The Twin Towers sort of represented the height of American power and prestige, and their fall kicked off the decline. From its peak in the unipolar 90s, a series of expensive misadventures that began after the towers fell diverted critical funds from development (against the backdrop of China's inevitable rise and industrial capacity), into conflict and war far away.
I grew up in a small town in New Jersey, about twenty miles west. From the highest point in our town, you could make out the outline of the WTC, far off in the distance.
In 2001, I lived in Chicago, and I took a trip to Italy in September of 2001. I remember flying into Newark airport early that month, and marveling (as I always did) about the New York skyline, including the Empire State Building and the WTC.
I returned eight days later, on the first day that flights resumed after 9/11, and I remember flying into Newark again, and there was still smoking climbing into the air around where the WTC once stood.
Beautiful images in some ways, but so raw and stomach-churning in others. I am not American but feel sick to this day at the thoughts of these events. On the day of 9/11, I was 11 and went to my IT class that afternoon in Sussex, UK. Our teacher set a task that we thought was hypothetical. They said something had happened in NYC and asked for us to put our investigative hats on and find information about it online. I suppose, in a way, it made sense as a task, to treat it as an exercise. It slowly came to realization that this was a real thing. Looking at these images now, the people in the foregrounds in 1970s attire, going about their days, it feels like a nostalgic optimism. Earth-shattering loss followed it. The ephemerality of optimism for our pockets of lived humanity in this lifetime are not to be taken for granted. We should remember and value what positive and pain-free times we are able to each be priveleged enough to enjoy. Time is short.
My parents worked and had most of their friends in Manhattan when I was a little kid — this was back in the 1980s. I have vivid memories to this day of passing the World Trade Center and being completely overwhelmed by the scale of it.
Most high rises taper, but these towers just went straight up as rectangles. And the effect was almost dizzying. They were just so tall.
I used to love drawing the NYC skyline as a kid — such an iconic thing. New York used to be much grittier, but I loved the energy of it as a kid. Was an incredible thing to experience.
People who like this might enjoy the amazing film Man On Wire
"Tragically, 60 people were killed during construction.
During their lifetimes the towers were host to the birth of 17 babies and 19 murders"
That is unusually high number of death during construction.
After 25 years, I still get emotional looking at these imageries. The emotion is raw. I'm still mad that this happened.
> The material expenditures on the towers were enormous; 192,000 tons of steel, 425,000 cubic yards of concrete, 43,600 windows with 572,000 square feet of glass, 1,143,000 square feet of aluminum sheet, 198 miles of ductwork, and 12,000 miles of electrical cable.
The towers also provided an extraordinary employment opportunity for the construction workers of the region. More than 3,500 people were employed continuously on-site during construction.
> A total of 10,000 people were involved in its construction. Tragically, 60 people were killed during construction.
During their lifetimes the towers were host to the birth of 17 babies and 19 murders.
Fifty thousand people called the towers their place of work and on many days tens of thousands visited.
Somehow, the producer of Godspell got permission to film one of their musical dance scenes on top of one of the unfinished towers. A good writeup of how that happened is here: https://ntweblog.blogspot.com/2015/01/godspell-and-construct...
The actual scene from the movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QL6d0ASmvfs
The camera work for that was stunning.
Found this sub recently as WTC buildings for some weird reasons fascinate me in rather uncanny way, whether as a 911 event or before that
https://www.reddit.com/r/TwinTowersInPhotos/s/cnyHzBE47C
Some photos form Sun Microsystems offices inside the WTC https://www.reddit.com/r/TwinTowersInPhotos/s/qYMuq6LG4W
Jules Naudet 3 hour footage of the collapse of the WTC, following the firemen before and after the towers got hit.
They were so stunning to look at from the outside. They were so large they didn't seem real.
I worked for a bit on the 95 or 96th floor. Inside they were less impressive. The lowish ceiling and skinny windows made it feel confining. To me, in the 90s, they felt old and dated on the inside.
For context, three of the tallest skyscrapers at the time were constructed in Chicago during roughly this same period.[0] (Originally known as the Hancock, Standard Oil, and Sears buildings, since renamed). Chicago was also the second largest U.S. city at the time, and I've often thought that the WTC construction was in part motivated by a sense of civic competition between the two cities.
"Of Chicago's five tallest buildings, three were completed within a 5-year span between 1969 and 1974."
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_buildings_in_C...
The article does not mention it (that I noticed), but the lower floors were occupied and in use before the upper floors were completed. My father was a beat cop in Manhattan in the late 60s and early 70s, he tells me that the construction crew took him up the elevator to a floor where the windows had not yet been installed, while businesses were working in the lower floors.
Dad also bemoaned the loss of Radio Row to build the WTC, as he was a big Ham enthusiast as a kid.
I looked at interior photos of the towers and those 18 inch wide windows are terrible. Did everyone hate those? It's a tragedy to see such beautiful views outside those windows that look like prison bars.
I saw a documentary that made the case that the Twin Towers' design was compromised from the beginning. The original design called for pillars at the corners, but the designers wanted open floor plans, so the city could be seen from anywhere in the offices. (Makes me wonder if the terrorists did more research than we would think)
I'm sure there are some civil engineers in here who would just love to weigh in so now I wait. :)
Seeing the pictures just makes me sad.
I remember having a beer in the restaurant at the top in the late 90's. I wish I'd taken some photos.
I lived/worked near WTC's and used the subways under it many, many times.
I had a short friendship with Marshall Brain (How Stuff Works, et. al.) in ~1993, and he and I decided to meet in the WTC square to go have lunch one day. He was early, and based on "stepping off" one side of one of the towers and knowing the # of stories, he mentally calculated how many Zebulon, NC's would fit inside them. If memory serves, he was either living there at the time or from there.
I had moved to Atlanta when the towers were hit, and although my closest colleagues from NY were all OK after 9/11, I'm sure there was at least someone I'd known or worked with that perished.
I can't quite describe the visceral thrill I'd get seeing the towers starting from when I was a little kid. And whether it was staring at the folks dining in Windows on the World from across the way (too "fancy" for us to go while it was still open!); staring up those endless vertical lines from the plaza below; catching a brief glimpse as you walked east to west somewhere uptown; or seeing them anchor the full skyline from a bridge or flight, the thrill only increased with each subsequent viewing. A truly special piece of NYC for someone who only knew the city with them. And it was truly sad having to get used to it without them.
I'm not an American, I've only ever been to NYC once in 2014, and I was only 8 when 9/11 happened, but somehow, seeing that skyline with those two towers still in it, evokes the feeling of simpler, friendlier times. Even though in the 90s, my own country was going through the troubles of recovering from 70 years of socialism — it was anything but simpler friendlier times.
The book Men Of Steel is about the company that erected the steel for the towers. It's highly worth reading and it talks at length about some of the challenges in not only the erection of the buildings, but the problems caused by the sheer scale of it.
The four cranes on each tower that you can see in the photos were a scaling up of a proven design and it didn't scale up well. They had tons of problems with them breaking down.
There were also some plans to do automated welding that came to naught. They had to fall back to manual welding after they couldn't get the automated process to work.
I remember my grandfather telling me when I was younger that many nice buildings were demolished to make way for the WTC. He worked nearby, so he saw the entire construction from start-to-finish.
Looking at all those steel beams I have only one thought...
This might be an unpopular opinion, but, apart from that 9/11 was a terrible act, I think the twin towers kind of dominated the NYC skyline in a way that was not good.
By themselves they were impressive, but, jutting out of the ground as they did, without peer, made for a jarring skyline. The fact that they did not taper and were twin made it worse.
The new tower is much better integrated into NYC skyline aesthetically. A shame I did not visit before returning to Ghana a couple of years ago.
That looks beautiful, it might be a silly question but why hasn't anyone pushed for rebuilding them? It's kinda sad to see NY without these towers, it's a silent reminder that terror once won. I know it would probably be very expensive, but I wonder why nobody thought of rebuilding these, even if as a symbolic token that people can reemerge after tragedy.
The Twin Towers 2 concept, which is mostly the originals with a few additional floors, would have been a more fitting replacement.
I visited New York in 1997 and was fascinated by the Twin Towers. Coming from a mid-sized city in France, they seemed unbelievably tall. We went there, but unfortunately, we weren’t allowed to visit because of some construction work. I was quite disappointed and swore to myself that I’d come back another time. Needless to say, that never happened.
> the World Financial Center, designed by Cesar Pelli, and several apartment buildings were built on this new land.
Now known as Brookfield place. Yet another ill-advised re-branding. I believe this was done after the GFC to attract non-finance companies.
Was the WTC 7 / Salomon Brothers Building part of the same construction?
A lot of public works projects and big construction projects were taking place during those years because the economy was not doing well. They were "jobs programs" I guess you could say.
Did they planted the building demolition explosives used to destroy the building at 11 Sep initially at the building stage?
Article neglects that the WTC defied NYFD building codes on egress. If the code was applied as existing in 1966, it would require 8 or 9 fireproof staircases. Instead Rockefeller asked for and got a pass and the building instead had three staircases embedded in six layers of drywall, which is far else than the then standard fireproofing (brick encased). Not only that, they had non-standard transit corridors that wove egress routes around the two sky lobbies.
I had the fortune of being at the top of the twin towers as a child in the 90s. A total shame what Larry Silverstein coordinated against these fantastic structures.
Tangentially:
> The vision was meant to use the trade facility and urban renewal as tools to clear and revitalize what had become a “commercial slum”.
What this refers to is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Row#New_York_City
Basically you cannot have Akihabara or Shenzhen style electronics markets because the sort of people that built the WTC don't like their chaotic appearance.