> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. :)
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.
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.
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.
49 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 71.8 ms ] threadThe 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.
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.
https://youtu.be/CqzbHEfX3o8?si=4wfuiD94x9p11sj0
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jules_and_G%C3%A9d%C3%A9on_Nau...
> 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.
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.
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.
China's rise wasn't "inevitable" it was underwritten when Nixon went to China and they subsequently got their most favored trading nation status.
Looking at where America is right now. It seems to make a downfall.
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.
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.
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...
Now known as Brookfield place. Yet another ill-advised re-branding. I believe this was done after the GFC to attract non-finance companies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_on_Wire
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIawNRm9NWM
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.
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.
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.
"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...
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.
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.
They should have been rebuilt identically.
Dad also bemoaned the loss of Radio Row to build the WTC, as he was a big Ham enthusiast as a kid.
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
The actual scene from the movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QL6d0ASmvfs
The camera work for that was stunning.
I'm sure there are some civil engineers in here who would just love to weigh in so now I wait. :)
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.
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.