All language subtitles for PBS.New.York.A.Documentary.Film.8of8.x264.AAC.MVGroup.Forum

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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