How the Twin Towers Were Born
The World Trade Center just after it opened.
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www.greatbuildings.com)
On April 4, 1973, just 33 years ago today, Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller of New York presided over the dedication of the World Trade Center. His New Jersey counterpart, William Cahill, was also present, but the day was Rockefeller’s, “a really thrilling and exciting occasion,” as he called it.
The Center, consisting of six buildings dominated by twin towers 110 stories high, had been backed from the start by Nelson and his brother David, the president of the Bank of New York. The two came by their belief in big building projects naturally. In the 1930s, when New York City was faltering economically along with the rest of the nation, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., had shot new energy and jobs into Midtown Manhattan by creating Rockefeller Center. His sons Nelson and David were among the many influenced by the scale and success of that project, which had been a new hub for Midtown. In the 1960s New York City was in yet another crisis, one that grew out of the flight of businesses to the suburbs.
For New York, losing offices, headquarters, and executive suites represented not only an economic hardship but an identity crisis. The World Trade Center was proposed as, according to one supporter, “a United Nations of business.” The plan, promoted by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, was to revitalize the Lower West Side of Manhattan with a campus dedicated to two activities that would fit well with the crowded Wall Street neighborhood nearby: international commerce and government. It was such a good idea that practically everyone opposed it.
The reason the World Trade Center drew criticism was that it was to be gargantuan, even by the standards of a city already plastered with superlatives. From the time a formal proposal circulated in 1963 the Port Authority intended to crown the city with the two tallest skyscrapers on earth. By 1965 the final plans were set and so were the lines of debate.
The Center would ultimately offer 11 million square feet—250 acres—of new office space. Other landlords feared it would swamp the market throughout the rest of New York. “We had a shipping company lined up some time back to take space at $10.50 a square foot,” said one. “The Trade Center came along and offered $6.50.”
The height of the towers was to be more than 1,350 feet, potentially interfering with television reception in Manhattan. According to experts, the buildings would act like antennas, pulling askew the signals from the antenna on top of the Empire State Building, in Midtown. The problem, if it appeared at all, would be noticeable only for about six months, though, the time between the construction of the steel and aluminum buildings and the completion of an antenna on the north tower. Anxiety ran high but seemed to have no real basis. “The broadcasters predicted interference when our steel went up to 700 to 900 feet,” said Guy Tozzoli, the executive director of the Trade Center during construction. “It just didn’t happen. They changed and said it would come when the skin reached the seventieth floor. Well, we’re at the seventy-third floor now.” But that didn’t silence the arguments.
Architectural preservationists, who were in sadly short supply in the 1960s, cried out against the presumption that huge skyscrapers would be an improvement on the gaggle of old commercial buildings that formed the World Trade Center’s neighborhood. Ada Louise Huxtable, the longtime architecture critic of The New York Times, dismissed the design as “just another big commercial venture.” With as much activity as possible clasped inside the mammoth Trade Center’s buildings or buried underground the space between them, the outdoor areas, Huxtable said, “promise to be vast, desolate, dull, windswept and empty most of the time.” Many an architect who was building skyscrapers in the 1960s might have found nothing objectionable in that description. Modernists seemed to equate desolate, dull, and windswept with clean, sturdy and safe. Those were the attributes that were pulling tenants to the suburbs, and they were the ones that found their way, in outsized form, into the World Trade Center.
The American Museum of Natural History came up with a very different reason to oppose the World Trade Center. Such tall buildings, a conservationist there protested, would interfere with the night migration of birds, which would bang into the unexpected obstructions. In a letter written in March of 1967, he implored the president of the Board of Estimates to vote against permitting construction to begin. It was a waste of time, and not just because the Port of Authority was unstoppable in rolling over all such complaints, but because construction had in fact already begun. (As it happened, many thousands of birds were killed each year in migration until efforts were made to darken and add netting to floors whose lights especially attracted them; this significantly lowered the death toll.)
The Port Authority, which truly was unstoppable, started work on June 9, 1965, even without the necessary authorizations from the city. On that day, crews roped off a building at the corner of Cortlandt and West streets and set about demolishing it. The Port Authority may not have had its permits, but it did have commitments from tenants eager to move into fully three-quarters of those 230 acres of office space. Fourteen months later, still with no permits, the Port Authority sent in earth-moving equipment, which was perfectly appropriate, since it planned to move earth, and heaven, if necessary, to build the towers. Finally in June 1967 the city’s Board of Estimate approved the plans. Or just got out of the way, once and for all.
Of all those who opposed the World Trade Center, no one was more stubborn than the owners of the Empire State Building, the 1931 landmark about to lose its title as the world’s tallest building. In 1972 that horrible reality was only a year away, and the north tower was crawling with 6,000 workers building walls in midair. That October the Empire State Building’s owners made an announcement—a ferocious, futile attack, like that of an army down to its last battalion. Their building was going to add 11 floors, bringing its total to 113, the top 2 of which would look down on the 110-story World Trade Center. Consulting architects said that the addition would not repeat the Art Deco motif of the original building but would sort of modernize it—sort of. Nothing came of the preposterous plan.
The following April the Empire State Building lost its title for good. The World Trade Center was dedicated in a ceremony that had its own share of controversy. President Richard Nixon’s representative couldn’t be there because a striking union had set up a picket line and he wouldn’t cross it. The Port Authority’s former executive director, the man who guided the project to fruition, declined to attend because it was raining. The New York Times, which had come to disdain the project, didn’t place its coverage of the gala dedication on page one, where it rightly belonged. It banished it to page 89.
The World Trade Center, born in controversy, eventually succeeded in pulling a business community around it, with the result that the Lower West Side was permanently transformed. The complex of buildings was always functional but never beloved—not until it was laid waste on September 11, 2001, and the world realized just how much humanity there had been in those hard, windswept blocks.
—Julie M. Fenster is the author with Douglas Brinkley of Parish Priest: Father Michael McGivney and American Catholicism (Morrow).
http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/web/20060404-world-trade-center-nelson-rockefeller-new-york-city-twin-towers-freedom-tower-9-11-september-lower-west-side-port-authority_print.shtml
