World Trade Center: Rise & Fall of an Icon

[Jeannette Latoria]

The World Trade Center on fire with the Statue of Liberty in the foreground

[Jeannette Latoria]

Construction progress of the Freedom Tower, as of April 2008, with concrete foundation work

[Jeannette Latoria]

The World Trade Center was an iconic structure and has been featured in numerous films as well as appearing in many television shows, cartoons, comic books, video games and music videos. Portions of Godspell were filmed at the top of the World Trade Center as the building was nearing completion.[141] The final scene of the 1976 film King Kong took place at the World Trade Center instead of the Empire State Building where the scene had taken place in the original film.[142] The events surrounding the September 11 attacks were portrayed in several documentaries and movies, including two major motion pictures made in 2006: Oliver Stone's World Trade Center and Paul Greengrass' United 93.[143][144] Several movies released shortly after 9/11 digitally erased the Twin Towers from skyline shots; one such was Spider-Man.[145] As of 2008[update], most networks airing reruns of popular television shows have chosen to leave the Twin Towers alone such as in establishing shots in Friends and in episodes of The Simpsons. An exception to this was the opening montage of HBO's Sex and The City within which producers removed shots of the Towers as a mark of respect for the victims of 9/11.[146]

[Jeannette Latoria]

ABSTRACT: OUR LOCAL CORRESPONDENTS about the excavation involved in the construction of the World Trade Center, the largest bldg. in the world with twin towers of 110 stories each. The Center, located at the southern end of Manhattan, is the largest bldg. job ever attempted. It presented unprecedented problems in the construction of its foundation. Writer details the construction from 7 yrs. ago to the present. The bldg. is under the aegis of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, who had to condemn 164 bldgs. to obtain the present site. One of these, the Marine Midland Bank Bldg. took 4 months to demolish and the whole site took 1 yr. to clear. The Port Authority plans to add about 24 acres to Manhattan with the rock & dirt from the excavation. This new area will be called Battery City Park. Tells about Manhattan Schist, the rock structure extending underground as far west as Pennsylvania and resultant problems with digging. Explains methods used to construct a system of interior concrete partitions & floors 6 stories below the street. Tells about the firm involved: Slattery Associates, West Street Associates, & Icanda, a Canadian firm affiliated to the Milanese based ICOS. The first 2 were responsible for underpinning the $27 million cost. Tells about construction of a huge basement called the Bathtub and the use of the slurry-trench method. Tells about problems of maintaining subway service and splicing and relocating telephone wires. Tells about various trips through several tunnels and passages and the Bathtub.

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1972/11/04/1972_11_04_130_TNY_CARDS_000308769

[Jeannette Latoria]

1973: World Trade Center Is Dynamic Duo of Height

When they debuted in 1973, the two glistening 110-story towers of New York City's World Trade Center (WTC), 1,362 and 1,368 ft high, were more than 100 ft taller than the city's other world height record holder—the Empire State Building. Their size was the subject of a joke during the press conference to unveil the landmarks. WTC architect Minoru Yamasaki was asked: "Why two 110-story buildings? Why not one 220-story building?" His tongue-in-cheek answer: "I didn't want to lose the human scale."

     Before foundation excavation began, the 500 x 1,000-ft site was enclosed by a 3-ft-thick, 70-ft-high concrete cutoff wall built by the slurry trench wall method and keyed 3 ft into rock. Excavation was complicated by two nearby subway tubes that had to be supported without service interruption. A six-level basement was built in the foundation hole. Excavation of 1.2 million cu yd of earth and rock created $90 million of real estate for project owner, the Port of New York Authority. Instead of being trucked off for disposal, spoil was used to create 23 acres of fill in the Hudson River adjacent to the WTC site. It has since been developed as Battery Park City.

     The twin towers had the world's highest load-bearing walls. Seattle-based structural engineer Worthington, Skilling, Helle and Jackson designed them as vertical cantilevered steel tubes. Exterior columns are 14-in. square hollow box sections spaced 39 in. center-to-center. Spandrels welded to the columns at each floor make them into huge Vierendeel trusses. Each tower is 208 x 208 ft with a column-free interior between the outer walls and the 79-ft x 139-ft core.

     Installation of steel for the load-bearing walls was more a problem of logistics than construction (ENR 1/1/70 p. 24). Adjacent city streets were narrow, congested and offered little storage space. Each of the 200,000 pieces of steel had to arrive at the right place at the right time—and for the most part, they did. One of the industry's earliest computer-programmed control systems, which took the owner's engineers six months to set up, helped accomplish this. The twin towers' HVAC system circulates and filters 9 million cu ft of air per minute to more than 9 million sq ft of office space. Air conditioning is provided by a 2.5-acre refrigeration plant at the fourth basement level. Instead of cooling towers, intake and outflow pipes run to the river, only 150 ft away.

     The project involved more than 700 contracts, coordinated and administered by Tishman Realty and Construction Co., New York City. The towers held the height record only briefly. Even as they neared completion, work had begun on ChicagoÕs Sears Tower, which would reach 1,450 ft.



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http://web.archive.org/web/20020611065443/http://www.enr.com/new/A0816.asp

[Jeannette Latoria]

A Shaken City's Towering Inferno
The Pluck Of New Yorkers Is Put To The Test In An Afternoon Of Terror At The Foot Of Manhattan
By Tom Mathews | NEWSWEEK


What the hell was that?" Up on the 37th floor of the World Trade Center, the shout rattled the office of Joseph Gibney, 28, a federal attorney. Gibney was talking on the phone, finishing off a slice of pizza. He heard a tremendous roar, and the phone went dead. When he looked up, everything in his office was in motion, as though someone were shaking a TV camera to fake an earthquake. Far below in the basement, Joseph Cacciatore, 24, a refrigeration mechanic, had just glanced up at the clock on the cafeteria wall. It was 12:15 p.m. Cacciatore didn't even hear the explosion, which was so powerful it blew out his contact lenses and shattered an eye socket. The next thing he knew it was pitch dark, his face was covered with blood and people in the blackness all around him were screaming, "God help us!"

This was no drill. The explosion killed four Port Authority workers: a locksmith, an engineer, an operations superintendant and a secretary who was pregnant. A dental-equipment salesman hauled from the shattered parking garage died of a heart attack. Elsewhere in the World Trade Center, a complex as populous as many American cities, more than 50,000 people were thrown into chaos. Lights flickered, then went dark. Elevators stuck between floors. As greasy wisps of smoke filtered upward, people waited for instructions but got none. There was no emergency sound system, no backup lights to illuminate the stairwells. "We were on our own," said Jose Rivera, a vice president for Dean Witter Discover. The miracle was that so few people were killed. Tim Kelly, a New York firefighter found himself staring at a scene out of Dante. "When you looked into the crater," he said, "It looked like a giant barbecue pit with coals burning."

A few minutes after the explosion, Kevin Shea, 33, pulled up with the New York Fire Department's Rescue Company No. 1. As he was inching his way across the parking garage, the concrete beneath him gave way, and he fell four floors into the crater left by the bomb. He landed on a pile of office room dividers, breaking his left knee and right foot, losing his helmet and face mask. "Rocks and cinders were falling everywhere," he recalled. "I thought, 'This is it.' I prayed to God to take me quick."

Descending from the 107th floor, Anna Marie Tesoriero, a teacher, had to shoulder the burden of saving other people's children in a crisis that spun wildly beyond her control. She had just ushered 17 kindergartners from PS 95 in Brooklyn into an elevator. It was crowded, and they started calling off the floors together as they descended. Then the colored lights over the door flickered and went out. They were stuck in the dark between the 36th and 35th floors. She smelled smoke. "We told them not to worry, but the little ones really missed the light," she said. They sang the theme song from "Barney & Friends." She took out a rosary that glowed in the dark and led everyone in Hail Marys. She knew how terrified the parents of the children had to be. What she didn't know was whether anyone knew where the elevator was stuck.

New York pluck, born of blackouts and subway fires, came to the rescue. Amid all the fear and confusion, the strongest looked after the most vulnerable. Untrained, mostly undirected, they suppressed panic, keeping the casualty toll far lower than it might otherwise have been. When the lights went out, Geralyn Hearne, 28, an accountant a week short of seven months pregnant, was eating lunch on the 43rd floor. Smoke seeped in and she began to feel sick.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/111113

[Jeannette Latoria]

Then she had a seizure. Donna Anderson, 27, a friend, squeezed her hand, thinking, "If we didn't get her out of there, she could die." Four firefighters piled in and started to carry Hearne down in a chair. On the 34th floor, the sour smoke billowed in from everywhere. Hearne and Anderson heard people trapped in the elevators screaming. Three floors up on 37, Gibney, a disabled attorney, was sitting in his wheelchair. Two colleagues named Jack and Andy draped him over their shoulders and headed down the stairwell. The smoke thickened. Gibney could feel Jack sweating, but Andy's strength gave out first. A young Asian took over for him, shouting over and over, "We're going to make it. We're going to make it."

If the disaster had struck in a city less self-possessed than New York, hundreds might have been trampled to death. As it was, all save five pulled through. By the glow of the fire in the crater, Lt. Joe Ward, 56, of Ladder Co. 6, found Shea, and other firefighters hoisted him gently to safety. Cacciatore found a water valve and sprayed himself to fend off the heat; firemen found him an hour and a half later. Emergency medical service workers put Hearne on a gurney, carried her down 34 floors and took her to St. Vincent's Hospital. Doctors performed a Caesarean section and delivered a two-month premature baby girl; both were in intensive care but recovering steadily.

After five hours in the elevator, teacher Tesoriero and her young charges heard a noise. Firefighters were chopping a hole in the side of the elevator. A light appeared. "It was like Rescue 100," she said. When the elevator finally reached the ground floor and the doors opened up, one very worried school-bus driver was there to take them safely home to Brooklyn.

KAREN BRESLAU, MARC PEYSER and PATRICK ROGERS

© 1993

[Jeannette Latoria]

Manhattan, July 1976
Source: http://www.hmsbacchante.co.uk/gallery_page_3.htm
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:World_Trade_Center_(New_York)

[Jeannette Latoria]

Procession of emergency vehicles at the World Trade Center bombing on February 26, 1993. The Tower is on the far right of the frame. Photo taken by Eric Ascalon from an adjacent pedestrian walkway.

[Jeannette Latoria]

Manhattan, 1995: view southwest along Chinatown's East Broadway, with 1 World Trade Center (the North Tower) in the background.

[Jeannette Latoria]

Snapshot through a chain link fence of the World Trade Center site ("Ground Zero") in July, 2002. Looking north, it shows ongoing excavation, two sides of the "bathtub" slurry wall circumscribing the site, and the damaged Verizon Building

[Jeannette Latoria]

Lower East Side, New York City, 1995. Singer Ingrid Lucia on rooftop with World Trade Center towers in the background.

[Jeannette Latoria]

Statue of Liberty and WTC, March 1996

[Jeannette Latoria]

World Trade Center (ca. 1995) Location: New York City, NY

[Jeannette Latoria]

View of Manhattan from a helicopter, flying over Upper New York Bay. The towers destroyed in the September 11 attacks can also be seen on the island of Manhattan.