eight-hundred-pound gorillas in tuxes, having no need to beat their chests. (When they replaced the Empire State Building in the remake of King Kong, they offered the creature a too-smooth, unvaried façade to convey precarious mountain perching.) They were at once the most dominant and least assuming facet of the New York skyline: Don't mind me, they said.
It took seven years and a billion dollars to build them. Putting together the deal required immense muscle, supplied by David Rockefeller at the Chase Manhattan Bank; his brother Nelson, then governor of New York (who stocked one tower with state workers when the building failed to attract tenants); and the considerable resources of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Austin Tobin, then head of the Port Authority, kept up the masquerade that the spanking new towers were somehow going to be given over to trade and port functions.
“How did the Port Authority—chartered to safeguard the economic health of New York's regional maritime commerce—become the agent, a half century later, of the port's displacement and decline? And what caused America's most venerable planning and development agency—once imbued with the high-minded public service doctrines of Woodrow Wilson—to transform itself into the world's biggest real estate speculator?” demanded Eric Darnton in his book about the World Trade Center, Divided We Stand. Though the agency probably could not have done much to keep the port in Manhattan, it does take gall to present to the public a real estate speculation as a consolidation of port services, at the very moment that these functions were being transferred to New Jersey. We were led to envision the twin towers as the vertical equivalent of all those shipping companies and countinghouses that once lined the docks, together with the shipbuilders, importers, commission merchants, marine insurance companies, brokers, and lawyers whose Whitehall Street offices had overlooked the harbor.
Still, you have to hand it to them: the World Trade Center went from being a white elephant, when it opened in 1972, to near-full occupancy of10 million square feet of office space. Not only did it initiate the resurgence of Lower Manhattan; its dug-out foundation stones were reused as landfill to make Battery Park City, the true center of that revival. By 2001 the World Trade Center was valued at $1.2 billion, and the Port Authority had managed to lease the buildings for ninety-nine years to a consortium led by Larry A. Silverstein for $3.2 billion. The city and the agency were licking their chops, contemplating how they would spend the huge profits resulting from privatization. The electronics shopkeepers of Radio Row whose district had originally stood in the World Trade Center's path were long forgotten. But then, on September 11, 2001, the towers joined the palimpsest of multiple erasures, like a child's magic slate, which is New York.
Now that they are gone, their absence reasserts how much they climaxed the southern tip of Manhattan. Their silvered profiles shimmering against a blue sky, like matching cigarette cases, or at night, when they became moody and noir-ish, were poetic postcard effects achieved only at a distance; up close, they seemed blandly off-putting, and oppressive at street level, like most 65-mph architecture built in that era.
To the rest of the world—though, curiously, I would maintain, not to native New Yorkers like myself, who would always regard the twin towers as parvenus compared to the Empire State, Chrysler, and Woolworth Buildings—the World Trade Center symbolized the Big Apple and, beyond that, the might of America. Certainly the twins had the richest and most imaginative of meanings, a mystic temptation one can only speculate on, to the Islamic terrorists who attacked them not once but twice. The first time, in 1993, despite the tragic loss of life and damage to the buildings, the towers remained standing, seemingly
It took seven years and a billion dollars to build them. Putting together the deal required immense muscle, supplied by David Rockefeller at the Chase Manhattan Bank; his brother Nelson, then governor of New York (who stocked one tower with state workers when the building failed to attract tenants); and the considerable resources of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Austin Tobin, then head of the Port Authority, kept up the masquerade that the spanking new towers were somehow going to be given over to trade and port functions.
“How did the Port Authority—chartered to safeguard the economic health of New York's regional maritime commerce—become the agent, a half century later, of the port's displacement and decline? And what caused America's most venerable planning and development agency—once imbued with the high-minded public service doctrines of Woodrow Wilson—to transform itself into the world's biggest real estate speculator?” demanded Eric Darnton in his book about the World Trade Center, Divided We Stand. Though the agency probably could not have done much to keep the port in Manhattan, it does take gall to present to the public a real estate speculation as a consolidation of port services, at the very moment that these functions were being transferred to New Jersey. We were led to envision the twin towers as the vertical equivalent of all those shipping companies and countinghouses that once lined the docks, together with the shipbuilders, importers, commission merchants, marine insurance companies, brokers, and lawyers whose Whitehall Street offices had overlooked the harbor.
Still, you have to hand it to them: the World Trade Center went from being a white elephant, when it opened in 1972, to near-full occupancy of10 million square feet of office space. Not only did it initiate the resurgence of Lower Manhattan; its dug-out foundation stones were reused as landfill to make Battery Park City, the true center of that revival. By 2001 the World Trade Center was valued at $1.2 billion, and the Port Authority had managed to lease the buildings for ninety-nine years to a consortium led by Larry A. Silverstein for $3.2 billion. The city and the agency were licking their chops, contemplating how they would spend the huge profits resulting from privatization. The electronics shopkeepers of Radio Row whose district had originally stood in the World Trade Center's path were long forgotten. But then, on September 11, 2001, the towers joined the palimpsest of multiple erasures, like a child's magic slate, which is New York.
Now that they are gone, their absence reasserts how much they climaxed the southern tip of Manhattan. Their silvered profiles shimmering against a blue sky, like matching cigarette cases, or at night, when they became moody and noir-ish, were poetic postcard effects achieved only at a distance; up close, they seemed blandly off-putting, and oppressive at street level, like most 65-mph architecture built in that era.
To the rest of the world—though, curiously, I would maintain, not to native New Yorkers like myself, who would always regard the twin towers as parvenus compared to the Empire State, Chrysler, and Woolworth Buildings—the World Trade Center symbolized the Big Apple and, beyond that, the might of America. Certainly the twins had the richest and most imaginative of meanings, a mystic temptation one can only speculate on, to the Islamic terrorists who attacked them not once but twice. The first time, in 1993, despite the tragic loss of life and damage to the buildings, the towers remained standing, seemingly
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