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.
The World Trade Center under construction through photos, 1966-1979
91–100 of 116 posts
Re: The World Trade Center under construction through photos, 1966-1979
#92I 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.
Re: The World Trade Center under construction through photos, 1966-1979
#93The 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 busi…
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.
Re: The World Trade Center under construction through photos, 1966-1979
#94Was 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.
Re: The World Trade Center under construction through photos, 1966-1979
#95Jules 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
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
Re: The World Trade Center under construction through photos, 1966-1979
#96The 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 busi…
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?
Re: The World Trade Center under construction through photos, 1966-1979
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
as an American I very much want to live in the reality where Gore won and 9/11 didn't happen.
Are you asserting that Al Qaeda liked Gore enough to suspend their vendetta?
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...
Re: The World Trade Center under construction through photos, 1966-1979
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 busi…
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.”
Re: The World Trade Center under construction through photos, 1966-1979
#99The 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.
> 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.
Re: The World Trade Center under construction through photos, 1966-1979
#100Beautiful 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.