The original World Trade Center, a complex with seven buildings featuring landmark twin towers
Lower Manhattan, New York City, was opened on April 4, 1973, and was destroyed in 2001 in
the September 11 attacks. The site is being rebuilt with five new skyscrapers and a memorial
to the casualties of the attacks. As of November 2011, only one skyscraper has been completed;
the other four are expected to be completed before 2020. One World Trade Center will be the
lead building for the new complex, reaching more than 100 stories at its completion. It became
the tallest building in New York City on April 30, 2012, and is expected to be finished by
2013. A sixth tower is awaiting confirmation.
At the time of their completion, the original 1 World Trade Center (the North Tower) and 2 World Trade Center (the South Tower), known collectively as the Twin Towers, were the tallest buildings in the world. Both buildings provided nearly 10 million square feet of office space for approximately 35,000 people and 430 companies. The complex was so large it had its own zip code: 10048. The other buildings included 3 WTC (the Marriott World Trade Center), 4 WTC, 5 WTC, 6 WTC (which housed United States Customs), and 7 WTC. All of these buildings were built between 1975 and 1985.
The complex was designed in the early 1960s by Minoru Yamasaki and Associates of Troy, Michigan, and Emery Roth and Sons of New York. The twin 110-story towers used a tube-frame structural design. To gain approval for the project, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey agreed to take over the Hudson - Manhattan Railroad, which became the Port Authority Trans-Hudson. Groundbreaking for the World Trade Center took place on August 5, 1966. The North Tower was completed in December 1972 and the South Tower was finished in July 1973. The construction project involved excavating a large amount of material, which was later used as landfill to build Battery Park City on the west side of Lower Manhattan. The cost for the construction was $400 million ($2,300,000,000 in 2012 dollars). The complex was located in the heart of New York City's downtown financial district and contained 13.4 million square feet of office space.
The windows on the World restaurant was located on the 106th and 107th floors of 1 World Trade Center (the North Tower) while the Top of the World observation deck was located on the 107th floor of 2 World Trade Center (the South Tower). The second King Kong film was filmed in 1976 with some scenes mentioning and showing the World Trade Center.
The World Trade Center experienced a fire on February 13, 1975, and a bombing on February 26, 1993. In 1998, the Port Authority decided to privatize the World Trade Center, leasing the buildings to a private company to manage, and awarded the lease to Silverstein Properties in July 2001.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, Al-Qaeda-affiliated hijackers flew two Boeing 767 jets into the complex, one into each tower, in a coordinated terrorist attack. After burning for 56 minutes, the South Tower (2) collapsed, followed a half-hour later by the North Tower (1), with the attacks on the World Trade Center resulting in 2,753 deaths. 7 World Trade Center collapsed later in the day and the other buildings, although they did not collapse, had to be demolished because they were damaged beyond repair. The process of cleanup and recovery at the World Trade Center site took eight months.
The first new building at the site was 7 World Trade Center, which opened in May 2006. The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, established in November 2001 to oversee the rebuilding process, organized competitions to select a site plan and memorial design. Memory Foundations, designed by Daniel Libeskind, was selected as the master plan, but this went through substantial changes in design. The new World Trade Center complex will include One World Trade Center, three other high-rise office towers, and the National September 11 Memorial and Museum.
The Memorial opened on the 10th anniversary of the attack. It consists of two pools set in the footprints of the original Twin Towers. These are where the towers used to stand. Thirty-foot waterfalls--the largest In North America-cascade into the pools, each then descending into a center void. The names of the nearly 3,000 names of the victims of the 9-11 and the 1993 attacks are inscribed in bronze parapets around the pools.
When the entire site is complete, the surrounding plaza will be all swamp white oak trees, except for one-the "Survivor Tree. This Callery pear tree was planted on the original World Trade Center plaza in the 1970s, and stood at the eastern edge of the site near Church Street. After 9-11, workers found the damaged tree, reduced to an eight-foot-tall stump, in the wreckage at Ground Zero.
The tree was nursed back to health in a New York City park and grew to be 30 feet tall, sprouting new branches and flowering in the springtime. In March 2010, the tree was uprooted by severe storms, but true to its name, it survived. In December 2010, the tree was returned to the World Trade Center site.
I enjoyed the visit to Ground Zero. I remember seeing so many graphic scenes on TV during the coverage of the infamous 9-11 attack and now I had the chance to be there to witness the progress being made in recover.
I remember the morning of the attack. I had taken a few days off and was headed out on my motorcycle. My plans were to spend a few days in Fort Walton Beach, Florida with my friend, Jim, and then head on down to Key West. In fact, I was at Jim's place that morning. Jim received a call from a friend who told him to turn on the TV. As we watched the coverage, the second plane hit the other twin-building. So much was going on after the attack, I never made it to Key West.
These few minutes of destruction changed the world as we knew it.