20-Year Memorial: Destruction of the World Trade Center, New York City

Background

Dear Readers, 20 years ago, the unthinkable happened. On September 11, 2001, foreign terrorists commandeered commercial jet airplanes and flew two of them into the World Trade Center Buildings in New York City. The first plane went into the North Tower at 08:46 am. The second plane flew into the South Tower at 09:03 am. Within an hour and 42 minutes, raging fires caused both towers to collapse into a gigantic pile of twisted steel, smoldering debris, concrete, and rubble. Several other buildings in the complex also collapsed. In total, 2,977 victims died and over 25,000 sustained injuries. At least 8,000 first responders have died since then from toxic dust at the site.

The War on Terror

America changed forever. We engaged in a "War on Terror," which had profound consequences on the countries involved, our adversaries, our allies, and us. In some ways, we prevailed. Jihadist organizations have not mounted a successful external terrorist act in the USA since 2001. 

But for 20 years, officials in the US Government lied to the American public about the success or lack of success in the wars. Deceit became entrenched, an unspoken conspiracy to hide the truth. We never learned the real goals of the war, the definitions of success, or the cost. The longer the war lasted, the more its “grotesque subtext” of nativism and racism moved to the foreground of American politics (Spencer Ackerman, 2021. Reign of terror, How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump, Viking Press). Thom Hartmann observed, "Bush’s presidency had devastating consequences to America in terms of international credibility, faith in our government domestically, the waste of trillions of dollars in tax cuts, and the loss of hundreds of thousands of human lives in unnecessary wars."

Many of the divisions, hatreds, suspicions, intolerance, and viciousness that we see today in our domestic politics stem from those two decades of warfare. In a long article by The Washington Post by Carlos Lozada titled, "9/11 was a test. The books of the last two decades show how America failed," Lozada points out,

Rather than exemplify the nation’s highest values, the official response to 9/11 unleashed some of its worst qualities: deception, brutality, arrogance, ignorance, delusion, overreach and carelessness. This conclusion is laid bare in the sprawling literature to emerge from 9/11 over the past two decades — the works of investigation, memoir and narrative by journalists and former officials that have charted the path to that day, revealed the heroism and confusion of the early response, chronicled the battles in and about Afghanistan and Iraq, and uncovered the excesses of the war on terror.

America was indeed knocked off balance. As William Galston wrote in American Purpose, the fact that the USA is now "weaker, more divided, and less respected than it was two decades ago" was due to our own choices, not prescience by Osama bin Laden or other jihadist theorists. 

• Now we have renewed domestic right-wing terrorism here at home, although the state's security apparatus may be able to keep it under control (or will it?). 
• We lie to and deceive ourselves, and we have the Covid pandemic running rampant, with anti-vaxxers engaged in a death cult. 
• The 9/11 terrorists did not manage to fly a plane into the Capitol, but American traitors attacked it on January 6, 2021. 
• We invaded Iraq to dispose an autocrat, but several contenders here in USA are trying to impose autocracy on the USA. 
• We tried to teach Iraqis and Afghans to hold free and fair elections, but in many US states, Republicans have undermined voting access for minority citizens, gerrymandered voting districts, and corrupted the vote certification mechanisms.
• The forever wars in Iraq and Afghanistan soured the world's opinion of democracies as agents of development and good. 
• The endless wars led to today's revisionism and inward-thinking.

Civil war has come to the USA, and we did it to ourselves. 

How will history books a century from now describe the war and its consequences? Who will write these history books? What mythology will those writers try to relate to their readers? 

Will schools honestly relate the story, or will they be muzzled as per the racist restrictions on "critical race theory" and the banning of books?

Some Photographs

World Trade Center, May 30, 1997 

This is the view of the WTC from the rooftop of 270 Broadway. I attended a meeting in that building on the top floor, and the view was too good to resist. This is a vertical panorama using an Olympus Zuiko 35mm ƒ/2.8 shift lens, with one frame shifted fully down and the second frame shifted up. I joined the frame with Photoshop's >Automate>Photomerge function. It is amazingly effective. Click to see the panorama at 3000 pixels

South Manhattan panorama from 270 Broadway, May 30, 1997

This is a horizontal panorama from the roof of 270 Broadway. My lens was not wide enough to include the top of the World Trade Center towers. Click to see 5000 pixels wide.

West panorama from 138 Lafayette Street, New York, Dec. 9, 1994

I took this panorama from the rooftop of the old Holiday Inn at 138 Lafayette Street. Back in the mid-1990s, this was one of the few hotels in lower Manhattan. Now there are dozens of trendy hotels. The Holiday Inn was a bit grungy, but it was convenient to the Federal Center, where I had business. The smog is over New Jersey.

New York view south from roof of 138 Lafayette Street (Leica IIIC, 5cm ƒ/3.5 Elmar lens, Kodak Tri-X film)

This is another view south from the roof of the Holiday Inn at 138 Lafayette Street. The tall building in left center is the Jacob Javits Federal Center. Click to see the photograph expanded.

Manhattan view north from the South Tower of the World Trade Center, April 29, 2001. Panorama consists of four frames from a Rolleiflex 3.5F camera with 75mm ƒ/3.5 Xenotar lens. The north tower is on the left of the scene. Click the photograph to see the full-size image.

Notes from the 10-Year Anniversary

I wrote about the World trade Centers on the 10-year anniversary. Please refer to these earlier articles:

The early years before 2011:

https://worldofdecay.blogspot.com/2011/08/before-and-after-new-york-and-world.html

The later years and destruction:

 https://worldofdecay.blogspot.com/2011/09/new-york-and-world-trade-center-later.html

Thank you for reading. I hope I can write an article in 2031 at the 30-year anniversary. Will we still be the USA then?

New York and the World Trade Center: the Late Years and Destruction

This is the second of a two-part series on my memories of New York City and the World Trade Center.

Brooklyn Bridge pedestrian walkway

Right half of undated stereo card of Brooklyn Bridge, from  the Boston Public Library digital archives

After visiting New York in the early 1970s, ten years passed before I returned. I recall a snowy stop-over in 1982, but did not make it to lower Manhattan that time. A decade later, professional duties took me to the Big Apple three or four times per year. I really enjoyed these trips; the people were nice, food great, and there was always something interesting to see or do. On 1994, after a long, dull day of meetings, I decided to clear my brain and walk across the Brooklyn Bridge. It's a great walk on a brisk day, and the view is spectacular, but the ambiance is marred by the constant traffic directly below the walking deck. This first photograph shows the view looking west while walking from Brooklyn to Manhattan. The twin towers are off to the left (south) of the bridge axis.
The second photograph shows the view north, with the Empire State Building beyond the historic Manhattan Bridge (opened to traffic on December 31, 1909). These were taken with Kodak Gold 100 film, which worked well on gloomy days and scans well.
In 1995, the family and I stayed in the Vista International Hotel at 3 World Trade Center. It was a 22-story steel-framed building, said to be the first hotel to open in Lower Manhattan since 1836 (is this possible?). It was badly damaged by the truck bomb that terrorists set off in the underground parking garage in 1993, but had been renovated and reopened. The hotel was convenient because you could pass through enclosed walkways into the lobbies of the north and south Trade Center towers. I recall one of the lobbies had a ticket office where you could buy half-price tickets for Broadway and off-Broadway productions. One evening, we went to the top floor of the hotel, and one of the stairways had an unlocked access door to the roof. The view of the south tower was awesome. It loomed up into the foggy night sky seemingly forever. Some employees were toiling away late in their offices. On September 11, the hotel was almost totally crushed, and 40 people lost their lives.
In 1997, I attended a meeting in a NY State Department of State office building at 212 Broadway. The meeting was on the top floor, and once again, an access door to the roof was unlocked. This was too good to resist and I took a panorama of the World Trade Center building using a 35 mm Olympus shift lens (in this case, shifting the lens vertically).

Panorama of four Rolleiflex exposures on 120-size film.

On April 29, 2001, I spent another day in meetings. It was a gorgeous clear day, and when I escaped, there were still two hours of daylight left. I had never been to the rooftop observation deck, and this was a perfect chance. Although being quite expensive, I recall thinking I might not have another opportunity. The Top of the World observation deck was on the 107th floor of 2 World Trade Center (the South Tower), and stairs went up to the open roof (open only on calm days). Amazingly, there was absolutely no wind that afternoon. Tourists from Germany and other countries were taking self-portraits with the spectacular view of Manhattan in the background (I confess, I took the obligatory dorky picture, too). The panorama looking north and east shows the north tower and Manhattan spread out across the horizon. The metal frame at the lower right is the rail system for the window-washing machines. The tourist gallery was set back, and you could not look down at a steep angle and see the streets immediately below. The panorama consists of four Rolleiflex (120-size film) frames merged together. Being a large film size, the original prints contain an astonishing amount of detail.

Card by Mayor Rudi Giuliana, from the Leica Gallery

Mayor Rudi Giuliani was a talented Leica photographer. I saw a sign at the Leica Gallery that the mayor always took his Leica with him when he made rounds around the city.

Federal Plaza from World Trade Center, April 29, 2001

Antennas and equipment on the roof of the North Tower, April 29, 2001

The view of Federal Plaza shows the amazing vista from the enclosed Top of the World observation level. The banal rectangle building in the center is the Jacob Javits Federal Building. The 1913-vintage Woolworth Building at 233 Broadway is in the lower right. The tall windowless red/brown edifice to the left is the former AT&T Long Lines Building. According to Wikipedia, it was designed to be self-sufficient and protected from nuclear fallout for up to two weeks after a nuclear blast. The East River is in the background.

Then the unimaginable happened. Five months after visiting the observation deck, the towers were destroyed. My coworkers and I watched television in our Vicksburg office transfixed as we saw the towers implode and throw up an immense dust cloud.

NASA photograph iss003e5388_232021.

This amazing NASA photograph from the International Space Station, taken by astronaut Frank Culberston, shows the dust plume rising into a clear sky (photograph iss003e5388_232021).

The next time I had business in New York was on December 19, 2001. Work crews had already cleared out an amazing amount of the rubble and twisted metal, but as the photographs show, some gutted buildings were still standing. I could not enter the demolition site, but the views past the truck entrances were horrifying. Two of my coworkers told me that was the first day they did not smell fumes from the underground fires. Before then, fumes were sucked into the ventilation system of the Jacob Javits Federal building, causing severe headaches for some workers.
This was the remains of the Winter Garden, across West Street from the Trade Center Plaza. It once housed beautiful palm trees.
Very moving were the impromptu memorials of flowers, notes, letters, and photographs of loved ones who had perished. Fortunately, none of my coworkers were hurt, but all knew someone or were connected via a friend or neighbor to someone who died.

MTA route map, December 2001

The December 2001 MTA route map shows how four subway stations were out of commission after the disaster. The WTC station was destroyed and had to be rebuilt.

I took the black and white photographs with Kodak CN400 film using my 1949-vintage Leica IIIC camera with a 5 cm ƒ/3.5 Red Dot Elmar lens. This was the post-war coated version of the famous Elmar lens, in production until the 1960s. This, as well as the later ƒ/2.8 version, are wonderful performers when adapted to Leica, Micro 4/3, or Fuji X digital cameras (and, of course, are best on film). My IIIC is still in regular use, but I sold the Red Dot Elmar lens.

Updated August 15, 2014, with added photograph.
Updated October 2018: added MTA map.
Update March 12, 2020: Mr Michael Hertz, whose design studio created the iconic NY Transit Map, died on February 28, 2020.
Update July 12, 2020: Added early-1900s stereo card of the Brooklyn Bridge

New York and the World Trade Center: The Early Years

Introduction

Ten years ago, on September 11, 2001, terrorists flew two fuel-laden jet planes into the World Trade Center towers in New York City, causing their collapse, killing thousands, and changing history. The destruction led to two foreign wars, an enormous increase in the security apparatus in the United States, stunning increases in the military-industrial complex, and myriad changes in the ways we view ourselves and the world around us. In many ways, we lost our way and lost the moral high ground internationally. To commemorate the terrible events of ten years ago, I looked through my archives to find photographs of the towers and other memories of New York. Although I did not live in New York during the years that the towers stood, I saw them on visits to the city, shopped in the underground malls, and once went up to the open observation deck.

Pre-tower Manhattan

This is a map of lower Manhattan from a brochure given out to tourists who visited the Towers in the 1990s. The towers were on the southwest corner of Manhattan. They did not directly face the Hudson River, but the site they were on was artificial fill. The scale of this map is off and the Liberty Island is really much further away.

Early 20th century map of Manhattan with steamship company docks along the Hudson River.

First, let's step back in history to well before the towers were built. The scene above shows upper New York Harbor and Manhattan Island at about 1940. The original photograph is from the archives of the Beach Erosion Board, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The archives are now housed at the Coastal and Hydraulics Laboratory at the Waterways Experiment Station in Vicksburg, Mississippi. Notice how the Hudson River (on the left) is lined with docks and wharves.

In 1940, New York and Jersey City were gritty, bustling working cities and ports. If 1940 is the correct date, war was raging in Europe, and New York harbor was a major transit origin for cargo convoys. Most of Europe was shrouded in darkness, but New York was a beacon of freedom for the few refugees who could find transit to the United States. Lights were blazing, food was plentiful, shops were stocked, and music and entertainment were everywhere - war seemed far away. The site for the towers was on the lower left side of Manhattan, then a district of small shops, factories and residences, known as Radio Row. The George Washington Bridge, completed in 1931, crosses the Hudson in the upper left of the photograph.

The island off the tip of Manhattan is Governors Island, occupied by the Coast Guard for most of the 20th century and now run by the National Park Service and the Governors Island Alliance. In the late 1930s, Robert Moses (Long Island Park Commission) pushed to build a monumental bridge connecting Manhattan to Brooklyn, with one of the bridge supports on Governors Island. Moses had such influence and control of funding sources that only President Franklin Roosevelt was able to squash the plan.

Liberty Island, with its Statue of Liberty, is the small island on the lower left, really much closer to the New Jersey shore than to New York.

The 1960s

Let's move forward to 1967. I took the photograph above from Rockefeller Center, probably from the observation deck in the GE Building, the Top of the Rock. Looking south you see the Empire State Building. If they had been built, the WTC towers would have been in the far distance to the right of the Empire.

This is the former PanAm building, built over the railroad lines leading into Grand Central Station. Back then, First Class passengers on Pan American World Airways were ferried to JFK airport by helicopter that took off from the rooftop heliport. This is a Boeing Vertol BV-107 helicopter (also known as a Sea Knight), operated by New York Airways. The heliport was permanently closed after a 1977 accident, where a broken rotor blade decapitated four passengers.

A side note: 1967 was near the end of the era of trans-Atlantic passenger traffic via ocean liner. The 1940 photograph showed how the entire Hudson River shore of Manhattan was lined with docks. But by the late-1960s, many of the docks were unused and passenger traffic on the great liners was drying up. This was largely a result of the success of the Boeing 707 jet liner, which entered service in 1958. The post-war generation was impatient and did not want to spend six days crossing the ocean (but I am glad that I made two Atlantic ship crossings in my childhood - they were fun). I took the photographs of the S.S. Constitution and the docks on color print film with a Canon range-finder camera and 50mm ƒ/1.9 Serenar lens.

The 1970s

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey built the twin WTC towers between 1996 and 1972. The matching buildings, designed by American architect Minoru Yamasaki, rose to 1353 feet (412 m) in height. When completed in 1972, they were the tallest buildings in the world. A Wikipedia article nicely summarizes their history and the decades of controversy and sordid political maneuvering surrounding the project. The aesthetics of the design were resoundingly criticized at the time and for many years later as extreme examples of post-war gigantism, but eventually they became icons of New York. The undated post card above, from Golden Apple Postcards, shows the towers taken with a long telephoto lens from the waterfront at Bayonne, New Jersey. Unfortunately, the photographer was not credited.

In March, 1974, I made a one-day trip to New York and took the excursion boat to Liberty Island. The South Tower had only been open two years and both towers were were only partly occupied. Attracting commercial (as opposed to subsidized Port Authority) tenants was part of the controversy that continued for years. From this vantage point, it was obvious how huge the buildings were, looming over everything else in lower Manhattan.

This is a 105mm tele view of the towers, scanned from a roll of Kodak Tri-X black and white film. This negative was double-exposed, adding to the dust and flaws in the frame. Still, after 35 years, the negative is intact and contains data that can be extracted. Will we be able to retrieve digital media in 35 years? (Camera: Nikkormat FTn; lens: 105 mm ƒ/2.5 Nikkor.)

Update May 6, 2013

I found this remarkable aerial photograph in NOAA's archives of a flying boat cruising over Battery Park. The Hudson River is in the foreground, the East River in the background. As in the 1940 photograph, you can see the many docks lining the rivers.

The label states:

A flying boat cruising by Battery Park at the south end of Manhattan Island. In: "Flug Und Wolken", Manfred Curry, Verlag F. Bruckmann, Munchen, 1932.

Image ID: line0987, NOAA's America's Coastlines Collection
Location: New York City
Photo Date: 1930 Circa
Credit: Fairchild Aerial Surveys Inc.

(To be continued in the next article.)
Updated with two photographs added on August 15, 2014