonably high chance and and he said yes I said was that he said

100 floors Oy and I said well your empires everyone's 102 and I said I'm

sorry but I think 110 is a better number for more than half a decade the

controversy raged on in and out of court as the Port Authority battled one

opponent after another including at one point the city itself which stood to

lose millions in property taxes as a result of the project and television

broadcasters who feared the massive towers would block reception of their

signals my mother who loved television she said you know you're my son and I

love him very much but I must tell you if you live in a heart television

reception in its area you better stop that frantic video is right and I knew I

had big problems in any case we did we actually negotiated a deal with the

television people and they moved down to our place and it all worked out

in the end the most tenacious bitter and heartbreaking resistance to the World

Trade Center would come from the hundreds of small businessmen who shops

and storefronts lined the ancient cobbled thoroughfares of radio Row and

whose entire way of life was threatened with extinction by the massive 16 acre complex

I really felt the the assault on Portland Street because you slowly began

to look at the plans as they emerged and you find that there's not gonna be a

Cortland Street they're gonna have a sign that says Portland Street and after

that it'll be nothing but concrete in a plaza and for which nobody ever stepped

well that was the urban renewal formula of the 60s that was so disastrous in

cities across the country the idea of clearing out supposedly getting rid of

blight which unfortunately was a synonym for history and for small business and

then to substitute these super blocks with huge buildings the real estate

community had an expression right for redevelopment you cut off you closed or

there's an official word for that too you deem apt wonderful all streets of

small buildings that gave you the history and the flavor and the

continuity of the city and you put them together for a super block for the World

Trade Center 14 historic streets became two super blocks if you are planner and

you look at the map or you're in an airplane you look down at the city you

see this area four story buildings slightly tumbled down in appearance what

would appear to be marginal retail uses electronic shops and so forth

so in the mentality of post-world War two redevelopment this was a soft area

an easy kill hardly anybody to relocate no no institutions to relocate and

nobody living there to speak up so there was quick one two three do it

but by the time the site began to be really getting ready for currents people

saying you're tearing out this living vital part of the city no sooner had the

boundaries of the new West Side location been announced then store owners and

merchants in the area had begun mounting fierce resistance to the port

authority's plans in this area thirteen

square blocks of lower Manhattan we will fight this with all the strength that we

have in order to preserve free enterprise in Manhattan we also feel

very reluctant about our city giving up

13 square blocks to the Port Authority

leading the fight was a pugnacious self-made electronic shop owner named

Oscar Nadeau known as the king of Cortland Street who was determined to do

everything he could to keep the Port Authority from taking away his business

an Oscar devised a series of spectacular protests probably the most memorable in

a way was when he had people parade him down the street in a coffin with a sign

that said here lies mr. small businessman don't let the Port Authority

bury him well believe me he got some press as the furor over radial Roe came to a

climax protests against large-scale redevelopment projects of all kinds were

gathering momentum across the city just ten blocks to the north opponents of Robert Moses would soon

score a stunning triumph in their fight to stop the lower Manhattan Expressway

in the end however even the rising tide of grassroots activism in New York would

prove no match for the power of the Port Authority or for the extraordinary

political skills of its fiercely determined leader Austin tourism we're

talking here about things in the public interest in a free country that concern

not a few store owners on a block down in this area but we're concerning

something it's going not tens of thousands a hundred thousands of

millions of people and their livelihoods in this area in the whole future of this

area and it's great a port which is the foundation of its welfare in the future

and those are the issue here and not any phony issue of the Port Authority

wanting to get into the real estate business which is the last thing in the

world that has the slightest interest in Austin Tobin wanted to win so bad

there's no under estimating that internal fire you can't run an agency

like the Port Authority especially in those times and have the successes that

it had and not have that fire inside Austin Tobin wanted it real bad now on

the technical side Tobin was just a lot smarter than the people he was playing

against if the city was gonna make a move he knew who is people in the City

Council where he could count on in a pinch he knew that if it became a public

relations battle that he had lead Jaffee who had all her ducks in a row with the

newspapers and he had the technical guys he could pull out arguments that had the

authority no one else had no one else could do this how could the City Council

counter an argument by his engineering department that this kind of a structure

was the way it had to be how could someone come in from you know little

Oscar nay Dells protest group and go up against the people who had gone in and

just put the second deck on the George Washington Bridge the third to buy the Lincoln Tunnel

in the end the Port Authority prevailed on every front in March 1966 the New

York State Court of Appeals turned back the last challenge to the legality of

its condemnation on the bright windswept morning of March 21st 1966 as opponents

of the project looked helplessly on the first red brick structures on radio row

which had stood since the time of the civil war began to come down

they lose they make a long story short the powers that are assembled in favor

of remaking lower Manhattan triumphs and one by one these competing uses are

literally driven into the sea or pushed on somewhere else and remember seeing

Cortland Street being shoveled off to become landfill for what became Battery

Park City I mean literally bulldozers and I found the old houses to just tip

them over smash them over like they were big fists were being leveled from the

sky I somehow among the many things that were lost on September 11th with the

final Polaroid photographs of the houses on Portland Street with their prices

that were labeled on them by the Assessors what the owners were gonna get

paid you know nine thousand twelve thousand 18th out whatever it was all

those original Polaroids no negatives were lost one of the buildings on

September 11 so they even that even that record of it is God

who's afraid of the big bad buildings everyone because there are so many

things about gigantism that we just don't know the gamble of triumph or

tragedy at this scale and ultimately it is a gamble demands an extraordinary

payoff the trade center towers could be

the start of a new skyscraper age or the biggest tombstones in the world ADA

Louise Huxtable 1966 I was in a dentist

waiting room in Paris with a giant toothache and I was looking at what you

usually you know look through those old magazine old newspapers and somehow I

fell onto a small article but the picture we called my attention it was

the twin towers but in their model form because it was 1968 and not yet started

to be built and I had not yet started to be a wire Walker which is actually the amazing part of

the story so how could I fall in love with was two towers the highest star

wars in the world say in the article so presumptuous so arrogant so naive so

romantic and it was all of that and I remember I just had to tear the article

and everybody was watching me you know in France everybody's watching each

other and was very quiet and I couldn't waive the page and class you don't you

know you don't steal something so I actually let go giant sneeze and under

the cover of the sneeze I tear the article put it under my shirt and I had

to leave and I had to find another dentist that what you know what was it

to have a toothache for another week when what I had now

in my chest was a dream

one of the most poignant of the many ironies surrounding the story of the

World Trade Center was that the extraordinary saga of its physical rise

by any measure one of the greatest engineering feats of the age would go

largely unnoticed at the time and come to be widely appreciated only after its

demise from the very start the challenge of constructing two immense towers not

only taller but far larger than any other in the world would force Austin

Tobin's team of builders and engineers to reinvent almost every aspect of

skyscraper technology and design challenging not only the height but the

most basic construction principles of its great rival the Empire State

Building and producing along the way one of the greatest works of engineering art

ever created the two buildings Empire State and World Trade Center were in one

ways the same and that they were symbolic of the city of New York

but inside the inside of the guts out a few of the structure entirely different

entirely different buildings I think the genius of the towers lay in

the engineering rather than in the architecture to build the world's

tallest buildings and a hundred and ten storeys took a special kind of genius

and that was really less robertson and his partners who came up with a way a

device a plan in order to realize the architectural simplicity of yamazaki

concept the tallest big and I'd ever worked on was 20 or 22 stories but I had

the kind of background that that very few structural engineers had I was a

pretty good mathematician I knew a lot about the dynamics of structures and the

even the dynamics of electrical circuits in addition to that I wasn't burdened

with the baggage of having before I could sort of look at all those

ideas and choose from them and develop new ones and make I think a new kind of

building something that hadn't been created before they weren't just

building the biggest skyscrapers that had ever been put up they were doing it

in a way that hadn't really been tried before on anything remotely like that

scale engineers who use ideas for the most part that have been used before

they couldn't do that in the World Trade Center and so you have a cross between

an engineer and a research physicist in effect that is being called into play to

build these structures on the morning of August 5th 1966 work on the World Trade

Center finally began the first challenge came with the foundations themselves which would have

to descend through 70 feet of waterlogged landfill originally laid

down by the English before reaching bedrock to keep the waters of the nearby Hudson at bay

Port Authority engineers constructed a gigantic concrete bathtub two blocks

wide and four blocks long and seven storeys high unearthing in the process along with 1.2

million cubic yards of dirt haunting reminders of the city's long vanished

colonial past including ship anchors cannonballs clay pipes and British coins

dating back to the reign of King George ii the greatest challenge by far however

lay in the engineering of the towers themselves from the start it was clear

that the port authorities demand for vast expanses of infinitely flexible

office space the towering sculptural forms yamasaki had designed to meet it

would require a complete break with the traditional techniques of skyscraper

construction stretching back nearly a century the World Trade Center represented a great advanced

technologically over skyscrapers before its time we represented much more of an

advanced technologically than architectural unlike a traditional skyscraper that's

supported by a steel or concrete grid work of columns and beams going all the

way through the building the trade center is supported mainly by its

exterior walls which were this very very tight tight mesh of steel so tightly

woven that it could support the weight of the building in a way it's sort of

like those steel mesh litter baskets that one sees out on the sidewalk that

are actually a very strong structure but this is 110 stories Worth and square

rather than round but the same kind of idea the Trade Center had a different

kind of structure it was built more like the wing of an airplane and the wing of

the airplane is strength is all on the surface of the wing or the fuselage on

both cases all of the interior columns that have been used in the past were a detriment

they were harmful to the design because we didn't want those interior columns we

wanted that weight out on the outside where it would do some good for this for

the starkness of the building in resisting the these giant loads from the wind

only such a design robertson knew could fulfill the unprecedented practical

needs of the building and still counteract the greatest natural stress

to the towering sail like structures the force not of gravity but the wind you

know if you put your feet close together and somebody shoves on your shoulder

it's easy for you to fall over if you put your feet apart and someone shoves

on your shoulder it's easy for you to stand up and the steel on the outside of

the towers was like your feet spread apart and the shell was like the gusts

of the wind you know in off the Atlantic Ocean if you put the steel out there you

could save a lot of money probably 40% in a total amount of steel but it also

had other implications for how you would use this building and one of them is

that you would have none of these interior columns that hold up the Empire State Building

every 20 feet messing up your floor plan so anybody could come in and deal with

the floors however they wanted to put up their partitions and it was kind of

real-estate paradise now in fact it was a design that looked great on paper but

when they went out to the wind tunnel in Fort Collins Colorado before they put

the building's up they found out that the structure when it was really put

together at least in miniature form didn't work quite the way they had

expected it just swayed too much beyond anything that would have been remotely

reasonable in fact they move so far that at least one model broke and fell over

in the wind now that didn't mean that the real towers would fall over it just

meant that they hadn't taken into account the tremendous forces they were

going to be dealing with and so we had to rethink the entire

process how much can a building move in the wind how much were they oscillate no

one had ever found out no one had ever tried to find out even or even thought

there was an issue to find out about not only how much does it move how much can

it move and the upshot of it was that Robertson and his collaborator Alan

Davenport came up with the idea of basically putting shock absorbers and

buildings which had never been done before and you know God darn it it worked they

kept these things from swaying beyond the tolerances that they'd set they

could resist and a hundred and fifty mile wind blowing consecutively on one

side of the building for 30 minutes and they would not fall down I used to say

they move like a snake different from all other buildings in the world the

strength to resist the wind is in the outside walls instead of the elevated

core which is normal for all other high-rise buildings in the world

and so these towers were much stronger if you would the really sublime thing

about this from the point of view of the Port Authority is that all this is

happening in the background while Austin Tobin is passionately defending these

structures against the critics back in New York City who have no idea that any

of this is going on in the background all it would have taken probably was for

some of the opponents to know what was going on behind the scenes when they're

out in Colorado in the wind town and one of the models fell over put that in one

New York newspaper and there's no World Trade Center when they're out in Eugene

Oregon testing people in a room and people are getting sick as they go back

and forth is the motion of the building is being simulated again put that in one

television program in primetime in New York City very hard to see how the World

Trade Center was going to be built but the Port Authority successfully walled

off that and other information from the public in the way that shows how

they were how good Austin Tobin was

as innovative in their construction as they were in their design the towers

were assembled not one column at a time but an immense preassembled pieces each

three stories tall the dramatically speeded the construction process we had

experimented with prefabrication in a few buildings but never even close to

the scale that was done on the World Trade Center huge prefabricated elements

constructed all over the United States with materials that came from all over

the world and finally assembled into one building in New York City

we had Stuart being fabricated in Los Angeles in Dallas in Seattle

in Pittsburgh in Virginia and down into Georgia and up into Canada and all of

that was coordinated through our offices at the peak of construction more than

800 tons of structural steel were being delivered each day to the massive construction site

raised into the sky by for Australian built kangaroo cranes and bolted into

place by Austin Tobin's army of 3600 men an extraordinary team of iron workers

and construction specialists that included Carl Furillo who had once

played right field for the Brooklyn Dodgers and in New Jersey man named

George Nelson who 40 years earlier had helped build the Empire State Building

and who now shrugged off work on the World Trade Center as just another

building a Koch erecting set with the incredible people who ran the job and I

still see as the Koch from time to time and I remind him not one iron worker was

killed in the construction of the World Trade Center and this is what they is to

do they'd be up on a steel can they'd look out and they'd say well we're gonna

be all right today boys mr. Koch just went to Mass as wound Catholic Church

that anyone at eight o'clock every morning and they say that takes care of

us for the day and sure enough not a single arm work at dawn now of course

the building lent itself to that because we put steel up on the outside wall so

and then it you could only fall two or three floors if you ever fell off but that was the

way it was

before signing off on the design Robertson and his team performed one

last unprecedented safety check one of my Jobs was to look at all of the

possible events that might take place in a high-rise building and of course there

had been in New York two incidences of aircraft impact the most famous one of

course being on the Empire State Building and we were looking at an

aircraft not unlike the Mitchell bomber that ran into the Empire State Building

we were looking at aircraft that was lost in the fog trying to land it was a

low flying slow flying 707 which is the largest aircraft of its time and so we

made calculations not anywhere near the level of sophistication we could today

but inside of our ability we made calculations of what happened when the

airplane goes in and it takes out a huge section of the outside wall of the

building and we concluded that it would stand it would suffer but it would stand

and the outside wall would have a big hole in it and the building would be in

place but we didn't look at is what

happens all that fuel and perhaps we could be faulted for that for not doing

so but for whatever reason we didn't look at that question of the of what

would happen to the fuel

in the end Robertson and his team did everything they could to protect their

building against a 500 year wind the worst conceivable Gale to which the

building could be subjected in 500 years it was inconceivable at the time that it

would also have to be protected against a 500 year plane crash or a 500 year

fire I think in effect the towers had an

Achilles heel and that was the fire they really didn't know much about fire and

they really didn't pay much attention to fire the structure they finally came up

with what just as good as the traditional ones in battling the wind

and holding up against gravity but they were much lighter the steel was lighter

thinner and you know how if you slice up an ice cube and put it in your drink

it'll it'll melt faster than if you have a whole ice cube well that's the way of

these lighter structures they would heat up faster in a fire the real question is should they have

been able to anticipate that this was something that they would have to

protect against and I just don't know the answer to the question

one of the things that we have to say about the trade center with all due

respect to its quality such as they were is that it was a dinosaur when it went

up it represented a way of building that had in fact already begun to be

discredited Jane Jacobs book the death and life of great American cities which

played so large a role in shifting people's viewpoints back toward an

appreciation of the street and the real city and the organic nature of cities

had already appeared and by the time the Trade Center was finished in the 70s

there were lots of other things to express a sort of shift in attitude so

the World Trade Center was an enormous project with a very long gestation

period that was sort of out of date by the time it was it was finished which

made it in a way all the sadder and then of course the Trade Centers finished at

a time when the economy is in the toilet I think that's the best way to put it

the Vietnam War has ripped the country apart the divisive nosov the young versus the

old the haves versus the have-nots had never been greater than perhaps accepted

in the case of the Civil War and there were these two monsters huge

undifferentiated buildings arising here and the context around them hadn't even been finished

for three long years from 1968 to 1971 the steelwork on the towers continued as

the 1960s came and went and the war in Vietnam raged on wreaking havoc with the

American economy straining the post-war global order and threatening to tear the

nation's social fabric apart in April 1970 progress on the towers were slowed

when scores of construction workers clashed violently with anti-war

demonstrators on the streets of lower Manhattan by then public sentiment about

the project and its builders had begun to shift dramatically and even Austin

toe had begun to lose his way as they're building the World Trade Center after

he's given everything he had to put it up he's starting to battle with New

Jersey Governor Cahill he's losing the battle on mass transit his reputation in

the press is taking a dive he's always had very careful control of the press

partly through his chief press officer Lee Jaffe through all those years

very carefully managed kind of guy someone who didn't have to deal with

these little details like legislators mayor's the citizenry of it of New York

City and by the time the towers are finished it's no longer fun for him he's

really become embittered as the structures begin to dwarf even the

highest of the city's old Art Deco towers the excitement and early optimism

about their immense eyes began to fade away I remember being offended that the

title for the tallest building was being taken away from the Empire State

Building a building that I liked much more and felt represented the the spirit

of New York much much better than the World Trade Center and I remember

thinking you know this whole thing is sort of gargantuan piece of banality as

always happens in New York buildings come in in cycles of boom and bust and

generally the tallest buildings come before the break and the cycle before a

crash and that was the case with the World Trade Center the fiscal crisis the

energy crisis all kinds of crises in New York a social crisis as well befell New

York and then in the mid-1970s and affected the fortunes of the city in

many ways beyond the the sheer revenues of trade and and of business

and still the twin towers rose as the city below them sank deeper and deeper

into social and economic disarray

finally at 11:30 a.m. on the cold foggy morning of Wednesday December 23rd 1970

the final column of the North Tower a 36 foot long four tonne piece of steel

draped with a large American flag was hoisted into place on the hundred and tenth floor to

celebrate the momentous occasion workers raised a 30-foot tall Christmas tree on

the southeast corner of the building December 1970 the reason I remember it

is the last piece is still wound up in the next day the first tenant moved into

the bottom of the building actually two tenants moved in that day on the 9th and 10th floors

seven months later on July 19th 1971 the topping out ceremony was repeated on the

Southtown in all a total of a hundred and ninety-two thousand tons of

structural steel nearly four times that of the Empire State Building had been

raised one thousand three hundred and sixty feet into the sky 25 stories

taller than the top floor of al Smith's beloved uptown landmark and a hundred

and ten feet higher than the tip of its great Art Deco mooring mast

to a remarkable degree however the achievement would go all but ignored

obscured by the growing troubles of the city below and by the rising tide of

criticism that now began to engulf the project just as it neared completion

there was some sense that there was something insane here that was that was

being done because there was no need for it this was a city that was getting into

more and more trouble where the city finances were terrible where crime was

rising where all of the problems that came to a head in 75 with the almost

bankruptcy of the city were all there and yet they were putting this building

up you know you should say what's going on from the very start the response in

the press to Yamasaki towers was savage one critic dismissed them as a standing monument to

architectural boredom another as the largest aluminum siding job in the

history of the world the towers are pure technology the lobbies are pure schmaltz

and the impact on New York is pure speculation the windows are so narrow

that one of the miraculous benefits of the tall building

the panoramic view out is destroyed

these are big buildings but they are not

great architecture ada Louise Huxtable

1971 yamasaki himself though privately devastated by the storm of criticism

stubbornly defended his design arguing publicly that the restricted views kept

office workers focused on their tasks of course people hate it you know working

in the Trade Center the reason it was filled up is because his face was

cheaper than a comparable space and lower buildings they hated it because

the elevator systems nuisance to go up and down was like you planned whether

you had to actually leave your office because it was only convenient I think

the trade center was also a terrible failure on an urban design level or a

public space level the plaza was dead

plaza managed to be dead not

only in day-to-day use or even at the occasional festival that could never quite

fill it but even in the movies when they made the whiz or when they made the second version of

king kong it still couldn't come to life it just resisted vitality

the impact of the trade center on the lower manhattan environment was really

rather devastating the plaza in front of the world trade center was a

concrete football field it was not an appealing place at all

most of the shopping and activity took place underground which was at a further remove from the

street life of new york the buildings only succeeded as abstract objects

they did succeed ultimately pretty well as abstract objects but

it is not out of abstract geometric forms that you make a city

you make a city out of street life and the world trade center pushed away

the street life of lower manhattan in favor of of something very different

for the port authority meanwhile far more immediate problems loomed

almost immediately the basic premise upon which the towers had been built

the desirability of concentrating trade-related businesses under a single roof was shown to have

little basis in reality despite vigorous efforts to promote the

complex few tenants signed up at the beginning because there was not

nearly enough business to fill it it was bailed out by its builders

governor nelson rockefeller committed to putting offices of the state of new york into one tower

and the port authority moved all of its own offices into the other so in fact it was

mostly a big civic boondoggle in effect um

and had only a minimal amount of tenants who were actually part of the original concept

by the early 1970s the world trade center whose final price tag had soared past a billion dollars

was losing 10 to 15 million dollars a year with no end in sight

and there was even worse news for the downtown real estate market

far from revitalizing the fortunes of lower manhattan the world trade center

had flooded the market with millions of square feet of unwanted office space

deepening the district's economic woes still further so by somehow bringing all these many

millions 10 million square feet of office space online at the time that this economic recession

i'm pulling people out of your building to come into mind subsidized by the government your

building then it's not worth this much because your building by the way does

pay taxes and yet you've got fewer tenants so that what we have done here in new

york city at least according to the critics was we built a new building that we don't

need we've reduced the value of the old buildings that we already had and we're

paying taxes and supporting the police and the schools and fire and everything else so we've in a

sense compounded our mistake i think when the trade center was finished in 1973

we were just at the moment when new york was about to begin descending rather than ascending the

fiscal crisis would hit the buildings would remain largely empty for many years

they would consume the kind of energy on their floors with fluorescent lights

that had only one switch and were simply on or off there was in every way a kind of symbol of

empty wastefulness that represented an overreaching ambition perhaps on the

apart of americans and a blind eye to the environment and to

other kinds of social equations that seem to be lost in this sort of

blank symbolism of these two great icons

on the rainy windswept morning of april

4 1973

while work on the upper floors of the two towers continued the port authority held a dedication

ceremony for the complex a somber event forced by bad weather to

move from the outdoor plaza to the lobby of the north tower the guest of honor secretary of labor

peter brennan never showed up nor did new york's mayor john lindsay

nor to the astonishment of those present did the man most responsible for the project

austin tobin who had retired from the port authority the year before

worn out and disheartened when a reporter asked him why he had missed the historic ceremony

tobin replied simply because it was raining he was not there at the official opening

of the world trade center he never moved into the world trade center and he really

hardly goes down there until he is dying of cancer so is it sad yes it's extremely sad

it's a very sad and unexpected end to the story because this guy

was one of the most powerful and most efficient and admired and studied

bureaucratic leaders in the history of the united states but his crowning achievement turns out

to be in the end a big drop of bitterness for

him you know we named applause at the austin tobin plaza only after he left and

austin we knew was very sick and think of all the projects that the

port authority did i think austin felt that the trade center was his greatest

and i got a call one day and he came down in a wheelchair and i

wheeled him out to the plaza he asked if he could be left alone and

austin sat in that wheelchair for almost two hours and he looked at the plaza and the

great sculpture that was in the plaza and he could see the hotel

and the customs house and the commodity building and the nagari sculpture is beautiful

and fritz kerning's sculpture which was in the middle of that fountain those were great works of

on and i remember leaving him there and then i came and got him

and i never saw him again after that he died almost within

weeks after that one moment two hours being out there looking at the plaza of

the world trades and named after him

the most sublime and transcendent episode in the entire history of the world trade center

would come in the first dark and difficult years after its opening

while the city lay deep in the worst financial prices of its history

and while the towers themselves still unfinished on the uppermost floors

seemed to stand as a painfully extravagant monument to folly and misguided ambition

six years following his epiphany in the dentist office in paris felipe t had nurtured his dream

painstakingly perfecting his skills as a high-wire artist and devouring everything he could find

about the twin towers in early january 1974 he flew to new

york city for the first time in his life to put in motion the next elaborate

phase of the illegal escapade he now called simply the coup he was 24 years old

when i came to new york it was winter and i had a little journal or whatever i wrote my

thoughts and i thought it's old it's dirty it's full of skyscrapers

i love it that was my first little entry the first day i saw new york

i remember my first encounter with the twin towers i got out of the subway with a long

subway ride and out of the darkness i emerge at the base

of one of the tower and look up and like it slap in the face i saw that my

dream was impossible i mean it was right there in aluminum and glass and

steel and concrete behind it it was right there it said impossible

and yet somehow i actually find myself trespassing over the plaza still under construction

and sneaking in one of the tower and climbing and climbing inside the building

until i find myself very close to the top and until there were no more windows

no more partitions they were just the skeleton the beautiful steel columns and beams

of the building and then i emerged but there were no gates there were

nothing to protect you from the devouring void and i stunned and i

looked and the second i looked at the other tower another time

the word impossible etched itself inside me but somehow i went back down and looked

again from the street and there i realized it's impossible but i'll do it and there was the

beginning of a second wave of work the the real work the work of getting

into the building not into a archaeological findings or architectural

magazines but this time it was the monster the beast getting into the belly

of the beast every day which i did hiding myself disguising myself

sneaking being caught abandoning the project going back to it for eight months eight

months in new york and the towers the more i got to know them the more they become an

ally that's why when i say i can't hear them probably

it's wrong i married them certainly but they became my friends

it was 1974 and remember now i had opened the tower at the end of 70 and i wanted public

relations i needed publicity i had at least 10 million 12 million square feet of face

and one day a young journalist he said he was named felipe from france

showed up in my office with two photographer friends of here

these were his buddies and he said you know i'd like to do an article on the world trade center

and i said welcome that's great and naturally i never asked show me your credentials

and later on i recognized that the subject always got back to how those

towers move in the wind

after eight months of fault starts last minute reversals heartbreaking postponements and

maddening delays the hour of the coup finally arrived at six o'clock on the evening of tuesday

august 6th 1974 while one team made its way up into the north tower petite

delirious with exhaustion and seething with the holy madness of his dream

slipped up to the top of the south tower with two confederates posing as delivery men in tow

carrying with them three heavy crates filled with equipment including a disassembled balancing pole

wire for rigging 250 feet of one-inch braided steel cable and a bow and arrow

the first problem was how to pass the cable across how to pass the first line which will

ultimately become a rope strong enough to pull the heavy steel cable

so how to get that fishing line across is like 200 feet from center of roof to

center of roof roughly we had all kind of ideas and the idea that prevail was the one i

thought was ridiculous was a bow and arrow but it actually worked so with the fishing line

and the bow and arrow we passed the first line across and then all night

we pulled and then the cable was secured it took all night to complete the complex job of rigging

to anchor and secure as best he could the slender one-inch cable

a quarter of a mile in the sky across the 130 foot gap separating the two immense towers

1 360 feet below wall street was just beginning to come to life when at a little past seven on the

morning of august 7 1974 philippetti stepped out onto the slender thrumming wire

that stretched across the immense shimmering void

whenever other worlds invite us whenever we are balancing on the boundaries of our

limited human condition that's where life starts that's where you start feeling yourself living

so when i found myself one foot on the wire one foot on the building and

ready to decide to shift my weight to become a bird it was not something new and

after a few steps i i knew i was in my element i didn't even talk the full length of

the crossing to get to know the rigging and the vibration of the building and the wire

and then very slowly as i walked i was overwhelmed by a sense of

easiness a sense of of simplicity and actually i can be seen on the first pictures smiling

smiling probably out of disbelief it's so easy after all those years and months of

ups and downs and detours victories and disasters finally i was carrying my life

on a path that was the simplest the most beautiful and the easiest

down on the street below thousands of people on their way into work

looked up in wonder and disbelief trends fixed by the sight of the tiny figure

walking on air between the two towers

somehow i found myself spending 45 minutes and doing eight classics there were

thousands of people at some point hundred thousand people and actually at some point during these

different crossings i actually could hear my audience a quarter of a mile below

and i could hear them punctuating what i was doing on the wire

let's see if i would take a bow on one leg or salute the horizon or

kneel in front of the tower to say hello to the tower i would hear

almost with it with an echo the people cheering

screaming uploading i had in my car a radio that connected me to the police

desk at the world trade center and on the day in question the light went on

and the patrol went at the police des said mr t there's a problem in the world

trade center i said what's the problem say there's a guy walking on a tightrope

between the two towers what should we do and i couldn't think

of anything else is it don't let them fall off and i hung up so then i drove a little further i

called back i said by the way this is incredible did somebody walk if he doesn't fall off

and he comes on don't arrest them within minutes police officers were dispatched to the

roof of the south tower sergeant charles daniels of the port

authority police never forgot the things he saw that day well after arriving on the rooftop

officer myers and i observed the tightrope dancer because you couldn't call him a

walker approximately halfway between the two towers

and upon seeing us he started to smile and laugh and he started going into a dancing

routine on the high wire he then went down to one knee and we stepped to the background i said for

everyone to be quiet and at this time he laid down on the high wire

and you know just like a basically rolled around on the wire like

he got up he started walking and laughing and dancing and he turned around and ran back out

into the middle he was bouncing up and down his feet were actually leaving the wire

and then he would resettle back on the wire again unbelievably really to the point that we just

everybody was spellbound in the watching of it and i i personally figured i was

watching something that somebody else would never see again in the world

thought it was once in a lifetime

during the the walks i had a sense of of dancing on top of the world i had a sense

of having a communion with the city of new york represented by the crowd below

i had a sense of having stepped in otherworldly matters at some point in one of the crossing i

laid down on the wire and looked at the sky and i saw a bird above me and again because of my scents

were decompleted i could see that bird pretty high up and i saw

the eyes were red and i thought of the myth of prometheus there

but the bird was circling and looking at me as if i was inviting

his territory as if i was trespassing which which i was so

at some point i thought the gods the god of the wind the gods of the towers the god of the wild

all those invisible forces that we persist in thinking they don't exist but actually that rule

our lives might become impatient might become annoyed by my persistent vagabondage

there so my intuition told me it was time for me to

close the curtain of this of this very intimate performance it was it was a

walk between me and the towers and i i landed on the same tower from

which i started the south tower and then i had the octopus of the authority you know

grabbed me by their hundreds of arms when he came in off the wire petite was

immediately taken into custody and rudely manhandled down into an

underground police station deep beneath the south tower where he was formally charged with no

fewer than 14 misdemeanors including criminal trespass disregarding police orders

reckless endangerment and performing without a permit then he was besieged by an army of

admiring reporters why did you do this that's the thousand why

this morning there is no why just because when i see a beautiful place to put my

why i cannot resist weren't you afraid up there at all i was not afraid but i was just um

no looking but what i have in front of me i have really something which was

huge and incredible you know so afraid not

but leaving more than a thousand percent so perhaps that's close to afraid i

don't know but at the same time i was happy happy happy happy you you need

dreams to live it's as essential as a road to walk on and ask bread to eat i would have

feel myself dying if this dream would have been taken away from me by

reason the dream was as big as the towers there was no way it could be taken away from me

by authority by reason by destiny it was really anchored

to me in such a way that life was not conceivable without doing

this the astonishing feat of high wire poetry

was the highest point in philippe petit's life and in many ways in the life of the twin

towers themselves as guy tazzoli had predicted the exploit was front page news around the country

and around the world and petite himself became an instant folk hero and nowhere more so than in

new york in the end thanks in large part to tozzoli himself

who personally interceded with the judge all charges were dropped

and the 24 year old frenchman was sentenced instead to perform for a group of children

in central park felipe was the first person to humanize these

things you know he put a human mark on them he said i don't care about your architect and

your plans for world trade i'm going to walk this thing and there he did doing this amazing

feat in which the whole city applauded because first of all it took guts and skill

but also it took these two buildings and he conquered them in some

astonishing way that had the whole town cheering but it was an astonishing moment and

after that it never happened again it's as if you did that once it was not to be repeated

fabulous you know it's just that that this guy had done this and it made the towers belong

if you would more to new york petit himself would never lose his deep love for the towers

in honor of his achievement the port authority presented him with a free

lifetime pass to the observation deck on the south tower where on a bright windswept afternoon

not long after his historic walk he signed his name in indelible inc on a steel beam

overlooking the vast canyon where he had danced among the clouds

in the years to come he would return to the high perch whenever he could

trying without success to relive the amazing walk in his mind and hoping to catch a glimpse one more

time of the valiant seagull he had once seen sailing high above him

a quarter of a mile in the sky it never

came

though few people realized it at the time petty's extraordinary exploit

marked a crucial turning point in the life of the twin towers and in

the life of the beleaguered city that was their home in the decades to come the fortunes of

both would undergo a remarkable transformation as the founding city all but written off

in the darkest hours of the fiscal crisis began to rise in new and unexpected ways

and as the world trade center itself a hollow mockery when it opened in 1971

finally began to fulfill the grandiose promise of its name well in many ways the world trade center

didn't look to most americans like something that had anything to do with world trade

it was a little bit like the world series not really having much to do with

the rest of the world it might have been more convincing if it had been called something like

the manhattan business center for the rest of the world though it came to be the

quintessential expression of globalization in the sense that new york was the capital of the world

economy and in that sense the two tallest towers in new york were really bound to symbolize

economic globalization even if people living in manhattan just thought

they were the biggest shadow casting pieces of real estate downtown the first changes came

while the city still toiled in the depths of the fiscal crisis

in 1975 the observation deck atop the south tower was open to the public for the first time

and almost overnight became one of the most popular tourist attractions in the city

one year later on july 4th 1976 the nation's bicentennial celebration

came to a stunning climax in new york harbor where thousands of small boats and dozens of tall ships

could be seen parading majestically against the breathtaking backdrop of the soaring twin towers

that same year the spectacular rooftop restaurant opened for business on the 106th and

107th floors of the north tower suddenly i knew the food critic gale

green wrote that new york would survive if money and power and ego could create

this extraordinary pleasure and instant landmark money and power and ego could rescue the

city from its ashes the observation that can win those underworld with the two things in white

judgment that turned the city of new york from looking at the trade center as some

monster downtown to something that was theirs they began to adopt it and it was great

it was so successful that you had to wait seven months to get a saturday night

reservation there unless you knew someone it was incredible and we were consistently

the highest grossing restaurant in the whole world these kinds of things give a building a

human dimension one would hope that the building would have a human dimension in its design

that has always been debatable with the case of the trade center

but events did happen that showed that this could be brought into the city

and into the life of the city another thing about the trade center

that changed it was the whole changing character of lower manhattan

people began to live downtown and they rather liked the trade center the big open space

and then the people living in tribeca also the people living in

battery park city began to see these buildings as an identifiable

landmark in their neighborhoods in their daily lives you know you could orient yourself

you knew where you were in relationship to the trade center towers

now as the years went on and we reached the period of the 90s with the great boom

and financial services financial services businesses needed much more space

and they gradually took over space as the state moved away to other locations as port authority

moved some of its functions out and so forth that stuff was rented commercially

the trade center took nearly a generation to become truly successful

through the 1980s the buildings filled up in the 1990s they became truly

profitable and gained a kind of credibility in the commercial real estate market

that had been predicted at the very beginning but not realized for over 20 years and it turned out

fine the trade center was self-supporting in fact when i retired from the port authority

of new york in 1987 the world trade center in new york was making more than

133 million dollars a year net net net so you know it worked and then all those

buildings in lower manhattan all the jobs that it created for people

even though we thought of them as a failure i think now looking back we can

see what they did contribute first of all economically had they not been there in

the late 1990s when new york city suddenly boomed practically like no place on the planet

the city needed all 10 15 million square feet of office space that those buildings provided

if they were not there so many other companies would have to go elsewhere so we had that space

so in a sense they helped make possible the renaissance of new york in the 1990s

now the reality was that these huge office blocks built for commercial purposes were

becoming more and more centers for world trade and world transactions generally

so in a way the world trade center became more and more truly a world trade center

over time and by the 1990s perhaps for the first time really was worthy of that name

and i'm not sure how far americans particularly new york was quite saw

that it was a symbol of economic globalization by the 1990s the new world order set in

motion a half century before had succeeded in ways no one could have

imagined in the years following the end of world war ii or even as the towers themselves had

first begun to rise at the very height of the cold war in less than two decades

the cultural and commercial energies unleashed by the forces of globalization

had breached political and ideological barriers around the world defeating and absorbing many of

america's one-time enemies behind the iron curtain linking the economic fortunes of distant

nations as never before setting whole populations and cultures

on the move and sending millions of new immigrants from every corner of the globe

flooding into new york city in numbers that rivaled and with a diversity that far exceed

even that of the great immigration of a century before no building in new york or for that

matter in the world symbolized those astonishing transformations more dramatically than

the world trade center itself which by the late 1990s had become a

microcosm of the new global culture humming with electronic financial transactions 24 hours a day

and home to a bewilderingly diverse working population that included sikh computer programmers

israeli accountants turkish engineers and financial experts from emerging

markets in malaysia syria uruguay and ghana numbered among the tall towers window

washers were men who hailed from poland yugoslavia albania turkey and ireland

the 79 employees at windows on the world included immigrants from 30 different countries

well the united states is the economy that seems to inhale more than it exhales

inhales capital it inhales people the huge increase in flows of of capital and people

into the united states which characterize the 1980s and 1990s

undoubtedly created a kind of asymmetry and so although economically the united

states was completely integrated into the world economy politically it was becoming more and

more detached from it that the myths which go right back to

the very foundation of the united states about the special providence that exempts the us from

the rest of the world's nasty political conflicts and this proves incredibly

tenacious people still clinging to this in the 1990s when it's absolutely clear that the us

had never been more connected to the rest of the world

the first hint for most new yorkers and for that matter for most americans

the globalization might bring with it unforeseen consequences came a few minutes after 12 on a cold

and cloud covered friday afternoon in the winter of 1993.

we mustn't forget that the building had already earned its footnote in history as an object of

scorn as a symbol of everything most of us in the united states think is

what what is great about our country our open free exchange of capitalism and ideas

and our willingness to deal with the world as a overall community

that failed miserably and killed six people which is about as minimal a number as you could think of

at the world trade center but we didn't take that threat seriously

enough i think we took it seriously but not seriously enough

by the summer of 2001 the culture of air-mindedness new york had been

pioneering for nearly a century had reached its very zenith immense

towers now soared high into the air in cities around the world

jet planes moved people and goods at high speed across the skies

while global broadcast networks and new digital media sped images and information around the world

instantaneously thanks in large part to the astonishing

projective power of american commercial culture which had now penetrated to every corner

of every nation in the world the twin towers had become the most

familiar structures on the most familiar skyline in the world

and the ultimate emblem of the forces of globalization still making their restless way

around the globe new york itself meanwhile having reaffirmed its status as the city at the

center of the world had emerged as one of the most strangely paradoxical cities on earth

at once bewilderingly diverse and cosmopolitan and yet as its own citizens often freely acknowledged

strikingly insular and inward looking i don't think cosmopolitanism is

something that we define only in terms of connections and awareness we like to in it's

better guys it is about awareness and sophistication and connection

and knowing what the world is but cosmopolitanism can sometimes also mean

a degree of self-absorption that blinds you to things outside

and maybe we've just been spending too much time you know staring at ourselves and

thinking that the world begins at the hudson river and ends at

the east river and there isn't anything else cosmopolitan people are often people who

have substantial powers of denial maybe we just didn't want to see what we

didn't want to see

well i think one of the sad things to me is to remember the enormous human effort

that went into building those buildings the gigantic endeavor the thousands of

construction workers the millions and millions of man-hours of effort

and how quickly could all be torn down the fact that just this physical creation you know

could be destroyed it took years and years and years to do to conceive to plan to execute

i guess again it's like us you know where it takes us a lifetime to create

the person we are and can be wiped out in a single mistake or accident and so it is

with cities and buildings i think it's precisely like death i mean death of

someone you know or someone you love i don't know how many people love those buildings but

certainly a lot of people knew them and then they were gone i mean how can it be that something that

extreme can happen so quickly and so irreversibly can't we just kind of reel that backward

a little bit no we can't we can't do it anymore with those buildings then with death

and i think the emotional reaction is very similar

this is public death

on a perfect almost achingly beautiful late summer morning in early september

a day of seemingly infinite visibility one man later said characterized by the rare and exquisite

flying conditions airline pilots call severe clear life in new york and much of the rest of

the contemporary world was changed irrevocably in the space of less than two hours

in my years in the in new york there's obviously nothing like it nothing comes close

as a newspaper man i've seen other horrors wars and the earthquake in mexico at 85 which killed

20 000 people but that was an act of nature not of man the combination of

the death the spectacular event of the two skyscrapers collapsing

and the motivations behind it all those things i think made this

something that just struck a knife right into the heart of every new yorker

knowing that we'd never be able to look at our city the same way again

first of all it's a surprise on a beautiful day at the center of this powerful nation

which has not been attacked on its own shores or its own land by a foreign power

in almost 200 years so that's a new thing secondly the public focus on this never

in history of the world had there been anything even close there's not really a second place

the second place probably be the assassination of president kennedy you know a world event

where the world is focused on that story but nothing like this where

it's seen instantaneously as it happens by tens of millions of people around the globe

in a little less than two hours with an almost poetically horrifying symmetry

the symbols and instruments of the city's uniquely air-minded culture

and of globalization itself skyscrapers jets and the mass media would be turned

back against themselves with a devastatingly lethal impact and effect

we were utterly struck by by the the fact that nothing here fit with any

prior experience of course people were talking about how it looked like something in a disaster

movie we could only think in terms of life imitating art

because we had no other thing to compare it to so people went to the movies and and

compared it

around 8 45 a.m on the morning of september 11 2001 people along the west side of

manhattan heard the piercing whine of a jet plane moving south down the hudson everything

about its trajectory was wrong heading south along an airway normally

reserved for northbound traffic it was moving much too fast and much too close to the ground

nearly 500 miles per hour at an altitude of just 900 feet more than twice the speed permitted for

aircraft that low it took less than 90 seconds for american airlines flight 11

to hurdle the entire length of manhattan island

a little after 8 46 a.m the huge 137 ton boeing 767 measuring more than half a football

field in length from wingtip to wingtip and carrying more than 9000 gallons of

highly inflammable jet fuel flashed across the final 20 blocks from

canal street to the world trade center and tore through the north wall of the

north tower between the 94th and 98th floors

instantly killing everyone on board and wreaking incomprehensible carnage

across five full floors of the building witnesses on the upper floors of the

south tower were stunned to see a wall of flame burst through the south windows of tower

one 130 feet away followed by a shower of disintegrating desks files

furniture computer terminals airplane parts and burning bodies

if you were just below where the plane hit your ceilings fell you saw the glint

of the plane going overhead there's an overwhelming feeling of terror

and you were probably knocked off your feet and of course if you were in the zone itself

you may have died instantly but even very close and this is very tragic very close to

the regions of impact there were people who lived for long minutes as they sought refuge from

you know the building flames to tremendous heat a couple of them even were able to foam

and then often in that region their lives ended quickly in the fire or they chose to

leap from the tower that airplane straddled several floors and it delivered a hell of a punch

the building swayed we know that when that punch was delivered the the swaying took the form of

waves that ran vertically up and down the building multiple times sort of echoing up and

down the building and really the incredible thing is considering the speed with which those

airplanes were flying enormous weight enormous speed rather than decapitating the buildings

or pushing them over the buildings absorbed the impact entirely

they took the hit and they stood

i was heading for the holland tunnel which has a four block

concourse if you want to call it leading to the top and as i turned into the first of those

four blocks and i looked up i said my god there was a hole in tower number one

my first thought was can't be a helicopter holster bay and the second was my god it can't be a

commercial plane because they're instructed to fly into the river

if they have problems i knew that

by 8 55 an army of firemen police officers emergency medical personnel and

government officials including the mayor himself had begun to descend on lower manhattan

along with an army of reporters photographers and television crews

as the machinery of the largest media apparatus in the world began to focus on the 16-acre site

at 902 am little more than 15 minutes after the attack millions of people in the metropolitan

region and tens of millions more across the country and around the world

we're staring intently at the smoldering skyline of lower manhattan

when a dark shape appeared on the horizon above the new jersey low ends

and came hurtling across the upper bay

got out of my car other people did and suddenly i saw a plane number two

coming from the south over the statue of liberty going very fast they say between 500 and

600 miles an hour

and i saw it smash into the south wall of number two on oblique

because they're going to wipe out all the staircases and all the sprinkler systems

that everyone just went sliced right through and powered such a big plane at that speed

and for a moment of incredible sadness for the people there and then an incredible anger

feeling that somebody had deliberately deliberately rammed into those towers

and those poor innocent people that were in there i was at the tweed courthouse on chamber

street right behind city hall i grabbed a notebook and ran to the

street in time to see the second one hid and knew right away obviously it was terrorism this amazing

fireball that came roaring towards broadway and people on the street corner just

going

that expression must have been uttered like 10 million times that

just astonishment what they were looking at

we know that when the airplanes hit there was an instantaneous release of

energy in the form of fuel vaporized that caught on fire there was fire instantaneously across

multiple floors that fire which was a kerosene fire jet fuel fire

burned very hot but it also burned very fast we're talking three to five minutes but

what it did is it ignited a simultaneous office fire in both cases across multiple floors

an office fire the like which had not been imagined before

in all cases an office fire is many things burning partitions carpets in particular computer cases

but paper mostly paper and if you look at the dynamics of the collapse what you find

is that in both cases it was the paper fire that was sustained long enough because

of the amount of paper in there to cause the steel to weaken to cause the collapse and the hammering

down in both cases i mean paper on that day was a constant presence it rained down on the city

as if in mockery of the kind of business that was done at the trade center

here have some of the paper and it burned and it brought the buildings down

the second plane had struck the south tower at 902 54 am just 16 minutes after the

first plane went in by then the first teams of firemen and rescue workers had already arrived at

the foot of the north tower where they were greeted by a scene of

horror and devastation that defied the imagination on the austin tobin plaza there were

corpses everywhere the mangled bodies of men and women who had already jumped or fallen from the

upper floors of the building and the charred remains of passengers from flight 11 some

still belted into their seats far above meanwhile in the upper reaches of the towers themselves

the gaping black holes when the planes had gone in marked a stark dividing line

between life and death in the north tower the plane struck at

the center and also struck much higher up and because it struck at the center the

fuel immediately went down the shafts and created a much broader fire the flames were much

more intense the number of floors that were available to move up and down were many fewer

so what happened was people were breaking windows in the north tower

desperate to get air and there was no place to go because there were no

stairwells that were open up and down people were stacked four or five on top

of each other at the broken windows desperate to breathe and other people

were were hanging on to each other across the the steel columns from window to window

hanging out of the windows desperate to breathe and just you know grasping each

other to keep hold of the building

one of the most horrific scenes in the history of the nation took place a thousand feet

above lower manhattan and it took the lives of people who were

staring down at safety you know at the most populous city

in the nation civilization at its peak but they didn't have anywhere to get

there and there's really there's really few words to describe how terrible that must

have been

foreign

there we go

by 9 30 ordinary life had all but ceased across the city as millions of new yorkers and hundreds

of millions more around the world looked on in shock and disbelief but the

nightmarish image is unfolding in real time on tv you usually can engage things you know

within a few minutes you know so that they may start getting worse but

at one time you say well this is what they are but this was something that started

getting worse and worse and worse and worse and worse and worse

at 9 38 word came that terrorists had commandeered a third jetliner

and crashed it into the pentagon killing everyone on board and 126 people on the ground

and not long after that a fourth plane had crashed into a hillside in rural pennsylvania

brought down by some of its own heroic passengers before it could reach its intended target

in the nation's capital military what struck me at the time i think is

the most significant part of that was when they came on and said that the

federal aviation administration ordered all air traffic in the united states to be grounded

i knew that it never happened before you know there are tens of thousands of

planes in the united states at any one time and to say they have to land

now what hit me was that this is really

beyond whatever i had thought

and then on a morning of hideous surprises already without precedent in the city's history

something happened that no one had ever thought possible before

something beyond comprehension something that had never happened

in the history of tall buildings since the first skyscrapers had gone up at the foot of manhattan

over a century before high up in both towers the raging fires

were now generating three to five times the heat of a nuclear power

plant and the interior temperature had soared in places to nearly 2000 degrees fahrenheit

at 9 58 am having withstood the ferocious heat of the inferno within for

nearly an hour the floor trusses on the 80th floor of

the south tower began to give way columns along the east wall began to buckle outwards

and the entire building began to come down

as the quarter mile tall structure dissolved into a massive shroud of smoke and dust

thousands of people in the surrounding streets began to cry out in horror and disbelief

then ran for their lives pursued by an enormous billowing cloud

of dust and debris

it never occurred to me that these two buildings would come down

so that when they did it was the most shocking moment maybe that i've never had

the south tower began to tip forward and then righted itself and came down and what in memory

seems like a slow-motion moment

what happened in 10 seconds 10 seconds it's a knockout in boxing

the whole thing came down

i was just to me still it's a staggering moment

in in new york in any history in world history for a place that had never had

anything like that happen to it ever before the empire state building didn't come down you could

93 the 4 000 pound bomb goes off in the basement

doesn't come down this time it came down this time they figured it out and i thought

man something news happened here

at 10 28 am 30 minutes after the south tower fell the television antenna atop the north

tower began to give way followed a fraction of a second later by

the upper floors of the building itself as the entire north tower now came down

to

and there was a release of heat that was off the scale fires ignited crushing and tearing was

going on and chaos mostly just chaos on some mathematical level was happening

you can't even describe it physically because it was too big

too chaotic it was a cataclysmic release and it released back into the city in

10 seconds in each case the surprising thing to me has always been how concentrated

it was they came straight down as if they were aimed directly at their foundations

and of course anything that was directly underneath no longer existed afterward

the so-called bathtub that ran six floors underground below street

absorbed the brunt of the energy inside that bathtub during those twin 10

second pulses what was really happening nobody can even imagine we know what the results

were the results were we were grappling with results inside that hole for the following nine

months where in a sense probably will be grappling with the results for years to come

i was upstate new york when i heard of the towers being destroyed a side of me

was not believing it it was a very strange blend of feelings

one was the sorrow the horror at witnessing a human life being

obliterated for no reason like that and i felt something

beyond words i felt almost an alive part of me being

squeezed to nothing being extracted and evisceration

almost it's an interesting question when you saw those two giant towers

collapse almost cleanly on themselves where did they go i have read in some architecture article

that they were made mostly of air if you consider the space between the solid molecules of

the steel the concrete the glass the aluminum there was a lot of air with mostly air actually

and they disappeared and it's where did they go was part of the the disbelief that i was feeling

because how you can make 200 000 tons of steel disappear it's unbelievable

in the end the half million tons of concrete steel glass and aluminum in each tower had

hurtled to the ground in a virtual freefall traveling at a speed of 125 miles an hour

shock waves from the twin impacts were picked up more than 40 miles away

by seismic instruments used for monitoring earthquakes the immense columns of rubble and dust

drifting away from ground zero could be clearly seen from outer space

i i have to tell you i didn't know whether the buildings were empty or whether

there were tens of thousands of people in them i just had no idea and

i was i was totally devastated by the fact that all those people were in there and this

building that i had designed was i was falling on them

the buildings were not so important to me i i'm good at buildings

but people are another better it was a terrible event

absolutely terrible i don't think you can measure the impact it's absolutely enormous

everybody felt it but of course those who felt it most and will never get over the effects

are those who lost people and the sheer numbers are so appalling

and the horror of the attack is so appalling that in one sense new york will never be

the same with the collapse of the second tower an

eerie quiet descended on new york by 11 o'clock hundreds of thousands of

dazed and disheveled office workers many covered in ashes and dust could be

seen marching north from the financial district straggling uptown along the west side

highway or heading over the bridges to brooklyn down at the site itself hundreds of

firemen and rescue workers rope their way across a surreal landscape of smoke and flames

at the edge of an immense seven-story pile of tangled steel and debris

searching desperately for any signs of life all day doctors and nurses in emergency

rooms around the city braced for the anticipated onslaught of injured survivors

that never came those who got out got up one nurse later said

those who didn't died the story of all the firefighters is

dramatic what struck me about rescue 2 in brooklyn is that

even though a little firehouse set out kind of in the middle of the brooklyn borough

they were at the world trade center when the second plane hit

and since that's only about 16 minutes they had to take you know a minute must

take a minute or two for the alarm to go out it's got to take you another minute or

something to get your shoes on and to get on the truck and then to go through brooklyn

at rush hour in the morning and go through the brooklyn battery tunnel

and be at the world trade center in 12 minutes by the way where they all died

is an incredible story

around 5 20 in the afternoon building number seven a 47-story tower on the north side of

vesey street succumbed to a raging oil fire within

and fell to the ground

one of the surprising things you could call it almost a sad poetic justice is that the only

buildings that were completely destroyed by this collapse were the buildings that carried the

trade center label buildings one through seven no other buildings with the exception of

the small orthodox church there that dissolved were destroyed and every building that

carried the label

we therefore died in britain stand shouldered shoulder with our american friends in this hour

of tragedy no doubt that these attacks are deliberate acts of terrorism

carefully planned and coordinated new york city has pulled up the drawbridge

every crossing to manhattan island is closed the financial heart of the world's only

superpower

evacuated night fell and an end finally came to the most harrowing day in the city's

history across the city friends and family members of those thought to have been in

the towers continued to roam the streets or make the rounds of hospital emergency rooms

anxiously looking for loved ones who would not come home

when asked on television about the future of his city mayor rudolph giuliani replied

without hesitation we're going to rebuild he said we're going to come out of this

emotionally stronger politically stronger much closer together as a city

and we're going to come out of this economically stronger too the people of new york city will be

whole again

the day itself was a horror and yet that day itself when

you know the president couldn't be found there was the mayor down at the site

helping solve the way to think about it when he was asked about how many

casualties there would be and he said more than any of us can bear that was the most

important sentence by a public figure because it puts sorrow into the story not just

empty rage not just let's go kill somebody back

which a lot of people felt including me but he he created a note there that said

wait a minute we have to think about this as humans and what it did to human beings

initial estimates of the number of dead ranged as high as 20 000. in the weeks and months to come

the number would steadily dwindle until the final confirmed toll of those who

died in the attack on the world trade center stood at 2792 men women and children

including 156 passengers and crew on board the two doomed aircraft

in the end it had been the second deadliest day in american history

surpassing the casualties of pearl harbor d-day and all the battles of the civil war

except antietam included in the overall total was one

particularly staggering figure 343 members of the new york fire

department had lost their lives that day including much of the department's top leadership

no fire department in history had ever suffered anything remotely like it

we lost all those firemen we lost police we had this fantastic contradiction of

people who hated you so much that they were willing to give up their life to take yours

and people who loved humanity so much that they were willing to run into the dawn building

and the smoke and flame and just to save the life of somebody they never met

and that ineffably beautiful there's no better definition of love no

there's no more inspirational no more inspiring no more neody saintly conduct that you can think of

than what they demonstrated

but i'll never forget where i was and i'll never forget that day and

i remember taking a bus home at night about 11

30 at amsterdam 116th street and how quiet the street was there was

an eerie silence like nothing i'd seen in more than 30 years of working there

and i remember a huge truck coming south on amsterdam with a yellow flashing light as it moved

past you could see was a giant truck carrying earth-moving equipment obviously

heading for the world trade center site and then i remember when the bus came that

there was a sign around the little box there that said no fair today i remember sitting on the

bus sitting opposite a young woman who was just crying and i remember when i got off the bus at

83rd street she was still crying i remember just putting my

hand on her shoulder and i said nothing and she said nothing and i got off but i'll

always remember that woman

i went back that night in the middle of this ghastly scene where you could still see the

fires burning at the end of the street everything was dark with these huge buildings all

black silhouetted against black and as the first lights begin to get hooked up

and they're sort of crude halogen lamps and come a lot of these cars from different places

and the first time you began to see the iron workers the hard hats showing up with their

tools with their hats and saying

we cut steel you're going to need us and i knew that night that that we're

going to be all right this was like some moment in the blitz

where citizens came out and began to dig the rubble and these guys knew what to do they were

professionals some of them i'm sure that showed up in the next couple of days helped put the

towers up and they had lived long enough now to see them come down

they knew how they were put together and they were going to help

deconstruct the rubble

on the morning of wednesday september 12 new yorkers woke to what was perhaps the

bleakest dawn in the city's long history overnight the reality of what had

happened had begun to sink in and hope that many could have survived

the twin collapses had all but vanished the numbers were simply unimaginable and

as the mayor had said more than anyone could bear

one financial firm in the north tower canter fitzgerald had lost nearly 700 people

the port authority which had built the vast complex and whose offices had occupied 18 floors

in tower 1 had lost 84 people including its own director we know that many port authority people

were killed we know that the entire headquarters was wiped out this was for the people within the

port authority of a a blow of unbelievable dimensions psychologically it was overwhelming i

mean it was it was really overwhelming no one you know we build libraries i built you know 40

million dollar sewer water main road projects this is way beyond anything i had ever

come in contact with anything that i had ever experienced at all and this obviously was very

very disturbing and just extraordinarily sad

though the exact number would not be known for months nearly 3 000 people

lay buried within an apocalyptic wasteland of tangled steel and concrete

rising in places to jagged peaks more than eight stories high

and smoldering with subterranean fires and yet from that sorrowful daunting landscape

something extraordinary would begin to emerge from the very start something that spoke

of the very best that the city and country were capable of and stood for

that we were able then in the following eight months to clear

more than a million tons of steel and rubble and human bodies and remains and all that

and do that in eight months without losing a single person

was to me this amazing human triumph they were able to say

we had this terrible day in our history and we're going to distinguish ourselves by the way we

solve it and i think the city has never been better than it was

in the way it went about the after part

i mean it was a gigantic improvisation there was no script and they found the script

you know they knew how to do it everything in their lives in some way must have led to that

16 acres in lower manhattan where they prove the value of what they do for a living but also the

sheer intelligence that's behind it and this is a place that demanded intelligence and got it

and got it in a way that that we'll be proud of for

generations

over the next nine months the unbuilding of the world trade center

a feat of improvised urban renewal unlike anything the city had ever seen

would rival and in some ways surpass the extraordinary collective achievement

that had raised it into the sky

week after week month after month the vast chaos of the pile slowly receded

as an army of iron workers crane operators demolition experts

and engineers grimly soldiered on working around the clock in shifts of eight to twelve hours

a herculean effort made incalculably more difficult by the fact that the work site was also

a burial ground

i mean it was just it was a horrible place to work it was a horrible place to work

we were putting milled asphalt you know to kind of build a road and flatten certain areas

put dirt over the debris so we could bring trucks in and whatnot

and have a firefighter come up and say you know look i'm sure my son is in this

pile of debris here can you just give me a couple of hours and i'll search through this

and then out of the corner of your eye to see this guy standing on the pile

with a spade i mean he had a typical gardening spade and was searching for his son

by getting spade fulls of debris and lifting it to his nose to smell

to see if he could smell you know putrefying flesh

put a human face on a tragedy that

that's very haunting

on the um memorial day a year later mayor

bloomberg asked a number of people to read some of the names of those who

had been killed at the world trade center and while we were waiting to go

out i talked with one of the these people who was going to read and he

told me this story richard anthony he said i was in wisconsin when the attack

occurred and as it was happening i knew that he my daughter

was at that very moment in a job interview with her employer in the trade tower

and and i went crazy you know in pain and so forth

as he's telling me this story i'm reliving it now

i began to cry

he said we tried to get a plane commercial we couldn't we

tried to get a private plane we couldn't and finally we got into new york

and we went down to the site we were taken over by a cop who will never be forgotten by us

he's now a member of our family and he took us everywhere we went to 38

places looking for our daughter

and we knew she was dead

at that moment um senator hillary clinton saw me and she

motioned me to come over and she said you look terrible what's

wrong

i said i'm sitting with the father

of a young woman who was killed

and i began to cry again crying again

but it it's like a personal tremendous loss

and what the father said was he was so proud of

of new york and appreciative he said i can't tell you how i appreciate what the mayor did i told him

i can't just sit here i have to work

i have to do something and he said sure you must work

and he embraced me he said i'll never forget him

well i'll never forget him either and the pain that he went

through and just incredible

and the strength that he displayed

great french jesuit paleontologist and a philosopher said that one of the

tricks in life is to convert everything into good

um he makes the reference to the stone you're a sculptor and you have a stone

and the stone has a scar in it and well so now you have to sculpt around that

scar and you've got to use that scar to make it part of whatever it is you're

going to produce that's beautiful and work with what you have play it as it lies

you know so whatever the circumstance you know use it for good purpose 911 how can you

possibly use it for good purpose you think about it you think as we've

suggested before you think about look what this reminds you of is the importance of your own life

and making the most of it because you can lose it in a flash and if that's all you learned from 9 11

if that's all you remembered that my god you could extinguish life so suddenly

so unexpectedly and it could happen to me and therefore i should think harder about the way i

spend my life instead of just wasting it you know it's not going to

teach you what to do with your life but it will teach you to do with your life

and to do it more and quicker and better and that can be extremely valuable i

it's had that effect on me

we are never going to be exactly the same again those of us who lived through this

we can't be in the same way that if you live through the kennedy assassination or

other you know cataclysmic events that had just a powerful wrenching emotional effect on people

you are not quite the same but everything isn't really different either

there is a glorious comforting power to normalcy that

ultimately pushes its way back in it's kind of like you can do anything you want in the sand

on the beach but ultimately the tides will sort of work their effect on it and

smooth it over and sometimes we almost don't want to let it

do its work because we fear that in some way maybe that's disrespectful

of those who died and or those who suffered so much to let normalcy come back but ultimately it's

the law of nature in fact that normalcy return

i think it's also true that there is a fundamental kind of new yorkness that cannot be destroyed

by even as cataclysmic and event as this and our day-to-day business

ultimately came back the business of living the feeling of living

what sitting life is like and that was not destroyed by 9 11. it's in fact

the new york equivalent of the tides it's just there and ultimately it sort of works its magic of

normalcy again but we will never be exactly as we were and that's right

it would be wrong to deny the enormity of what's happening but that doesn't mean everything changes

as a result i really like them you know i really like them

i i miss them i see them right now none of the other buildings had the

power and presence of those towers when you ask someone what they'd like to see there

i know that the answer to that question is something you and i have not thought of

something that has far more dimension far more connection with the city

far more beauty and utility far more originality than we're capable of dreaming of but

should one build tall yes i think so otherwise the

forces of darkness have won i mean they were attacking our ability to challenge the sky

ever since the biblical times to build tall has been both the arrogance of man and the

confidence of man so we must build again not 110 floors

but not 109 either maybe 111 or whatever and i don't care whether it's

the tallest building in the world or not i don't think that's

the issue but i would like to see there a symbol of the city of new york that is as

strong or stronger than the symbol that was there before

i would like to see some depiction of all the religions list them all

atheism ethical humanism catholicism etc and you'll notice that

each of those religions these value systems have two principles they share in common

and the two principles started with monotheism and the jews tsudaka and tikkun olam

sadaka means generally we must treat one another as brother and sister we should show one

another respect and dignity because we are like things we are human beings in a world

that has nothing else like us and we are to treat one another with love

charity use your own words the second principle is well what do you do with this relationship

well we don't know exactly how we got here why we got here et cetera et cetera

that's for mine's larger than ours but we know that we are like kinds

and we should work together to make this as good an experience as possible let us repair

the universe now islam believes that buddhism that has no god

believes it every ethical humanist i ever met believes it those two principles were

supposed to love one another and we're supposed to work together to make the experience better

that's all the religion you need really to make a success of this planet and

i'd like to see that in 9 11 somewhere

i'd like to see that captured somehow

there's more about new york at american experience online see a map of lower manhattan through

time access bonus interviews and world trade center questions and

answers with a panel of experts

all this and more at pbs online pbs.org

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