Today, on the 19th anniversary of four coordinated terrorist attacks that killed almost 3,000 airplane terrorist attacks that destroyed the World Trade Center (WTC), the #stampoftheday, is reminder that the WTC was the result of an ambitious effort to make lower Manhattan a hub of economic activity.
The stamp that introduces this theme – a 5-cent stamp calling for Americans to “plan for better cities” – was issued in 1967, a year after construction began on the WTC complex. Designed by Francis Ferguson, an architect and planner who was then teaching at Columbia University, it features a stylized map of a city that, like lower Manhattan, appears to be surrounded by water.
To me, the stamp serves as a reminder that our cities are the result of a complicated interplay of economic forces, politics, and planning. And the World Trade Center’s history is a great illustration of how those forces come together to produce notable changes in the physical environment. In fact, the western portion of the World Trade Center site was created by 18th century landfilling, which itself, was an early exercise in city building for commercial purposes.
The idea for the WTC reportedly first was proposed at the 1939 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows. In 1946, Winthrop Aldrich, chairman of Chase National Bank and scion of the Aldrich dynasty, who had helped organize the World’s Fair exhibition, was selected to lead the World Trade Center Corporation, a body created by the New York state legislature to study the feasibility of a permanent trade center that would house institutions representing every facet of international trade in New York City. The corporation, however, decided the state’s money would be better spent improving the city’s ports.
The idea for a trade center, however, was taken up by David Rockefeller, Aldrich’s nephew, who was vice chairman of the Chase Manhattan Bank, a new entity formed via a merger in 1955. In 1957, at his urging the new bank broke ground on a downtown skyscraper, a move that went against the grain because most of the post-war building activity in NYC was occurring in midtown Manhattan. In an effort to stem that trend, in 1958, Rockefeller founded the Downtown Lower Manhattan Association (DLMA), which made a World Trade Center the centerpiece of a $1 billion downtown redevelopment plan that would transform 564 acres in Lower Manhattan by replacing old buildings and crooked streets with new superblocks that could house large floorplate skyscrapers. And the area would be served by a new elevated highway, the Lower Manhattan Expressway, that would connect the Holland Tunnel and the East River bridges and by a new heliport.
In the late 1950s, McKinsey and Co., which DLMA hired to examine the trade center idea, reported that even if a massive site could be assembled via powers of eminent domain, a privately financed building on the site would not be financially viable. Undeterred, Rockefeller, whose brother Nelson was governor of New York, turned to Austin Tobin, the long-time head of the Port Authority of New York, a self-financed bi-state agency that operated the region’s airports, the bridges and tunnels spanning the Hudson River, and local port facilities.
In 1960, DLMA released a plan calling for the Port Authority to build a world trade center on a 13.5 acre site near the South Street Seaport on the east side of lower Manhattan. While Tobin agreed to back the idea, the proposal floundered because, as a bi-state agency, the Port Authority required approval for new projects from the governors of both New York and New Jersey. While Nelson Rockefeller supported the idea, then New Jersey Governor Robert Meyner objected to New York getting a $335 million real estate development that didn’t to provide many benefits for New Jersey.
At the urging of New Jersey officials, Tobin and the Port Authority changed the plan in two notable ways. First, they began focusing on a site on the west side of Manhattan centered on Cortland Street, that was known as Radio Row because it was home to several blocks of stores that sold radios, war surplus electronics, and parts to repair those items. The heart of the proposed site was the Hudson Terminal, a railroad station (and two 22-story office buildings) served by the Hudson and Manhattan Railroad, which connected Hoboken, Jersey City, and Newark with the west side of Manhattan. Moreover, the Port Authority agreed to take over operations of the financially ailing railroad, which by the late 1950s was carrying about 26 million passengers a year, less than a quarter of what it had carried at its peak in the 1920s. Believing the project would benefit New Jersey and allow the rail line to continue without requiring a state subsidy, incoming New Jersey Governor Richard Hughes agreed to support the modified WTC plan in December 1961, just before he took office.
Unhappy that their neighborhood and livelihoods were about to be obliterated, property owners and companies in the area tried to stop it via efforts that included staging a protest that featured a coffin draped in black with a life-sized dummy labeled “Small Business Man.” In June 1962, they also asked a state judge for an injunction against the project. The Radio Row lawsuit went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which in 1963 refused to hear the case.
Meanwhile, the Port Authority was expanding project’s scope. In 1962, the plan called for a 72-story “world trade mart”-with hotel rooms for sleepy international businessmen-a securities exchange, and several other office towers. But by 1964 the Port Authority had decided the project would feature two 110-story buildings-the tallest ever built. These towers would contain more office space than the Pan Am Building (now the MetLife) and the Pentagon combined-about 10 million square feet-even though there were already about 10 million vacant square feet of office space in the city. This prospect worried other property owners in Manhattan, who worried that the project not only would flood the market but also that the Port Authority, which had other revenues, would be able to charge lower rents. Writing in New York magazine in 1969, labor lawyer Theodore W. Kheel, called the project “a striking example of socialism at its worst.”
Undeterred, the Port Authority began purchasing properties in the area for the World Trade Center by March 1965. Demolition of Radio Row began in March 1966 and completed by the end of the year. However, the Port Authority still lack some approvals it needed from New York City. The issue was that as a public entity, the Port Authority (unlike the area’s previous property owners) did not have to pay local property taxes. Finally, in August 1966 the Port Authority agreed that it would make annual payments to the City in lieu of taxes for the portions of the World Trade Center that were leased to private tenants. With the agreement in hand, groundbreaking for the construction of the World Trade Center took place a few days later.
I won’t go into the marvels of how the building was constructed except to note that the site was located on landfill and bedrock was 65 feet below the surface. This meant that building the massive structures required building a “bathtub” with a slurry wall around the West Street side of the site, to keep water from the Hudson River out. Once this was done, 1.2 million cubic yards of fill and dirt was removed and then used to create the land that is now the site of Battery Park City.
The project, which was completed in the mid 1970s, was not considered a financial or an aesthetic success. All the space wasn’t leased out until 1979 and it was filled only because it housed many government entities and because, as its critics had warned, subsidies provided by the Port Authority allowed it charge below-market rents.
The boxy buildings, which some people nicknamed “David” and “Nelson” after the Rockefeller brothers also were not popular. A New York Times reporter, profiling a long-time employee of the Empire State Building’s Observation Deck in 1985, wrote that he “seems to regard the World Trade Center as little better than the box the Empire State Building came in.” Others criticized the superblocks created by the project. In “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” for example, Jane Jacobs described the project as an act of “vandalism” that “dilute[d]” the rich urban landscape with “the humdrum and the regimented.” And Lewis Mumford denounced the WTC as an “example of the purposeless giantism and technological exhibitionism that are now eviscerating the living tissue of every great city.”
None of this is meant to diminish the significant, tragic losses that occurred on this day in 2001. Nor does it deny that despite their many design flaws, the twin towers were a key part of the New York skyline. As Henry Stewart wrote in an article on the Gothamist website that was the source for much of this post, “For many New Yorkers the towers didn’t just dominate the skyline; they were the skyline, which was part of why their absence was felt so viscerally.”
Be well, stay safe, fight for justice and work for peace.