Six Years After: Looking Back at the World Trade Center

…of Nikitas3.com

When the World Trade Center was built, it was a bit of a shock to New Yorkers. Designed by Japanese architect Minoru Yamasaki, the towers at first were not at all well received. They looked like two new houses in a subdivision with no shrubbery around them. But then as smaller and medium-sized buildings developed in the neighborhood, there was a sense that things were “filling in” and, over time, WTC became an icon.

Yamasaki designed the towers to adhere to modernist Western sensibilities, adding a siting element that made them much more pleasing. Rather than lining up the two buildings side-by-side, he wisely placed them catty-corner in order that they not overwhelm the financial district with a static layout.

I lived in New York 13 years, and walked in the vicinity of the towers many times. You couldn’t help but look up at them. If you stood in the plaza or better yet between them, at their corners, you were “surrounded” by them. There was something very impressive in their duality, that these behemoths were so identical and so big and so… man-made.

I only actually went up into the towers once in my life. It was 1980. We all lived in Vermont at the time, and a friend was getting married. But the wedding was being held in New Jersey where his fiancee hailed from. So we all decided to take him out on the town in Manhattan two nights before the wedding, and agreed that we would all rendez-vous on Thursday evening at the top of the World Trade Center at 7 o’clock.

It was a gorgeous September day. I arrived fashionably early at the restaurant on the top floor of the North Tower, the first to be hit on 9/11. It was called Windows on the World and, for a country bumpkin like me, the elegant urban bustle of this eatery 1,350 feet over the sidewalk was vivid, with a clear sky and a view for 60 miles west to the sinking tangerine sun over Jersey. The place was jammin’ so I ordered a beer and people-watched for a while.

After the appointed 7 o’clock had well passed, I ordered a second beer, and started to wonder where my friends were. So I wandered away from the bar and stood by the shaded eastern windows looking over onto the north face of the South Tower. It was awesome, and a very disconcerting feeling being so high up and, there, just a short distance away was another massive structure, an identical one, whose geometry plummeted in perfect perspective toward earth. As I was getting my balance, I looked across onto the roof of the South Tower and there spotted my friends, six guys, on the open observation deck. Realizing my error, I finished my beer quickly, hopped into the elevator, descended, crossed the plaza, and ascended to the roof of the South Tower.

So that’s my story about my one and only trip to the World Trade Center.

After the towers fell, there was a lot of conjecture about their very nature, that they were too big and too showy and too obvious a target for terrorism. One of the more interesting theories was that the towers were cursed, that, according to the 3,000-year-old Chinese art of feng shui, in which the precise arrangement of furniture in a room — or of buildings in a city — is supposed to create a sense of peace and order.

A feng shui expert said that the towers always had suffered from a “poison arrow” meaning that they were offset from each other and that their catty corners were “stabbing at each other’s hearts”. So it is interesting that a Japanese architect plotted these buildings according to a modernist Western sensibility that then violated the ancient Eastern concept of feng shui. And that perhaps the World Trade Center was flawed on a more cosmic scale than we ever could have known.

I’ve often wondered what it would be like to bring some New Yorker back to life who had died in, say, 1999, and tell him to look at the skyline, and to watch his stunned countenance, and to listen as he wondered aloud about how two of the biggest buildings in the world could simply had disappeared. But knowing the story of 9/11, it is a more bizarre tale than anyone could imagine as the twin towers fade into history but at the same time remain forever alive. And it now is obvious to me that their death really was just the beginning of their real and eternal life.

Also see Michelle Malkin’s Sunday Meditation