A Resident Remembers the Rise and Fall of a Pair of Local Landmarks
Kids in the neighborhood had an affectionate name for the World Trade Center towers: The Twins. They were as familiar and fixed a landmark in our community as the bell towers and church steeples of towns across America.
Living a block away from two vertical columns of shining steel that thrust a quarter mile into the sky and were visible from every corner of the city and for 20 miles around, we knew how Jack felt at the foot of the beanstalk.
The towers were a looming presence in our lives. They blocked the sun most mornings, casting much of the neighborhood in shadow. They reached so far into the troposphere their top floors were often encased in cloud. They even altered prevailing wind currents, creating a non-stop swirl of air that cooled our Gateway Plaza apartment so effectively I seldom turned on air conditioners in even the hottest months.
Soon after we moved to the neighborhood in 1993, the year my daughter Eva turned five, she got dizzy looking up at the towers. She said she was afraid they were going to fall over and crush us.
I assured her that was never going to happen.
Later I did the calculations.
If the South Tower, the closer of the two, were to somehow topple in our direction, it might indeed hit our building and if it did its rooftop observation deck would crash into the Hudson River, hundreds of feet off shore.
Likewise, if the North Tower fell at a slight angle toward the northwest, it would crash into a then-empty lot on Warren Street, the future site of I.S. 289, the middle school Eva would later attend.
But she soon outgrew her fear of the towers toppling. Like other neighborhood children, as she learned to navigate the city, she was taught that she could never really get lost because the towers, visible night and day from vantages throughout the city, would always guide her home.
The Twin Towers and the surrounding World Trade Center doubled as our town square and shopping mall. Neighbors attended concerts in the vast outdoor plaza between the towers in the warm months and skated on its ice rinks in winter. Local teens, like mall rats the world over, hung out year-round in the Trade Center concourse, where retailers catered not to the affluent but to residents as well as office workers and visitors who shopped at Foot Locker and the Limited and the Gap and took their kids to play dates under the reading tree at Borders Books.
When the Trade Center towers first appeared on the Manhattan skyline—the North Tower opened for occupancy in 1970; the South two years later —the Twins were decried as soulless monstrosities, charmless, oversized and indifferent to the needs and desires of human beings. Architecture critic Francis Morrone summed up his cutting critique in one word: “airportlike.” The best thing about the South Tower observation deck? It was, Morrone wrote, the only place in the city where the view wasn’t marred by the World Trade towers.
His opinion that the towers were permanent eyesores didn’t change, but the public’s view began to on the morning of Wednesday, August 7, 1974. That’s when France’s Philippe Petit walked a steel-cable tightrope that stretched 200 feet between the rooftops of the two towers. For 45 minutes Petit cavorted above the abyss, carrying his 26-foot balance pole back and forth between the towers eight times. While he was at it, he executed playful dance steps and even stretched out on his back and calmly lay there at 1368 feet as if in no more danger than a lazy man sunning himself in a backyard hammock.
It was as if Petit’s walk infused the stark towers with a touch of his own mischievous personality. It brought them down to earth and made them more approachable.
He gave the beasts a soul.
He also single-handedly turned the towers into twin Everests—in the years after his feat, three daredevils parachuted from the top of the towers and a dozen climbers scaled their chrome and glass facades.
One was a fireman named Dan Goodwin who climbed the North Tower on Memorial Day, 1983, to dramatize the frightening fact that if disaster ever struck, there was no way he or any other emergency rescuer could reach office workers trapped on any floors higher than the eight stories a ladder truck could reach.
Ten years after Goodwin’s climb, Arab terrorists—nobody talked about “Islamic extremists” in those days—exploded a half-ton of explosives in the Trade Center basement parking garage, killing six people and injuring more than 1,000. The evacuation of 50,000 survivors was a chaotic daylong process that dramatized Goodwin’s warnings.
The bombers were ultra conservative religious zealots and followers of a blind, Jew-hating Egyptian sheik who declared it his mission to destroy the Trade Center’s twin “pillars of power” by toppling one into the other. The scheme sounded laughably far-fetched, the mad ravings of a lunatic. But it was just months after the bombings that we moved to the neighborhood in the shadows of the Twin Towers. And it was not long after that Eva expressed her fears that they would fall.
I believed what I said at the time, that it would never happen. I failed then to understand the awful simplicity that lay at the heart of even the most spectacular acts of terror. The sheik and his minions set out to strike fear in the hearts of their enemies—and to make the nightmares of children come true.
Just eight years later, new fanatics with grandiose “Death to America” schemes succeeded in destroying the Twin Towers. And to accomplish their ultimate goal, they let loose in the land the terrible beast we were once warned against —fear itself. It has sown hatred and religious and racial intolerance and divisions deeper and more dangerous than any seen since the Civil War.
The Twins are gone now but the wounded neighborhood that many feared would not survive their destruction, has healed and thrived. Just like the nation must, so that all the things the terrorists hated and hoped to destroy—our democracy, our multi-cultural heritage, our demands for equality and justice for all, our freedoms and our ideals—shall endure.
Steve Dougherty
(Editor’s note: This story is adapted from “Audrey & The Twins,” an ebook by Battery Park City resident Steve Dougherty, published on Kindle and available on Amazon at www.amazon.com/Audrey-Twins-Steve-Dougherty-ebook/dp/B09GMSHL17.)