Try to remember the love. Try to forget the hate.
This post hurts me, as it hurts many.
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Twin shadows stretching across lower Manhattan late in the day
World Trade Center
AKA The Twin Towers, The WTC
Location: New York City
Year completed: 1972 (Tower 1), 1973 (Tower 2)
Height: 1,368 feet (Tower 1 or North Tower), 1,362 feet (Tower 2 or South Tower)
Claim to Fame: Why build just the tallest building in the world when you can build two?
The idea of a World Trade Center complex in New York City originated with billionaires Nelson and David Rockefeller in 1955, and became a formal plan with financing in 1960.
As mentioned in the “Coming of the Boxes” post, most of the new office development in New York City after the Second World War occurred in Midtown Manhattan due to a combination of the area offering greater convenience for commuters and lower land values for developers.
Midtown also offerred greater flexibility of site selection because new structures in midtown didn’t have to contend with the narrow streets and tiny blocks of lower Manhattan that dated back to when the Dutch controlled New Amsterdam. In Midtown, a developer could demolish a dozen five- and eight-storey buildings and construct a new 40-storey building on a landscaped plaza. This was much harder to do downtown.
As a result of these realities, Midtown Manhattan emerged as a second central business district in New York City, and by the late 1960s it actually surpassed downtown in the number of workers and square footage of office space. Meanwhile, the shift of the shipping industry towards container ships and away from old-style bulk-cargo freighters that required dozens of men to load and unload them was having a serious impact on the once busy docks that ringed Manhattan. As the 1950s progressed, more and more traffic was being redirected to the container ports that were opening on the New Jersey side of the Hudson River.
The WTC concept was initiated as an attempt to revitalize lower Manhattan by constructing modern "open concept" office space with adequate electrical and plumbing facilities, modern elevators and fire safety features and other amenities demanded by business (and the law, for that matter). The idea was to create a single complex that could house the scattered offices of import/export companies, law offices specializing in foreign trade, international banking and finance houses, insurance companies that dealt with ships and cargo and all sorts of commerce related to world trade — hence the name.
Lower West Side of Manhattan in the 1920s. Note the massive docks along the Hudson and the smaller Battery Park compared to today
The East-side Plan
Originally, the complex was to consist of six to eight 50-storey buildings on now-derelict dock lands along the East River south of the UN Building . These buildings would have stood between 600 and 700 feet tall, and only in Manhattan would that have made them undistinguished.
But a problem emerged. The chief public transit line on the East Side of Manhattan was, and still is, the Lexington Avenue Subway. Although there has been talk since 1929 of building a subway line under Second Avenue, to this day it remains only partially built and is not expected to open until after 2010. In addition, by the early 1960s, the idea of building expressways for cars in manhattan was a no-go, because of strong public opposition to demolishing neighbourhoods such as Little Italy, Chinatown and the Village in order to make way for on-ramps and such. (Crazy New Yorkers standing in the way of "progress"!
)
Because the complex was expected to house tens of thousands of office workers, it was decided to move the site to the lower west side of Manhattan where there was already a convergence of subway lines, the Port Authority train from New Jersey (PATH), the Staten Island Ferry and the new West Side Highway being completed on what used to be land covered by warehouses. The actual site of the complex was then occupied by turn-of-the-century tenements that were in rather bad shape, and "Radio Row," a collection of dozens of stores specializing in the sale of electronic gear. The main site, however, had the added benefit of already being owned by the New York Port Authority, which given the recent decline in shipping activity was anxious to receive the rents a large office complex would bring in.
After a number of delays caused by the change in site and assembling the necessary properties, between 1964 and 1966 the wrecking ball was taken to 13 blocks of low-rise buildings, some of which dated to before the US Civil War. These 13 blocks were then combined by removing all the smaller streets within them, creating what is called a "superblock" bounded by major roads.
Radio Row was dominated by Heins and Bolet, which opened in 1920. Competitors came and went, but Heins and Bolet remained the best place in New York to buy radio gear and did not close until the entire neighborhood was bulldozed
Groundbreaking on the new complex began in 1966. The first step in construction was the creation of "the Bathtub", a 16-acre (6.5 hectare) excavation down to the bedrock of the island of Manhattan surrounded by reinforced concrete walls to serve as a dam against water intrusion from the nearby Hudson River. The Bathtub was seven storeys deep, and included an underground terminal for the PATH train.
Meanwhile, the blueprints for the towers themselves were being finalized by architect Minoru Yamasaki and engineer Antonio Brittiochi.
The Design
Because the new site was somewhat larger than the one suggested south of the UN building, it permitted the structures to have have a larger "footprint." This meant that the buildings constructed could be wider, and therefore also taller. Advances in "tube building" design being pioneered in Chicago (see the John Hancock Center post) also permitted a taller building to be considerably stronger, and thus the ratio of its footprint to its total height could be reduced. That is, a building could go even higher without getting all that much wider.
Combine larger site, a wider building and then reduce the ratio of the width to the height, and the possibilites for how high you can go get a whole lot grander. Thus, Yamasaki decided to combine the six or eight structures of "Phase I'" into just
two buildings.
Yamasaki was known for his “gothic modernist” tendencies in design, and he intended to make the World Trade Center buildings the fullest expression of this style: using a combination of arches and massive fixtures with the spartan box-like constructions pioneered by Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier and employing the new “tube” design principle because this would allow massive open floors.
Like the cathedrals of the Middle Ages, the spaces between the bracing arches of the tube construction would be where the windows would be located.
The "gothic modernist" lobby of World Trade Center Tower 1.
When the project became focused on two central towers (around 1963), their original height was slated to be 80 storeys. With each floor having to be 12-14 feet in order to accommodate cables and utilities under drop ceilings, this translated into a total height of both towers of between 960 and 1,100 feet, give or take.
Engineer Antonio Brittiochi focused on the technical aspects, such as how to provide adequate water and elevator service to the structures. One of his innovations was the creation of the “sky lobby” concept.
This innovation was inspired by the system of express and local trains used by the New York subway system. Rather than have elevators travel the full height of the buildings, which would have resulted in most of the floor space being turned over to elevator shafts if adequate service was to be provided to the higher floors (due to the time delays of moving up so many floors) Brittiochi hit upon the idea of treating the buildings as several smaller buildings stacked on top of each other.
A series of express elevators would take people part-way up the building to another lobby equipped with elevators that would serve the next series of floors. These "sky lobbies" reduced the number of elevators needed by a factor of three.
Final height, and why they were different
Nobody is precisely sure who was responsible for the decision or when it happened exactly, but some time after excavation of the Bathtub began, it was decided that the towers would not be 80 storeys, but rather they would beat the floor record set by the Empire State Building (102 storeys) and rise a whopping
110 storeys above lower Manhattan. The most banale reason for this decision is that once multiple millions of dollars had been committed to the controversial project, they might as well build the tallest buildings in New York City (and the world) rather than build two huge buildings that would have tied for second or third place.
Ego does play a role in such decisions, to say the least.
The two buildings were thus divided into three sections, with the sky lobbies at the 44th and 78th floors. The difference in height of six feet between the two towers was the result of a Port Authority request to have the 43rd and the 67th storeys of Tower 1 raised three feet to accommodate ventilation for the kitchens of cafeterias for Port Authority employees.
The twin towers under construction in late 1969. Tower 2 was begun 14 months after Tower 1
Completing the Bathtub itself took almost 18 months, and it wasn't until the spring of 1968 that Tower 1 of the World Trade Center rose above ground level. The nine million cubic feet of earth that excavation of the Bathtub produced was sold to the City of New York (for a profit), and was used to extend the shoreline of the tip of Manhattan and create the larger Battery Park that exists today.
Because the sky lobby concept allowed the towers to be essentially treated as three buildings stacked on top of each other, this also allowed the completion of the lower sections of the towers so they could be occupied before the upper storeys were even completed. Although they had to put up with dust and noise, the first tenants of Tower 1 of the World Trade Center moved in during May 1970 even though work on the upper third of the building would not be "topped off" until the summer of 1971, and final installation of amenities was not completed until early 1972. The first tenants moved into Tower 2 in January 1972.
The actual official ribbon-cutting ceremony wasn't held until April 4, 1973 after five years of construction that was stopped serveral times due to strikes at different times by electricians and steelworkers (the labour disputes of the 1970s had arrived).
The tallest and second tallest buildings in the world, respectively, the twin towers lord over lower Manhattan
Sadly, unlike the grand opening ceremonies that were held when the Woolworth Building and Empire State Building opened earlier in the century (complete with the sitting president pushing the button that lit them up for the first time), no such fanfare accompanied the official opening of the new tallest and second-tallest buildings in the world on that rainy, cold day.
Nixon had his own problems in 1973, and the mayor of New York City was sick in bed. The City of New York was also on the verge of bankruptcy, and the economy was taking a downturn due to high oil prices caused by the grumblings of the OPEC cartel.
And besides, thousands of people were already working in both towers, so the official opening was really just a formality that almost anybody of importance skipped on that gray and rainy day.
Status: The first buildings to surpass the Empire State Building in height also opened just as an economic downturn began.
The World Trade Center had other problems. Although they were intended to be dedicated to companies involved in "world trade," most companies involved in such activity didn't feel the need to be located in the same building.
The main tenants of the World Trade Center in the early years were actually the declining Port Authority itself, and various government agencies of New York City that were forced to move there.
The public that had shunned the opening ceremonies in 1973 also expressed dislike of the buildings' aesthetics. They were described as "blank slabs," "tumors on the lung of Manhattan" and "symptoms of an obsession with gigantism."
To be fair, I'll give the last word to their architect, and leave their ultimate fate to another post:
Quote:
"People ask me why I would build two 110-storey towers in Manhattan.
Well, I could have built a single 220-storey building, but I wanted this project to have a more human scale."
-Minoru Yamasaki, 1973
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heh.