The World Trade Center under construction through photos, 1966-1979 | Hacker News Reader

The World Trade Center under construction through photos, 1966-1979

rarehistoricalphotos.com

240 pointskinderjaje111 comments

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.

Thanks for that. We seem to have lost sight of the importance of "commercial biodiversity" in the past 40 or more years of continuous M&A concentration.

Happily, I saw a little discussion of it in 2008 when the advocates of letting the auto companies fail were pushed back by statistics showing how many second and third tier suppliers would be destroyed. But the fourth tier, the shenzhen / radio alley-type stuff is still ignored. Very similar to how most companies want to simply hire skills and assume that they will magically appear when in years past, companies took an active hand in creating them by having a career development path in-house.

Perhaps the AI bubble will be viewed in the future as the last gasp of companies that depleted the soil that they grew in and now struggle to survive without anyone that knows how to do the work anymore. Maybe LLMs will be all that remains, our Moai.

There's plenty of "commercial biodiversity" left on Canal Street. And it's pretty gross.

It's a shame the same logic wasn't applied in maintaining a healthy root-level auto company ecosystem. Having a single megacorp at the top inevitably makes it too big to fail. On the other hand, if there are dozens of smaller car companies, the failure of any one of them is insignificant to the wider ecosystem.

A company that knows it is too big to fail will inevitably lead to mismanagement. After all, why bother saving for a rainy day when you can count on corporate welfare handouts? Why bother reducing your risks when you can always rely on a bailout? You can never lose, so the obvious thing to do is to bet as big as possible in an attempt to create as much short-term "shareholder value" as possible.

I can't think of a way to have dozens of smaller car companies, all competitive and all viable long term without ongoing and adaptive regulation.

With Chevron doctrine dead and Congress struggling to pass a budget, I can't see how it is possible to have any meaningful regulation in the US in the short to mid term.

Even the mainland China model of pitting province and local governments against each other to foster competition might not work in the long term (it is still early days). We already see specialization in provinces which to me indicates that there is a defacto province government who wins auto manufacturers in the long run.

I think you can expand this to “finance” more broadly. This essay by the CCRU from 30 years ago is really interesting and basically explores the phenomenon of marketplaces turning into organized financial spaces as a space becomes more capitalistic. Let’s not forget what the WTC is/was: a major focal point of global capitalism, not just another building.

http://www.ccru.net/archive/markets.htm

In 'highly developed' economies the anarchy of concrete market-places has been replaced by the securitized space of the shopping mall (interiorized, guarded, and surveilled). Instead of dark and crowded alleys, lined by open stalls - which encourage a multiplicity of tactile interactions - the mall substitutes shop windows and brightly lit retail displays.

It's not about looks but efficient use of land: Manhattan was (and still is) the financial capital of the world. It had the most valuable real estate in the world. Radio Row was a poor use of real estate.

Before the Chinese traded electronics in Shenzhen, they traded it in Hong Kong. Yes, as Hong Kong transformed into a financial center, it got rid of the electronics traders.

> It had the most valuable real estate in the world. Radio Row was a poor use of real estate.

So why did they force a sale price on the people there?

If as finance people we believe in market forces they should have bought the stores out at market prices.

It's another heads-we-win-tails-you-lose situation.

The Wikipedia article hints that it went through the courts. Probably the only legally recognised rights were of the property (real estate) owners and those rights didn't include using the sidewalk as a display area and blasting out announcements on loudspeakers.

So $30,000 in 1962 was probably very generous, but these business owners held the WTC project ransom by demanding unreasonable payouts.

The wikipedia article mentioned that it went to court.

> It's not about looks but efficient use of land

Right, confiscation from private owners to use it for erection of a building no one needs is a very efficient use of land. The project will require astronomical up front expenses, will stay vacant for almost 2 decades, and have endless problems until its last day (fires, terrorist acts, issues with the structure). But who cares, it's efficiency we are talking about.

Line must go up

The White House and Central Park are a poor use of real estate as well. Imagine how much money you could make if you developed it into a new Kowloon Walled City!

Besides, didn't the Twin Towers have a massive occupancy problem? I recall that being the reason why so many government entities were forced to move there...

‘poor use of land’ meaning ‘not being used for the benefit of wealthy people.’

What is "poor use of real estate"?

> because the sort of people that built the WTC don't like their chaotic appearance.

And their counterparts in government hate it because chaos is inefficient (because people have rights) to impose their will on (regulate) so even if you don't build WTC there becomes a regulatory environment where nothing organic can grow.

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.

Its fall showed, that cultural relativism and universal liberalism, where just western delusions. Socialism was a dead ideology by then, but this really attacked western values, insofar, that a dried husk of a imperialist religious ideology, revived with western demand for natural resources (oil) would rather engage in cultural warfare upon western values and society then trying to fix itself.

It was a ringing bell, bringing the attention back to the old ugly worldorder of great games, land-empires and bloody conquest and the inability to isolate from hostile ideologies, even if you are the usa and living on a giant island. Bush went to iraq and the failure to build any working state there- showed not only the failure of neoncons, but also of the whole "all cultures are equal" and academic impotence. There explanation models had nothing for this but tired rehashes of colonial/anti-colonial ideology, no predictions, no real help, just "belief in universal values and western culture, and righton" - and that was it. No help for the 2 billion stuck in religious ember, not real analysis to free the wasted geniuses trapped under burkas. Silence, ideology and absence, thats whats left.

Some of this rings true, but it makes way too many speculative assertions about the future stated as if they're simply done deals. It also uncritically channels many memes from the destructionist movement presently "leading" the US, rather than acknowledging that movement as part of the "cultural warfare upon western values".

It is already final. You can not be stuck in medieval times in a world with nuclear weapons and proliferation. Had Israel not taken out the reactors of Iraq and Syria, ISIS and Iraq would have nukes today. Which would result (because non-reasonable actors aka fanatics longing for the afterlife) in a regional exchange.

The middle east is already gone. They will nuke one another, rather sooner then later. And their governments know. They desperately embrace the surveillance state as stabilizer, move there centers of government out of population centers expected to implode in senseless rebellion and anarchy again and again - they want to build cities optimized to escape nuclear retribution, for the day when some of their madmen lob a device at Israel.

They celebrate right now in Ghaza and chant for more violence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3yaBgGzANc

And that boiling cauldron of madness is wide spread: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwdlsHaRD1k

It is - seriously - no wonder they got destroyed. NYC is a symbol, and the towers were a recognizable icon in the skyline.

There's a high number of coincidences about the towers getting destroyed. It's no conspiracy, it's because the towers and NYC meant something in the eyes of the world with regards to the USA.

Just rattling off a few of the wild ones:

The episode of The Lone Gunmen which predicted an attack with a plane on the towers.

The Sega Master System game (I forget the name, but I own it) where it depicts a missile hitting the towers on the opening screen. It's pixels with little wings, and super spooky in retrospect.

The Dream Theater live album released on 9/11 which showed the NYC skyline burning.

There's so much stuff, I almost don't blame the conspiracy theorists. But they have the causality backwards. They also really like to ignore the fact that 8 years earlier somebody tried to blow up the towers and killed 6 people...

What wondrous things you'll be able to do with computer graphics! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cu1bivgaiVw

The album for "Party Music" from Boots Riley's band "The Coup" was scheduled to be released in September and they had to delay it due to the cover having a picture of the WTC exploding [1]

Tom Clancy's book "Debt of Honor" is very similar in a spooky way as well. Including the hesitation to shoot down commercial airliners being used as weapons. [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_Music [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt_of_Honor

I recall reading an article sometime around 1999 that mentioned a ban on holes being drilled between floors in the towers for running network wiring because they were beginning to worry about structural integrity. That article was disappeared after the attacks. I know I read it, but the information totally disappeared.

The article "Mother Earth, Mother Board" by Neal Stephenson (https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/), written in 1996 says "The collapse of the lighthouse must have been astonishing, like watching the World Trade Center fall over."

That totally freaked me out when I re-read the article a few years later.

Somewhat supporting your point, the towers were literally bombed in '93 with the intent of toppling them:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_World_Trade_Center_bombin...

I imagine this terrorist attack inspired some of the art on your list.

So the videogame I mentioned was from 87! I think... Around then for sure. Definitely late 80's since it was for 8 bit Sega.

The majority of development in the US is private. It hasn't been redirected to war. What's primarily happened is that Americans decided that the '90s were the perfect decade and if you build anything past that you are "ruining the" [community|environment|neighborhood].

Everything new is "gross" for the people who are on their fifth year of therapy with no end in sight. It's always someone else's fault but don't change anything because community character is the most important thing.

Even as the true “community character” — the people who live in the community — are pushed out by the price required to live there.

Some of the best “preserved” (via this ‘build nothing change nothing’ tactic) communities in my expensive socal city are dead. They were turned from diverse beach communities into dead information technology/finance monoliths.

The 1970s weren't exactly a prosperous time period. The total end of the gold standard marked the real decline.

China's rise wasn't "inevitable" it was underwritten when Nixon went to China and they subsequently got their most favored trading nation status.

I couldn’t help feel the same.

Looking at where America is right now. It seems to make a downfall.

> Looking at where America is right now. It seems to make a downfall.

It's been happening for years now. 'America', the idea, died the moment the 2nd plane hit the towers.

People saw that happen, and were so fearful they immediately opened their hearts to fascism.

2025 is merely the year where all of Bush's fascist policies & Obama/Biden's failure to clean it up metastasized into the overt fascism that hurts everyone in a country & eventually destroys the country itself.

I firmly believe that the 9/11 terrorists won. They got what they wanted, which is exactly what you describe. They also destroyed the optimism and energy of our culture. I lived through that time, and we have never recovered. The malaise of today started on 9/11/2001.

What we should have done is, as a symbolic act, rebuild the towers exactly as they were (with some structural improvements maybe) and go about our business. We should have gone after the terrorists as an international police action and not much more.

That would have been a symbol of true strength. "No, your little act of vandalism won't have any effect on us at all. We are above that." Be like the "wall" archetype in fiction, the huge guy someone punches as hard as they can and they barely notice.

Instead we showed stupidity and weakness disguised as strength, something we're now wallowing in with a whole culture revolving around fake strength and compensatory narcissism. Nothing says dying nation like gold plating everything.

The thing with this pernicious idea of rebuilding as it was is it would have left no place for the massive commemorative space that an event like that needs.

The Freedom Tower is so unimpressive in large part because it had to fit within the constraints of the main event at this location.

Put that in the lobby of each building. Make it a giant high ceilinged space with a big granite monument, but rebuild.

The freedom tower literally looks shattered, and next to it is a giant wound that never heals. That’s what that whole site says. “We are broken now.”

Thanks to Cheney, Bush, and Rumsfeld, et al, who reacted to the attacks the way Bin Laden wanted them to react...

I remember reading an article in 2003 how Clinton's team wanted to handover intel about terror threats to Bush's team during the presidential transition, but the latter skipped those meetings. And remember how Bush supposedly ignored warnings in his daily briefings?

Without hanging chads and the shenanigans in Florida, maybe Al Gore's administration would've caught these terrorists, there'd be no sending kids to die in Afghanistan and Iraq... what else?

> and their fall kicked off the decline

My feeling is that the response was the thing that kicked off the decline. At the time of the attack, the US had quite a bit of goodwill around the world. The US could have surgically gone after the people responsible, with minimum civilian deaths, and most of the world would have backed them to the hilt, and the US would have come out stronger. Instead we had spurious claims of weapons of mass destruction, the coalition of the "willing" going into Iraq with jackboots on, over the widespread objections of their own populations, and abuses in Guantanamo Bay. That response burned an awful lot of goodwill around the world: which kicked off the decline.

>The Twin Towers sort of represented the height of American power and prestige, and their fall kicked off the decline

no. The twin towers opened in 1973 at a time when NYC was becoming a hollowed out urban core. "New York City never officially declared bankruptcy, but it came very close in 1975 due to severe financial distress. The city faced a fiscal crisis, and through negotiations involving unions and state assistance, it managed to avoid formal bankruptcy" [wikipedia] The buildings were not a commercial success and suffered vacanies and low rents. This is the reason that they were not rebuilt, but rather a smaller building was erected in their place. (one of the problems with tall commercial buildings is that they require a non-trivial amount of elevator square feet in the middle of each tower; this is sq footage that does not make money. if you look at tall buildings being built today, they are almost all residential structures. The require less elevator because the number of people in each apartment is far smaller than the number of people in offices)

New York City only bounced back financially during the Reagan revolution. The Democrat party was dead in the water at that time (similar to today) but it bounced back when Clinton came from out of nowhere (a place called Hope!) to win. but looking back today, Clinton was part of the "hollowing out the economy, sending it to China" (I'm not blaming nor absolving here, that type of idea was popular in economics. It didn't work because it turns out the world is not a nice place where opening up to China and Russia turns out not to open up in the other direction (and also because economic efficiency entails "in efficient markets, economic profits go to zero" and everybody except consumers doesn't like that, and consumers don't like it either on the other side of their ledger, their jobs))

>diverted critical funds from development... into conflict and war far away.

defense spending is not and was not a major factor wrt spending in the economy

https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/styles/pubs_2x/pub...

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.

I visited Manhattan in 1990 and took photos on top of the towers, and also from the Staten Island boat shuttle. I thought then and still think now that those towers looked magnificent.

They should have been rebuilt identically.

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.

I just visited NYC for the first time a few months ago, and had the most amazing time, one hell of a city and I can’t wait to get back.

I could ramble for hours about all the things I loved about the trip, but one of the things that stuck out was all the young kids taking the subway by themselves or in small packs of friends out pretty late etc. They all seemed so much more street smart and independent than my own similar aged kids (we live in a quiet neighborhood in Seattle). I also grew up fairly sheltered in the suburbs where I had very little exposure to the “real world” as they say…

I’d be fascinated to hear more about what it’s like to grow up in such a massive city.

The subway systems is one of the greatest socioeconomic equalizers in NYC. During rush hour, you'll share a subway car with a homeless man, an ER doctor wearing scrubs, a fashion model wearing YSL, a finance bro, and a food delivery worker. It's an amazing city for people watching.

People who like this might enjoy the amazing film Man On Wire

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_on_Wire

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIawNRm9NWM

Highly recommended... I found it quite beautiful and moving, and it's the only film I've felt compelled to write a blog post[1] about. "Seeing the film (made just last year) transforms the memory of the Towers from one of trauma to something more like transcendence."

[1] https://johnj.com/posts/man-on-wire/ [2009]

Edit: add year

Similarly, there was the Robert Zemeckis movie "The Walk" which is a dramatization of the same event.

After watching, I felt the movie was as much a tribute to the WTC as it was about this wire walker. It's a beautiful film.

"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.

I'm still mad, and I'm not even American. Even over here in Germany, it was a massive shock wave that went through society and I still remember the day it happened vividly. The effects in society are felt to this day.

as an American I very much want to live in the reality where Gore won and 9/11 didn't happen.

Are you implying Gore winning would've meant 9/11 wouldn't have happened?

Not the parent, and I'm not saying it definitely wouldn't have happened (I have no idea), but it's at least possible. There was advance intelligence around the event that might have been treated differently by a different administration.

Even if it had happened, the response would also have been different.

What do you think the different response would have been?

I have no idea; I'm just saying that with different people in charge, they wouldn't have reacted in exactly the same way.

If I had to guess, I'd say at least no Iraq war, if we consider that part of the response. Patriot Act probably would have looked different. I expect there still would have been military action in Afghanistan, but likely with differences as well.

In Richard Clarke’s book he details the intelligence community’s multiple warnings to the new Bush administration that spring and summer. They were ignored.

As Gore came from the Clinton admin he and the people around him would have had a lot more experience dealing with and familiar with the threats and actors, who were already known.

The Bush administration let the attacks happen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11_attacks_advance-k...

Are you asserting that Al Qaeda liked Gore enough to suspend their vendetta?

They're asserting that they want to live in a world where two things are true.

- Gore was declared winner of the 2000 presidential election

- the WTC wasn't attacked on September 11th, 2001.

the two don't have to be connected to be wishes.

Bush's team ignored Clinton's team attempt to handover what they knew about the threats (in these threads someone mentioned Richard Clarke's book, I remember reading a 2003 TIME article, you can probably also read the results of the congressional investigation).

If the Supreme Court hadn't done the shenanigans in Florida, Clinton's team would've been Gore's team, and who knows, maybe those hijackers would've been caught...

If Gore had won, maybe McCain could have been President after him, and the Republican party could've gone in a very different direction too.

If you enjoy these kinds of hypotheticals, check out the series For All Mankind on apple tv.

One could argue that Osama bin Laden did succeed in destroying the US if not the entire Western order.

The US did exactly what he wanted them to.

He wanted to radicalize Muslims worldwide against the West and drain American resources through prolonged wars.

It's also interesting how infrequently Americans know OBL's motivations for the 9/11 attacks. A big part of it was the American support of Israel, and OBL's belief that this would lead to further oppression of Muslim people in Palestine.

He did terrible things but was pretty accurate in his predictions.

OBL hated Palestine ?

"this" == "the American support of Israel"

> 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.

Interested in Reading about those murders.

I couldn’t find any evidence of the birth of 17 babies. The claim may be confused with the approximately 100 babies born to women whose husbands died in the 9/11 attacks.

I also couldn’t find any evidence for the 19 murders. Six people were killed in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, which was an act of terrorism. Plus 9/11.

There was at least one additional murder. Louis DiBono, who held a lucrative contract to fireproof the steel beams of the towers, was murdered in the parking lot under the North tower on Oct 4, 1990. John Gotti was convicted for the murder (and four other murders). The FBI, eavesdropping on Gotti, overheard the order, but misheard the name and thus failed to warn DiBono. Also, there was no video surveillance or witnesses, and the body wasn’t found for three days, all indicating a lack of security. The Feb 26, 1993, bombing was apparently done from the same parking lot 2+ years later.

https://npdf1.org/crime-scene-world-trade-center/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gotti

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.

https://youtu.be/CqzbHEfX3o8?si=4wfuiD94x9p11sj0

Did anyone film with film cameras that day? We could get really really high res footage out of that.

thanks for the link - fascinating to read about the origins of this footage [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jules_and_G%C3%A9d%C3%A9on_Nau...

You're welcome

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. :)

I hsve a hard time believing the history would be greatly altered if the planes did not cause the buildings to fall.

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.

Yeah, it was a facade. That facade fell in 2001.

(I'm not saying this was good. It was a terrible tragedy. The attack itself obviously, and then what followed as well.)

I don't know if I'd call it a façade. More of a lull. I was 20 in 2001, and growing up in the 90s it very much felt like we had entered "post-history". Yes, the world wasn't perfect, there was still conflict and social problems, but they were better than at any time in the past, and clearly getting better (along with technology) all the time.

I was slightly too young to really remember the cold war, and my only hazy related memory is positive: the fall of the Berlin wall. So, major geopolitical conflict was a thing of the past.

Of course in reality, 10-15 years of relative peace (and of course there was still regional conflict) and social stability (though of course there were many unaddressed problems) is just a blip, but especially growing up in that era, it didn't feel that way at the time. I think that might be why so many millennial and Gen-x folks feel particularly disillusioned with the state of the world now.

It’s true, the 90s definitely seemed like wildly optimistic times and technology seemed to be unlocking the “common man” in really great ways. I never had the feeling things would go backwards.

it was very real

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.

Not sure why you're being down voted for an aesthetic opinion for which you gave a logical explanation. I'm not sure whether I agree or not, but the comment seemed fine to me.

They were downvoted because the downvoters disagreed with the opinion. I so wish we could all agree to not do that.

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?

No, IIRC the Port Authority owned the land but leased development out to a developer, Larry Silverstein. Coincidentally Silverstein leased the rest of the WTC complex from the PANYNJ in July? 2001.

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?

No, it was the art students.

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.

Honest question , would it have changed much ?

I suspect so. The case was made in 102 minutes, a NY Times book detailing how 18 people on or above the South Tower's impact zone managed to escape in one of the partially collapsed staircases. Were the stairs built to firecode specs in place in 1966, and not in the flimsy manner expedited by Rockefeller, these stairs would have easily survived intact long enough for many more than 18 to survive.

I guess we're talking about not just brick, but reinforced concrete infused brick ? Anyway I'd be interested to read more about it, thanks.

Right, it's fireproof brick, isolated steel stairs, pressurized air, 120 m fireproof doors.

This rules aren't there for no reason.

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.

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