Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The New York World Trade Center

Episode Date: September 11, 2021

Prior to their destruction in 2001, the World Trade Center in New York was a marvel of architecture. It was a collection of seven different buildings which served as the center of New York’s financial district. The planning for the complex was decades in the making and during its brief history, it was witness to several significant events. Learn more about the history of New York’s World Trade Center on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Prior to their destruction in 2001, the World Trade Center in New York was a wonder of architecture. It was a collection of seven different buildings which served as a hub of commerce in New York's financial district. The planning for this complex was decades in the making, and during its brief history, it was witnessed to several significant events. Learn more about the history of New York's World Trade Center on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Do you ever climb into bed ready to sleep only to have your mind start racing the moment your head hits the pillow? thoughts bouncing around, replaying the day or jumping ahead to tomorrow? That is exactly why Catherine Nikolai created Nothing Much Happens. Each episode is a gentle, cozy bedtime story where, well, nothing much happens.

No drama, no tension, nothing you need to follow closely. Just soft narration, calming repetition, and soothing sensory details designed to help your mind slow down and your body relax. It's not about entertainment, it's about rest. And millions of listeners around the world use it every night to quiet their thoughts and finally fall asleep. If you've ever struggled to shut your brain off at night, this might be exactly what you've been missing. You can listen to Nothing Much Happens wherever you get your podcasts.

Episodes are every Monday and Thursday. This episode is sponsored by Brilliant.org. Brilliant's mission is to inspire and develop people to achieve their goals in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. One person, one question, and one small commitment to learning at a time. They enable great teachers to illuminate the soul of math, science, and engineering through bite-sized interactive learning experiences. Their courses explore the laws that shape our world,

elevating math and science from something to be feared to a delightful experience of guided discovery. If you're interested in learning about any STEM subject, go to everything-everywhere.com slash brilliant. Once again, that's everything-everywhere.com slash brilliant. There are a lot of television shows and podcasts about the events of September 11, 2001, and the destruction of the World Trade Center.

That's an enormous topic that would take a lot of time to dissect, and besides, there are plenty of other outlets that will be focusing on that. Instead, I want to put my own spin on things by focusing on what happened beforehand, how these buildings came to be, and what made them special. If you go back far enough to before the Dutch first arrived on the island of Manhattan, the spot where the World Trade Center was located was actually near the Hudson River. The southern tip of Manhattan used to be much smaller than it is today. All of the area around the edges of the island today are reclaimed land. During excavations at the site in 2010, they actually found the remains of an 18th century ship not far from where the towers stood. Analysis of the wood shows that it probably came from Philadelphia. Beginning in the 1920s, the location where the World Trade Center was located was known as Radio Row.

It was a district focused on the sale of radios and electronic equipment that was centered on Cortland Street. even though Lower Manhattan was the original location of the first settlement on the island, and even though the stock exchange was on Wall Street, by the mid-20th century, most of the economic growth on the island was in Midtown, closer to where Times Square was located. The idea for a World Trade Center in New York was first floated in 1943, based on a project in New Orleans. Here I'll take a small detour to explain the idea of a World Trade Center. New York is not the only city that has a World Trade Center. Actually, there are currently 323 World Trade Centers located in 90 countries around the world. There is a World Trade

Center's association, which serves as the organizing body for them. The idea of a World Trade Center is pretty simple. It's usually just a single building or a collection of buildings, where companies and government agencies can operate under one roof that all seek to facilitate international trade. Due to the sheer size of the building in New York and its prominence on the skyline, if you generically said, the World Trade Center, it usually just referred to the one in New York. In most cities, the World Trade Center is usually just a normal-sized office building and not necessarily located in a prominent place. Both London and Paris have World Trade Centers, and you never hear of them. Back in New York, the state legislature

put their plans for a World Trade Center on hold in 1949 and then revived it again in 1961. The project was organized by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. As the Port Authority is jointly administered by both states, both states had to approve the plan. New Jersey didn't agree to go along with it until the Port Authority agreed to take over the Hudson and Manhattan train station. The new station would allow people from New Jersey to rapidly get to the World Trade Center via a new transportation system based on the old H&M Railway called the Port Authority Trans Hudson, or Path, and it's still in existence today. In 1965, the Port Authority began using eminent domain to purchase the buildings on Radio

row, giving each business $3,000, regardless of how success. or established the business was. Demolition began in 1966. The lead architect of the project was an American architect named Mirno Yamasaki. His original plan had two towers that were 80 stories each. However, one of the primary requirements of the Port Authority was that the facility had to be 10 million square feet of office space. To meet the requirement, Yamasaki changed the design so that each tower would be 110 stories tall. Each tower would be taller than any building in the world at the time of construction. One of the most innovative aspects of the towers was their elevator system.

Rather than building elevator shafts that go up the entire building, he designed elevators to run like trains. There would be local elevators and express elevators. The 44th and 78th floors were designed as sky lobbies, where people would transfer to get to elevators to go to higher floors. This system allowed the percentage of the building which could be used for office space to go from 62% to 75%. This system is still used today in many extremely tall skyscrapers.

The elevators were also the fastest in the world at the time of construction. The towers themselves were what was called a framed tube design. Basically, each tower was a metal tube with load-bearing columns on the perimeter, not the interior. There were 59 load-bearing columns on each side for a total of 236. This technique, which was new in the 1960s, allowed for very open floor plans. Another consequence is that the building had very narrow windows which were only 18 inches wide. I should note that during the design of the building in the 1960s, the architects actually did consider the possibility of an airplane colliding with one of the towers. This had actually occurred back in 1945 when a B-25 bomber accidentally hit the Empire State Building in the fog.

Their scenario was for a Boyne 707 lost in the fog trying to land at Newark or JFK airports. There was a fair amount of resistance to the design of the towers. Aesthetically, many architects were against the modernist design and claimed it looked like a giant filing cabinet. Many of the building owners in Manhattan objected to the government being involved in such an enormous increase of commercial real estate, which would depress prices. The city of New York also had objections. Believe it or not, because this was a Port Authority project, which was a state agency, the city had no say or control over what was happening. and this included not being subject to New York City building codes. Construction of the North Tower began in August of 1968,

and construction of the South Tower began in January 1969. Over 1.2 million cubic yards of fill was removed from the World Trade Center site. All of that material was used to reclaim land and expand the southwest of Manhattan. Due to the prefabricated nature of many of the components of the building, especially the aluminum exterior, construction went quickly. Tower 1 topped out on December 23rd, 1970, and Tower 2 topped out on July 19, 1971. Both buildings were dedicated on April 4, 1973, and by that point, tenants had already been in both buildings for quite some time. The first tenants on Tower 1 had actually moved in before the building had topped out.

The World Trade Center's distinction of being the tallest building in the world didn't last very long. It only held the record for two years until the Sears Tower in Chicago surpassed it in 1974. Over the next 15 years, five more buildings were built at the World Trade Center complex, the last of which was the 47-story Building 7, which was constructed in the mid-1980s. One of the first noteworthy events that happened at the World Trade Center occurred on August 7, 1974, when a French tightrope walker named Philippe Petit managed to string a wire between the two towers and walked across. He spent six years planning the walk even before the buildings had been completed. It was all highly illegal, and it was called the Archiefti.

artistic crime of the century. There is a fantastic documentary about it called Man on Wire, which I highly recommend. And the story is interesting enough that I'll probably dedicate a full episode to it in the future. On February 13, 1975, a fire broke out in the 11th floor of the North Tower. It spread to nearby floors, and it was primarily paper and filing cabinets which burned, and the fireproofing had protected all the structural steel. On February 26, 1993, A truck filled with 1,500 pounds of explosives was detonated in the underground parking garage of the North Tower. The terrorist plan was to have one tower fall over onto the other, like dominoes, but that's not how skyscrapers fall down. The design of the tower actually helped in this attack because it mostly blew up inside the hollow cylinder, causing little structural damage.

Today, 20 years after the events of September 11, 2001, the World Trade Center site is still under development. There's a national memorial on the site of the two towers, and there's been several new buildings constructed. The new World Trade Center 1, informally known as the Freedom Tower, is now the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere. World Trade Center 2 is scheduled for completion in 2022, and it will be one of the tallest buildings in the United States. There are three other buildings completed as well as a new transportation hub, a performing arts center, and a Greek Orthodox Church, which replaced one that was destroyed in the attack. The World Trade Center site has been a center of commerce in New York City ever since the World Trade Center was constructed. Despite the events of September 11th, New York has rebuilt, and today the World Trade Center site is once again a major hub in the city. The associate producers of Everything Everywhere Daily are Peter Bennett and Thor Thompson.

Today's review comes from listener 372-444 over at Apple Podcasts in the United States. They write, A Daily Must Listen. Gary has an incredible talent for curating interesting topics and providing an amazingly comprehensive overview of that topic in such a short podcast. At only 10 minutes a day, give or take, it's on my must listen list each morning. He never fails to feed my curious nature by introducing me to a little-known historical event and unique geographic locations, or to provide a totally new perspective to a mundane piece of school book history. I've been following Gary as a travel photographer long before he began this podcast, thanks to a mutual friend, and I applaud his ability to refocus his efforts during this past year to bring us such a well-research and well-constructed podcast.

I'm looking forward to his next project of Everything Everywhere tours. Well, thank you, listener 372-444. That has got to be one of the longest well-written reviews I've gotten so far. And just an update, I'm talking to some companies this week about the tours, and I hope to have some updates very soon. Remember, if you leave a review or send in a question, you two can have it read on the show. These are the towers of New York's World Trade Center. They are 1,350 feet high, and this morning a young Frenchman named Philippe Petit, an accomplished aerialist, walked a tight wire from tower to tower. Petit had no net beneath him.