> The vision was meant to use the trade facility and urban renewal as tools to clear and revitalize what had become a “commercial slum”.
What this refers to is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Row#New_York_City
Basically you cannot have Akihabara or Shenzhen style electronics markets because the sort of people that built the WTC don't like their chaotic appearance.
Before the Chinese traded electronics in Shenzhen, they traded it in Hong Kong. Yes, as Hong Kong transformed into a financial center, it got rid of the electronics traders.
So why did they force a sale price on the people there?
If as finance people we believe in market forces they should have bought the stores out at market prices.
It's another heads-we-win-tails-you-lose situation.
Besides, didn't the Twin Towers have a massive occupancy problem? I recall that being the reason why so many government entities were forced to move there...
Right, confiscation from private owners to use it for erection of a building no one needs is a very efficient use of land. The project will require astronomical up front expenses, will stay vacant for almost 2 decades, and have endless problems until its last day (fires, terrorist acts, issues with the structure). But who cares, it's efficiency we are talking about.
And their counterparts in government hate it because chaos is inefficient (because people have rights) to impose their will on (regulate) so even if you don't build WTC there becomes a regulatory environment where nothing organic can grow.
Happily, I saw a little discussion of it in 2008 when the advocates of letting the auto companies fail were pushed back by statistics showing how many second and third tier suppliers would be destroyed. But the fourth tier, the shenzhen / radio alley-type stuff is still ignored. Very similar to how most companies want to simply hire skills and assume that they will magically appear when in years past, companies took an active hand in creating them by having a career development path in-house.
Perhaps the AI bubble will be viewed in the future as the last gasp of companies that depleted the soil that they grew in and now struggle to survive without anyone that knows how to do the work anymore. Maybe LLMs will be all that remains, our Moai.
A company that knows it is too big to fail will inevitably lead to mismanagement. After all, why bother saving for a rainy day when you can count on corporate welfare handouts? Why bother reducing your risks when you can always rely on a bailout? You can never lose, so the obvious thing to do is to bet as big as possible in an attempt to create as much short-term "shareholder value" as possible.
http://www.ccru.net/archive/markets.htm
In 'highly developed' economies the anarchy of concrete market-places has been replaced by the securitized space of the shopping mall (interiorized, guarded, and surveilled). Instead of dark and crowded alleys, lined by open stalls - which encourage a multiplicity of tactile interactions - the mall substitutes shop windows and brightly lit retail displays.
no. The twin towers opened in 1973 at a time when NYC was becoming a hollowed out urban core. "New York City never officially declared bankruptcy, but it came very close in 1975 due to severe financial distress. The city faced a fiscal crisis, and through negotiations involving unions and state assistance, it managed to avoid formal bankruptcy" [wikipedia] The buildings were not a commercial success and suffered vacanies and low rents. This is the reason that they were not rebuilt, but rather a smaller building was erected in their place. (one of the problems with tall commercial buildings is that they require a non-trivial amount of elevator square feet in the middle of each tower; this is sq footage that does not make money. if you look at tall buildings being built today, they are almost all residential structures. The require less elevator because the number of people in each apartment is far smaller than the number of people in offices)
New York City only bounced back financially during the Reagan revolution. The Democrat party was dead in the water at that time (similar to today) but it bounced back when Clinton came from out of nowhere (a place called Hope!) to win. but looking back today, Clinton was part of the "hollowing out the economy, sending it to China" (I'm not blaming nor absolving here, that type of idea was popular in economics. It didn't work because it turns out the world is not a nice place where opening up to China and Russia turns out not to open up in the other direction (and also because economic efficiency entails "in efficient markets, economic profits go to zero" and everybody except consumers doesn't like that, and consumers don't like it either on the other side of their ledger, their jobs))
>diverted critical funds from development... into conflict and war far away.
defense spending is not and was not a major factor wrt spending in the economy
https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/styles/pubs_2x/pub...
What we should have done is, as a symbolic act, rebuild the towers exactly as they were (with some structural improvements maybe) and go about our business. We should have gone after the terrorists as an international police action and not much more.
That would have been a symbol of true strength. "No, your little act of vandalism won't have any effect on us at all. We are above that." Be like the "wall" archetype in fiction, the huge guy someone punches as hard as they can and they barely notice.
Instead we showed stupidity and weakness disguised as strength, something we're now wallowing in with a whole culture revolving around fake strength and compensatory narcissism. Nothing says dying nation like gold plating everything.
I remember reading an article in 2003 how Clinton's team wanted to handover intel about terror threats to Bush's team during the presidential transition, but the latter skipped those meetings. And remember how Bush supposedly ignored warnings in his daily briefings?
Without hanging chads and the shenanigans in Florida, maybe Al Gore's administration would've caught these terrorists, there'd be no sending kids to die in Afghanistan and Iraq... what else?
The Freedom Tower is so unimpressive in large part because it had to fit within the constraints of the main event at this location.
Everything new is "gross" for the people who are on their fifth year of therapy with no end in sight. It's always someone else's fault but don't change anything because community character is the most important thing.
Some of the best “preserved” (via this ‘build nothing change nothing’ tactic) communities in my expensive socal city are dead. They were turned from diverse beach communities into dead information technology/finance monoliths.
My feeling is that the response was the thing that kicked off the decline. At the time of the attack, the US had quite a bit of goodwill around the world. The US could have surgically gone after the people responsible, with minimum civilian deaths, and most of the world would have backed them to the hilt, and the US would have come out stronger. Instead we had spurious claims of weapons of mass destruction, the coalition of the "willing" going into Iraq with jackboots on, over the widespread objections of their own populations, and abuses in Guantanamo Bay. That response burned an awful lot of goodwill around the world: which kicked off the decline.
China's rise wasn't "inevitable" it was underwritten when Nixon went to China and they subsequently got their most favored trading nation status.
Looking at where America is right now. It seems to make a downfall.
It's been happening for years now. 'America', the idea, died the moment the 2nd plane hit the towers.
People saw that happen, and were so fearful they immediately opened their hearts to fascism.
2025 is merely the year where all of Bush's fascist policies & Obama/Biden's failure to clean it up metastasized into the overt fascism that hurts everyone in a country & eventually destroys the country itself.
There's a high number of coincidences about the towers getting destroyed. It's no conspiracy, it's because the towers and NYC meant something in the eyes of the world with regards to the USA.
Just rattling off a few of the wild ones:
The episode of The Lone Gunmen which predicted an attack with a plane on the towers.
The Sega Master System game (I forget the name, but I own it) where it depicts a missile hitting the towers on the opening screen. It's pixels with little wings, and super spooky in retrospect.
The Dream Theater live album released on 9/11 which showed the NYC skyline burning.
There's so much stuff, I almost don't blame the conspiracy theorists. But they have the causality backwards. They also really like to ignore the fact that 8 years earlier somebody tried to blow up the towers and killed 6 people...
Tom Clancy's book "Debt of Honor" is very similar in a spooky way as well. Including the hesitation to shoot down commercial airliners being used as weapons. [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_Music [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt_of_Honor
That totally freaked me out when I re-read the article a few years later.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_World_Trade_Center_bombin...
I imagine this terrorist attack inspired some of the art on your list.
It was a ringing bell, bringing the attention back to the old ugly worldorder of great games, land-empires and bloody conquest and the inability to isolate from hostile ideologies, even if you are the usa and living on a giant island. Bush went to iraq and the failure to build any working state there- showed not only the failure of neoncons, but also of the whole "all cultures are equal" and academic impotence. There explanation models had nothing for this but tired rehashes of colonial/anti-colonial ideology, no predictions, no real help, just "belief in universal values and western culture, and righton" - and that was it. No help for the 2 billion stuck in religious ember, not real analysis to free the wasted geniuses trapped under burkas. Silence, ideology and absence, thats whats left.
In 2001, I lived in Chicago, and I took a trip to Italy in September of 2001. I remember flying into Newark airport early that month, and marveling (as I always did) about the New York skyline, including the Empire State Building and the WTC.
I returned eight days later, on the first day that flights resumed after 9/11, and I remember flying into Newark again, and there was still smoking climbing into the air around where the WTC once stood.
They should have been rebuilt identically.
Most high rises taper, but these towers just went straight up as rectangles. And the effect was almost dizzying. They were just so tall.
I used to love drawing the NYC skyline as a kid — such an iconic thing. New York used to be much grittier, but I loved the energy of it as a kid. Was an incredible thing to experience.
I could ramble for hours about all the things I loved about the trip, but one of the things that stuck out was all the young kids taking the subway by themselves or in small packs of friends out pretty late etc. They all seemed so much more street smart and independent than my own similar aged kids (we live in a quiet neighborhood in Seattle). I also grew up fairly sheltered in the suburbs where I had very little exposure to the “real world” as they say…
I’d be fascinated to hear more about what it’s like to grow up in such a massive city.
[1] https://johnj.com/posts/man-on-wire/ [2009]
Edit: add year
After watching, I felt the movie was as much a tribute to the WTC as it was about this wire walker. It's a beautiful film.
During their lifetimes the towers were host to the birth of 17 babies and 19 murders"
That is unusually high number of death during construction.
After 25 years, I still get emotional looking at these imageries. The emotion is raw. I'm still mad that this happened.
The towers also provided an extraordinary employment opportunity for the construction workers of the region. More than 3,500 people were employed continuously on-site during construction.
> A total of 10,000 people were involved in its construction. Tragically, 60 people were killed during construction.
During their lifetimes the towers were host to the birth of 17 babies and 19 murders.
Fifty thousand people called the towers their place of work and on many days tens of thousands visited.
I also couldn’t find any evidence for the 19 murders. Six people were killed in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, which was an act of terrorism. Plus 9/11.
https://npdf1.org/crime-scene-world-trade-center/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gotti
The actual scene from the movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QL6d0ASmvfs
The camera work for that was stunning.
https://www.reddit.com/r/TwinTowersInPhotos/s/cnyHzBE47C
Some photos form Sun Microsystems offices inside the WTC https://www.reddit.com/r/TwinTowersInPhotos/s/qYMuq6LG4W
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jules_and_G%C3%A9d%C3%A9on_Nau...
I worked for a bit on the 95 or 96th floor. Inside they were less impressive. The lowish ceiling and skinny windows made it feel confining. To me, in the 90s, they felt old and dated on the inside.
"Of Chicago's five tallest buildings, three were completed within a 5-year span between 1969 and 1974."
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_buildings_in_C...
Dad also bemoaned the loss of Radio Row to build the WTC, as he was a big Ham enthusiast as a kid.
I'm sure there are some civil engineers in here who would just love to weigh in so now I wait. :)
I remember having a beer in the restaurant at the top in the late 90's. I wish I'd taken some photos.
I had a short friendship with Marshall Brain (How Stuff Works, et. al.) in ~1993, and he and I decided to meet in the WTC square to go have lunch one day. He was early, and based on "stepping off" one side of one of the towers and knowing the # of stories, he mentally calculated how many Zebulon, NC's would fit inside them. If memory serves, he was either living there at the time or from there.
I had moved to Atlanta when the towers were hit, and although my closest colleagues from NY were all OK after 9/11, I'm sure there was at least someone I'd known or worked with that perished.
(I'm not saying this was good. It was a terrible tragedy. The attack itself obviously, and then what followed as well.)
I was slightly too young to really remember the cold war, and my only hazy related memory is positive: the fall of the Berlin wall. So, major geopolitical conflict was a thing of the past.
Of course in reality, 10-15 years of relative peace (and of course there was still regional conflict) and social stability (though of course there were many unaddressed problems) is just a blip, but especially growing up in that era, it didn't feel that way at the time. I think that might be why so many millennial and Gen-x folks feel particularly disillusioned with the state of the world now.
The four cranes on each tower that you can see in the photos were a scaling up of a proven design and it didn't scale up well. They had tons of problems with them breaking down.
There were also some plans to do automated welding that came to naught. They had to fall back to manual welding after they couldn't get the automated process to work.
By themselves they were impressive, but, jutting out of the ground as they did, without peer, made for a jarring skyline. The fact that they did not taper and were twin made it worse.
The new tower is much better integrated into NYC skyline aesthetically. A shame I did not visit before returning to Ghana a couple of years ago.
Now known as Brookfield place. Yet another ill-advised re-branding. I believe this was done after the GFC to attract non-finance companies.
