Was the WTC 7 pulled?

intro • the collapse • the fire • pull it • videos • reports & articles • links

Last updated:  07/28/2008

Silverstein said "pull it"...

On a PBS documentary video released in Sept. 2002, the WTC leaseholder Larry Silverstein is shown saying that a fire department commander tells him that the fire in the WTC 7 might not be able to be contained and Silverstein recommends to the commander that maybe the smartest decision to make to avoid risking any more lives is to "pull it".  Right afterwards, Silverstein says the decision was made to "pull" and then they all watched the building collapse.

America Rebuilds: A Year at Ground Zero -PBS (09/10/02)

Narrator: "World Trade Center 7 had always been considered the starting point for rebuilding. Locating north of the slurry wall, Seven had been cleared faster than the rest of the site and there had been no bodies to recover.
Pelted by debris when the North Tower collapsed, Seven burned until late afternoon allowing occupants to evacuate to safety."

Larry Silverstein, WTC Leaseholder: 

"I remember getting a call from the, uh, fire department commander, telling me that they were not sure they were gonna be able to contain the fire, and I said, 'You know we've had such terrible loss of life, maybe the smartest thing to do is, is pull it.' Uh, and they made that decision to pull and then we watched the building collapse."

(Video:  video.google )

What exactly was Larry Silverstein referring to by using the word "it" when recommending to the fire commander that he should "pull it" after he was told that the fire in the WTC 7 might not be able to be contained?

Isn't the fact that the word "pull" was used in the very same PBS documentary by the destruction crews to describe the demolishing of the WTC 6 further evidence that Mr. Silverstein was using the word "pull" to mean demolish or "pull down" the WTC 7?

America Rebuilds: A Year at Ground Zero - PBS (09/10/02)

Unidentified construction worker 1:  "Hello? Oh, we're getting ready to pull building six."

Luis Mendes, NYC Dept of Design and Construction:  "We had to be very careful how we demolished building six. We were worried about the building six coming down and then damaging the slurry walls, so we wanted that particular building to fall within a certain area."

Unidentified construction worker 2:  "Well they got the cables attached in four different locations going up and they'll be pulling, pulling the building to the north. It's not everyday you try to pull down an eight story building down with cables."

[Video:  video.google.  Extended:  youtube.]

Phrasal Verbs: pull down - To demolish; destroy: pull down an old office building.

Phrasal Verb:  pull down 1. To pull down or break up so that reconstruction is impossible: demolish,

destroy, dismantle, dynamite, knock down, level, pulverize, raze, tear down, wreck

How did the FDNY know at about 2pm that the WTC 7 was going to collapse?

► Deputy Chief Peter Hayden: "By now, this is going on into the afternoon, and we were concerned about additional collapse, not only of the Marriott, because there was a good portion of the Marriott still standing, but also we were pretty sure that 7 World Trade Center would collapse. Early on, we saw a bulge in the southwest corner between floors 10 and 13, and we had put a transit on that and we were pretty sure she was going to collapse. You actually could see there was a visible bulge, it ran up about three floors. It came down about 5 o’clock in the afternoon, but by about 2 o’clock in the afternoon we realized this thing was going to collapse.

Firehouse: Was there heavy fire in there right away?
Hayden: No, not right away, and that’s probably why it stood for so long because it took a while for that fire to develop. It was a heavy body of fire in there and then we didn’t make any attempt to fight it. We were concerned about the collapse of a 47-story building there.

Firehouse: Chief Nigro said they made a collapse zone and wanted everybody away from number 7— did you have to get all of those people out?
Hayden: Yeah, we had to pull everybody back. It was very difficult. We had to be very forceful in getting the guys out. They didn’t want to come out. There were guys going into areas that I wasn’t even really comfortable with, because of the possibility of secondary collapses. We didn’t know how stable any of this area was. We pulled everybody back probably by 3 or 3:30 in the afternoon. We said, this building is going to come down, get back. It came down about 5 o’clock or so, but we had everybody backed away by then. At that point in time, it seemed like a somewhat smaller event, but under any normal circumstances, that’s a major event, a 47-story building collapsing. It seemed like a firecracker after the other ones came down, but I mean that’s a big building, and when it came down, it was quite an event. But having gone through the other two, it didn’t seem so bad. But that’s what we were concerned about. We had said to the guys, we lost as many as 300 guys. We didn’t want to lose any more people that day. And when those numbers start to set in among everybody…" -Firehouse Magazine (04/02)

Is it just a coincidence that several demolition teams arrived at the WTC at about 3pm around the time rescuers were told that the WTC 7 was going to collapse?

A CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF THE COLLAPSE OF WTC TOWERS 1, 2 & 7 FROM AN EXPLOSIVES AND CONVENTIONAL DEMOLITION INDUSTRY VIEWPOINT
ASSERTION #7

"WTC 7 was intentionally ‘pulled down’ with explosives. No airplane hit it, and the building owner himself was quoted as saying he made a decision to ‘pull it’.”
PROTEC COMMENT: This scenario is extremely unlikely for many reasons.
5. Several demolition teams had reached Ground Zero by 3:00pm on 9/11, and these individuals witnessed the collapse of WTC 7 from within a few hundred feet of the event. We have spoken with several who possess extensive experience in explosive demolition, and all reported hearing or seeing nothing to indicate an explosive detonation precipitating the collapse. As one eyewitness told us, “We were all standing around helpless…we knew full well it was going to collapse. Everyone there knew. You gotta remember there was a lot of confusion and we didn’t know if another plane was coming…but I never heard explosions like demo charges. We knew with the damage to that building and how hot the fire was, that building was gonna go, so we just waited, and a little later it went." - Brent Blanchard/Implosion World (08/08/06) [Reprinted:  911movement.org]

Protec clientele:  BECHTEL INFRASTRUCTURE CORP, LOCKHEED MARTIN, NASA, U.S. ARMY CORPS OF ENGINEERS, U.S. BUREAU OF HEALTH CARE, U.S. ENERGY LABS, INC." - protecservices.com

► WORLD TRADE CENTER TASK FORCE INTERVIEW:  LIEUTENANT WILLIAM RYAN, Interview Date: October 18, 2001

"At that time he said, "7 has got fire on several floors."

Then we found out, I guess around 3:00 o'clock, that they thought 7 was going to collapse. So, of course, we've got guys all in this pile over here and the main concern was get everybody out, and I guess it took us over an hour and a half, two hours to get everybody out of there.

So it took us a while and we ended up backing everybody out, and that's when 7 collapsed. Then, basically, after 7 collapsed, I went over and told the Chief that -- by then they had companies with handie-talkies, masks.

Basically, we fell back for 7 to collapse, and then we waited a while and it got a lot more organized, I would guess.

"...the firefighters made the decision fairly early on not to attempt to fight the fires, due in part to the damage to WTC 7 from the collapsing towers. Hence, the fire progressed throughout the day fairly unimpeded by automatic or manual suppression activities.
It appears that the sprinklers may not have been effective due to the limited water on site and that the development of the fires was not significantly impeded by the firefighters because manual firefighting efforts were stopped fairly early in the day.
WTC 7 collapsed approximately 7 hours after the collapse of WTC 1. Preliminary indications were that, due to lack of water, no manual firefighting actions were taken by FDNY. -FEMA: WTC Building Performance Study, Chp 5 (05/02)

"Falling debris also caused major structural damage to the building, which soon began burning on multiple floors, said Francis X. Gribbon, a spokesman for the Fire Department. By 11:30 a.m., the fire commander in charge of that area, Assistant Chief Frank Fellini, ordered firefighters away from it for safety reasons." -New York Times (11/29/01)

"The global collapse occurred with few external signs and is postulated to have occurred with the failure of core columns" -NIST

Firehouse Magazine Reports - WTC: This Is Their Story

► Captain Chris Boyle: "After that, we headed to Vesey and Broadway. That’s where (Deputy) Chief (Tom) Haring was. He was starting to put together a command post.

Firehouse: Did that chief give an assignment to go to building 7?
Boyle: He gave out an assignment. I didn’t know exactly what it was, but he told the chief that we were heading down to the site.

So we go there and on the north and east side of 7 it didn’t look like there was any damage at all, but then you looked on the south side of 7 there had to be a hole 20 stories tall in the building, with fire on several floors. Debris was falling down on the building and it didn’t look good.

But they had a hoseline operating. Like I said, it was hitting the sidewalk across the street, but eventually they pulled back too. Then we received an order from Fellini, we’re going to make a move on 7. That was the first time really my stomach tightened up because the building didn’t look good. I was figuring probably the standpipe systems were shot. There was no hydrant pressure. I wasn’t really keen on the idea. Then this other officer I’m standing next to said, that building doesn’t look straight. So I’m standing there. I’m looking at the building. It didn’t look right, but, well, we’ll go in, we’ll see.

So we gathered up rollups and most of us had masks at that time. We headed toward 7. And just around we were about a hundred yards away and Butch Brandies came running up. He said forget it, nobody’s going into 7, there’s creaking, there are noises coming out of there, so we just stopped. And probably about 10 minutes after that, Visconti, he was on West Street, and I guess he had another report of further damage either in some basements and things like that, so Visconti said nobody goes into 7, so that was the final thing and that was abandoned.
Firehouse: When you looked at the south side, how close were you to the base of that side?
Boyle: I was standing right next to the building, probably right next to it.
Firehouse: When you had fire on the 20 floors, was it in one window or many?
Boyle: There was a huge gaping hole and it was scattered throughout there. It was a huge hole. I would say it was probably about a third of it, right in the middle of it. And so after Visconti came down and said nobody goes in 7, we said all right, we’ll head back to the command post. We lost touch with him. I never saw him again that day.

So we got water to 22, but then that’s when they said all right, number 7 is coming down, shut everything down. I don’t know what time that was. It was all just a blur.

Firehouse: Did they shut the tower lines and remove them from there?
Boyle: No, just left them. Everything was left where it was. Just shut everything down, moved everybody back.
Firehouse: Could you see building 7 again from there?
Boyle: Seven, no. You got a half block away, you couldn’t see it, couldn’t see a damn thing. All we heard was they were worried about it coming down, everybody back away." -Firehouse Magazine (08/02)

► Firefighter Marcel Claes: "We were kept away from building 7 because of the potential of collapse." -Firehouse Magazine (04/02)

► Deputy Chief Peter Hayden: "By now, this is going on into the afternoon, and we were concerned about additional collapse, not only of the Marriott, because there was a good portion of the Marriott still standing, but also we were pretty sure that 7 World Trade Center would collapse. Early on, we saw a bulge in the southwest corner between floors 10 and 13, and we had put a transit on that and we were pretty sure she was going to collapse. You actually could see there was a visible bulge, it ran up about three floors. It came down about 5 o’clock in the afternoon, but by about 2 o’clock in the afternoon we realized this thing was going to collapse.

Firehouse: Was there heavy fire in there right away?
Hayden: No, not right away, and that’s probably why it stood for so long because it took a while for that fire to develop. It was a heavy body of fire in there and then we didn’t make any attempt to fight it. We were concerned about the collapse of a 47-story building there.

Firehouse: Chief Nigro said they made a collapse zone and wanted everybody away from number 7— did you have to get all of those people out?
Hayden: Yeah, we had to pull everybody back. It was very difficult. We had to be very forceful in getting the guys out. They didn’t want to come out. There were guys going into areas that I wasn’t even really comfortable with, because of the possibility of secondary collapses. We didn’t know how stable any of this area was. We pulled everybody back probably by 3 or 3:30 in the afternoon. We said, this building is going to come down, get back. It came down about 5 o’clock or so, but we had everybody backed away by then. At that point in time, it seemed like a somewhat smaller event, but under any normal circumstances, that’s a major event, a 47-story building collapsing. It seemed like a firecracker after the other ones came down, but I mean that’s a big building, and when it came down, it was quite an event. But having gone through the other two, it didn’t seem so bad. But that’s what we were concerned about. We had said to the guys, we lost as many as 300 guys. We didn’t want to lose any more people that day. And when those numbers start to set in among everybody…" -Firehouse Magazine (04/02)

► Battalion Chief John Norman: "I started to go down Vesey toward West, but there was a lot of debris blocking the way and they were telling me no, you don’t want to go down there – they’re worried about that building collapsing. I looked at 7 World Trade Center. There was smoke showing, but not a lot and I’m saying that isn’t going to fall. So I went up Church Street two more blocks and went across to West and went right down behind 7 and got a good look at three sides. From there, we looked out at 7 World Trade Center again. You could see smoke, but no visible fire, and some damage to the south face. You couldn’t really see from where we were on the west face of the building, but at the edge of the south face you could see that it was very heavily damaged.

Firehouse: Could you see if there was a lot of debris in the street after the building came down?
Norman: Yes, that’s why we couldn’t walk down Vesey. But I never expected it to fall the way it did as quickly as it did, 7.

Now we’re still worried about 7. We have guys trying to make their way up into the pile, and they’re telling us that 7 is going to fall down – and that was one of the directions from the command post, to make sure we clear the collapse zone from 7 and this is a 600-foot-tall building, so we had to clear a 600-foot radius from that building." -Firehouse Magazine (05/02)

► Chief Joseph Pfiefer

Firehouse: "Were you watching 7 World Trade Center?
Pfiefer: Yes, I watched 7. At one point, we were standing on the west side of West Street and Vesey. And I remember Chief Nigro coming back at that point saying I don’t want anybody else killed and to take everybody two blocks up virtually to North End and Vesey, which is a good ways up. And we stood there and we watched 7 collapse.

Dennis Tardio was coming down the C stairs in building 7. At about the 9th or 10th floor, he met my brother Kevin, who told Dennis, you can’t get down these stairs, there was all sorts of debris. He directed him to the B stairs and, according to Captain Tardio, they got out of the building and 30 seconds later it started collapsing. If they would have continued in the same stairs, there was no way they would have been out. I’m not too sure if my brother stayed there a little longer and directed more companies along with his guys or he was doing what firemen do, make sure all the brothers get out.

Firehouse: Did they all get killed?
Pfiefer: Yes." -Firehouse Magazine (04/02)

► Battalion Chief Tom Vallebuona: "I couldn’t get rid of that feeling like everything is going to collapse. 7 World Trade Center – I couldn’t even watch that. I said that’s enough. I refused to watch that.

We thought 7 World Trade Center was going to fall and push the side of the World Trade Center that was still standing, and then it was going to go into 90 and I thought the scaffold was going to fall and cover the block and kill another 30 people." -Firehouse Magazine (08/02)

► Deputy Chief Nick Visconti: "I don’t know how long this was going on, but I remember standing there looking over at building 7 and realizing that a big chunk of the lower floors had been taken out on the Vesey Street side. I looked up at the building and I saw smoke in it, but I really didn’t see any fire at that time.

Now, World Trade Center 7 was burning and I was thinking to myself, how come they’re not trying to put this fire out? I didn’t realize how much they had because my view was obstructed. All I could see was the upper floor. At some point, Frank Fellini said, now we’ve got hundreds of guys out there, hundreds and hundreds, and that’s on the West Street side alone. He said to me, Nick, you’ve got to get those people out of there. I thought to myself, out of where? Frank, what do you want, Chief? He answered, 7 World Trade Center, imminent collapse, we’ve got to get those people out of there.

I was getting some resistance. The common thing was, hey, we’ve still got people here, we don’t want to leave. I explained to them that we were worried about 7, that it was going to come down and we didn’t want to get anybody trapped in the collapse. One comment was, oh, that building is never coming down, that didn’t get hit by a plane, why isn’t somebody in there putting the fire out?

I walked out and I got to Vesey and West, where I reported to Frank. He said, we’re moving the command post over this way, that building’s coming down. At this point, the fire was going virtually on every floor, heavy fire and smoke that really wasn’t bothering us when we were searching because it was being pushed southeast and we were a little bit west of that. I remember standing just where West and Vesey start to rise toward the entrance we were using in the World Financial Center. There were a couple of guys standing with me and a couple of guys right at the intersection, and we were trying to back them up – and here goes 7. It started to come down and now people were starting to run.
I said, that building is not coming this way, you could see where it was going, but I was concerned about debris. I heard later on that somebody got trapped in the debris of 7, but I don’t know.

Firehouse: Five o’clock is when Tower 7 came down.
Visconti: Five or 5:30. I was saying it’s good to know who’s here, but there’s no imminent collapse, there’s nothing hanging over us. It’s more stable. I said OK, pick out six or seven guys and walk over this way, we’ll pick up some, we’ll get over there." -Firehouse Magazine (08/02)

Doesn't this NYU medical student who described hearing an explosion at the WTC 7, then seeing a shockwave ripple through the building, then saw its windows busting out, then sees the bottom floor cave out before the rest of the building fell sound like they just witnessed a building being demolished with explosives?

Reporter: "I'm here with an emergency worker. He's a first year NYU medical student. He was down there; he was trying to help people. His name is Darryl."
Darryl: "Yeah I was just standing there, ya know... We were watching the building [WTC 7] actually 'cuz it was on fire... the bottom floors of the building were on fire and... we heard this sound that sounded like a clap of thunder... turned around - we were shocked to see that the building was, ah well it looked like there was a shockwave ripping through the building and the windows all busted out... it was horrifying... about a second later the bottom floor caved out and the building followed after that... we saw the building crash down all the way to the ground... we were in shock." -1010 WINS NYC (09/11/01) [@ 1:22 into the video]

What does demolition experts Controlled Demolitions, Inc. (CDI) think the phrase "pull it" means in demolition terms?

Female receptionist: Good afternoon, Loizeaux Company.
Jeff: Um, sorry, do I -- is this Controlled Demolitions?
CDI: Yes it is.
Jeff: Ok, I was wondering if there was someone I could talk to briefly -- just ask a question I had?
CDI: Well what kind of question?
Jeff: Well I just wanted to know what a term meant in demolition terms.
CDI: Ok, what type of term?
Jeff: Well, if you were in the demolition business and you said the, the term "pull it," I was wondering what exactly that would mean?
CDI: "Pull it"?
Jeff: Yeah.
CDI: Hmm? Hold on a minute.
Jeff: Thank you.
CDI: Sir?
Jeff: Yes?
CDI: "Pull it" is when they actually pull it down.
Jeff: Oh, well thank you very much for your time.
CDI: Ok.
Jeff: Bye.
CDI: Bye.

(See also:   CDI: 'Pull It' Means 'Pull It Down')

Notice how a lot of other references where the word "pull" is being used to describe the demolishing of buildings and how even FEMA uses the word "pull" to describe how the WTC 7 collapsed:

► "The collapse of WTC 7 was different from that of WTC 1 and WTC 2, which showered debris in a wide radius as their frames essentially "peeled" outward. The collapse of WTC 7 had a small debris field as the facade was pulled downward, suggesting an internal failure and implosion." -FEMA: WTC Study, Chp 5 (05/02)

► "The preparation of the structure for implosion could have been approached a number of ways...it was decided that CDI [Controlled Demolition, Inc.] could effectively minimize the amount of linear shaped charge explosives to be used in the structure. By torch-cutting splice plates on selected upper columns/floors, and utilizing approximately 3,000 feet of steel-core cable on alternate upper floors to help “pull” the northern and eastern walls away from the fiber optics cables..." -Controlled Demolition, Inc. (01/23/05)

"Phase 1 continued to fall, helping to pull Phase 2 in. Phase 2 was detonated several seconds later and collapsed and fell the same as Phase 1." -Controlled Demolition, Inc. (01/23/05)

► Perfect demolition leaves Dome a fallen souffle  

"In a flurry of flashes and booms, the Kingdome... rumbled to the ground Sunday in 16.8 spectacular seconds.
More than 4,450 pounds of dynamite, unleashed over a span of tiny delays, blitzed one of the world's largest concrete domes -- one day shy of its 24th birthday.
"The roof did its job, the gravity engine worked. It provided the energy we needed to pull the columns inward," said Mark Loizeaux, president of Controlled Demolition Inc., the Maryland-based company whose handiwork brought down the Dome.
"The demolition went perfectly," said Tom Gerlach of Turner Construction Co., which is building a new football and soccer stadium on the site. "The relief is palpable." -Seattle Post-Intelligencer (03/27/02)

► "Stacey Loizeaux, who calls herself "The Demolition Woman," grew up in a family whose grandfather, Jack, pioneered the art of implosion, the controlled demolition of structures ranging from bridges to blast furnaces, from radio towers to buildings. In 1957, Jack Loizeaux, now 81 and retired, was the first person in the U.S. To "implode" buildings in dense urban settings. J. Mark and Douglas K. Loizeaux, who co-authored an article, "Demolition by Implosion," in the October 1995 issue of Scientific American, describe the process of preparing a building for its five-second takedown as a process of carefully removing all non-essential (non load-bearing) materials, scanning blueprints, taking samples of concrete to determine its actual strength (or weakness!) -- and even, in some cases, re-building parts of the structure in order to properly pull it down." -University of Pittsburgh

► "With few exceptions, explosive demolition in the early 1960s was concentrated in the industrial sector, and blasters worked primarily within a few-hundred mile radius of their respective offices. Many expanded their resumes' with power plants, warehouses, factories, coal tipples and blast furnaces, and with each new project they gained valuable experience. Gradually they began to develop techniques to increase the efficiency of explosive charges, such as pre-cutting steel beams and attaching cables to certain columns to "pull" a structure in a given direction. -ImplosionWorld.com

► "In the demolition industry, a blaster is usually trying to pull a structure away from adjacent exposures and towards an area large enough to contain the debris." -ImplosionWorld.com

► "The University of Louisiana at Monroe, Anderson Excavation, and Controlled Demolition, Inc. (CDI ­ Implosion Subcontractor) of Phoenix, Maryland announced today that Olin Hall on the ULM Campus will be imploded on Saturday September 25 at 10 a.m.
Implosion is a process where a small amount of explosives is used to disrupt selected supports in a building. This allows gravity to pull the structure down in a controlled manner. CDI has used this implosion method thousands of times around the world during the past 52 years to remove unwanted structures. CDI's safety record is unparalleled." -University of Louisiana at Monroe (09/20/04)

► "Jack [Loizeaux] brought a basic knowledge of construction, engineering, and physics to his new science of implosion. More important, though, he brought the fascination and conviction of a true believer. Long before anyone else, he had faith in the power of explosives to help gravity do what it wants to do anyway: pull things down." -University of Georgia

► "On Sunday, June 10, 2001, the City of Des Moines subcontracted the implosion of the Younkers Warehouse Building to Controlled Demolition Incorporated (CDI) from Des Moines and Metro Wrecking and Excavating, Inc. from Phoenix, Maryland.  CDI drilled over 500 holes in the supporting columns in the building and placed approximately 250 pounds of explosives.  The explosives were detonated with a delay pattern that started in the southeast corner of the building and proceeded toward the northwest corner in a matter of seconds. This delay sequence allowed the explosive charges to detonate fractions of seconds apart; reducing the noise and vibrations to approximately 25 percent of the allowable levels before damage would occur to surrounding buildings. This delay allowed CDI to control the direction that the building would fall and resulted in the illusion that the building melted. CDI planned the implosion to pull the building to the southeast and away from the intersection of SW 9th and Mulberry Streets. The implosion was very successful. -Front Line/Des Moines, IA

► How does an implosion work?
"Not all demolition blast(s) are implosions. The industry often refers to them as implosions because it is a popular expression. A true implosion is a case when a structure has been caused to fall inwards on itself. Smokestacks, towers, bridges and most buildings are not imploded. They are simply knocked over.
Implosion is used when there is limited area on all sides of a structure making it impossible to lay them out.
The principles used on an implosion are basically the same whether it is a true implosion, or if the structure is simply going to be laid out. The principle tool in an implosion is gravity. The explosives are used to weaken and cause the supporting members of the structure to fail, thus allowing gravity to pull the structure down or over." -Dykon Blasting Corp.

► "Stacey Loizeaux, twenty-six years old, has worked for Controlled Demolition, an international explosives engineering firm, since the age of fifteen. She learned the fine art of demolition from her father, Mark Loizeaux, and her uncle, Doug Loizeaux—president and vice-president of the company.
NOVA: A common misconception is that you blow buildings up. That's not really the case, is it?
Stacy Loizeaux: No. The term "implosion" was coined by my grandmother back in, I guess, the '60s. It's a more descriptive way to explain what we do than "explosion." There are a series of small explosions, but the building itself isn't erupting outward. It's actually being pulled in on top of itself. What we're really doing is removing specific support columns within the structure and then cajoling the building in one direction or another, or straight down.
NOVA: I understand that you try to use the smallest amount of explosives possible...Can you explain why?
SL: Well, the explosives are really just the catalyst. Largely what we use is gravity. And we're dealing with Class A explosives that are embedded into concrete—and that concrete flies. So, let's say your explosive is 17,000 feet per second—you've got a piece of concrete moving at that speed when you remove it from the structure.
NOVA: Can you describe the prep work that goes into dropping a building.
SL: Well, it depends on the structure, obviously. We've had chimneys prepared in half a day and we've had buildings that take three months. Generally we don't do the preparation work. We are usually an implosion subcontractor, meaning that there is a main demolition contractor on site, who's been contracted by the property owner or the developer, and they then subcontract the implosion to us.
NOVA: Why do the explosive charges go off at intervals rather than all at once?
SL: Well, if I kick both your legs out from under you, you're going to fall right on your butt. If I kick one leg out from under you, you'll fall left or right. So the way we control the failure of the building is by using the delays. And, again, that varies structure to structure and depending on where we want the building to go. A lot of people, when they see a building implosion, expect it to go into its own basement, which is not always what the contractor wants. Sometimes the contractor wants to lay the building out like a tree. And, sometime, we need to bring down buildings that are actually touching other buildings.
NOVA: How do you do that?
SL: Well, you just pull it away, you peel it off. If you have room in the opposite direction, you just let the building sort of melt down in that direction and it will pull itself completely away from the building. It can be done.
NOVA: What do you look for in an explosive?
SL: Velocity. You have two different types of explosives. You have low order and high order. A low order explosive is like what they used when they bombed the Oklahoma City building—that's ANFO, ammonium nitrate and fuel oil. It's a very slow, heaving explosion. It tends to push more than it does shatter. The explosive we look for is a shattering explosive. What we want to do is instantaneously remove the integrity of the columns or whatever we're working on. That's what we look for in nitroglycerin or NG-based dynamite. With a steel building, we use something called a linear shaped charge. It's the same explosive they use to sever the fuel tank off the Space Shuttle, when they launch.
NOVA: I understand that Controlled Demolition was hired to bring down the remains of the Oklahoma City Federal Building. Were you out there for that?
SL: My father and my uncle went out.
NOVA: Do you get a thrill watching a building fall?
SL: Oh sure. I mean you really don't ever lose it. Your perspective changes. When I first started traveling with my Dad at fifteen, sixteen years old, I used to be awestruck. But you sort of go from that awestruck feeling to where you understand how the structure is coming down and you're watching for certain things—counting the delays or waiting for a part of the building to kick out or waiting for it to pull forward. So it does change, but it's always a rush." -NOVA/PBS (1997)

► Demolition of Dangerous Building

"City staff have contacted the property owner by phone to request that he obtain a demolition permit and pull down and demolish the building, however, the owner has demonstrated no desire to cooperate.

2. THAT the owners are hereby ordered to pull down the building and remove the resulting debris and the discarded materials from the site
within 14 days of the date from a copy of this Resolution being served pursuant to Section 324A of the Vancouver Charter.

3. THAT in the event that the owners do not comply with the order set forth in the preceding paragraph, the City Building Inspector is hereby ordered and authorized to pull down the building and remove the resulting debris and discarded material from the site at the cost of the owners and dispose of it by selling to the demolition contractor any material he may agree to purchase, and delivering the rest to a disposal site." - Vancouver City Council (01/09/96)

Was it just a coincidence that Larry Silverstein, who had already owned WTC 7, signed a 99-year lease for the rest of the six WTC buildings just six weeks before the attacks?

► "Larry A. Silverstein serves as President and CEO of Silverstein Properties, Inc. and is a member of the New York Bar. He is a Governor of the Real Estate Board of New York, having served as its Chairman. He is Vice Chairman of the Board of Trustees of New York University and is the Founder and Chairman Emeritus of the New York University Real Estate Institute. As a Professor of Real Estate, his "Silverstein Workshop" became one of the best attended and most informative educational programs in real estate development and investment analysis.
Mr. Silverstein is acknowledged for his philanthropic endeavors. He contributes his time and resources to the United Jewish Appeal/Federation of Jewish Philanthropies of New York, on whose board he served as chairman. Mr. Silverstein is currently Chairman of the Realty Foundation, trustee of New York University, trustee of the South Street Seaport Museum, and a trustee of the Museum of Jewish Heritage.
Mr. Silverstein, 71, is married with three children, two of whom [Lisa & Roger] are executives of Silverstein Properties. He is a classical music enthusiast, a passionate yachtsman and dedicated New Yorker." -Silverstein Properties Development

► "In an effort to move forward, developer Larry Silverstein, president of Silverstein Properties, has turned to Tishman Construction Corp. to rebuild 7 World Trade Center (WTC). The groundbreaking, Silverstein said in a statement, is expected to be earlier than September 11, 2002.
The new building, which is expected to take three years to build, will be a 2-million-sq.-ft., 47-story tower. The new tower will be erected at approximately the same location and with approximately the same dimensions as the original 7 WTC. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill has been selected to design the building.
Silverstein Properties owned 7 WTC outright. It was not part of the original six-building complex. While plans for 7 WTC move forward, the developer is still involved in a legal battle with the insurers of the others buildings he leased from the Port Authority of NY&NJ. The controversy is whether the destruction of the Twin Towers was a single event or two separate event. The final determination will result in the insurers paying out $3.6 billion or $7.2 billion. Another factor will be what can or will eventually be built on the Twin Towers site.
Silverstein Properties expects the reconstruction of 7 WTC to go more smoothly because it is not on hallowed ground. No one died in the destruction of the original 7 WTC structure, which was physically separated from the rest of the trade center, connected only by a plaza and a elevated walkway." -New York Construction News (01/14/02)

► "Silverstein Properties is a Manhattan-based real estate development and investment firm that owns, manages and has developed more than 20 million square feet of office, residential and retail space.
In 1987, an affiliate of Silverstein Properties built 7 World Trade Center, a 47-story Class A office tower that contained 2 million square feet of office space, across the street from the World Trade Center complex.
By the year 2000, 7 World Trade Center was 100% occupied by some of Manhattan's premiere companies, including Salomon Smith Barney, Hartford Fire Insurance, American Express and the United States Securities and Exchange Commission. The Mayor's Office of Emergency Management and the United States Secret Service also leased significant space in the building; Con Edison held a ground lease from the Port Authority for a substation that supplied power to a major part of Lower Manhattan and the Financial District.
In the summer of 2001, separate affiliates of Silverstein Properties signed a 99-year lease with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey of four buildings at the World Trade Center, including the Twin Towers." -Brodoff Communications

"Mr Frank Lowy is executive chairman and co-founder of the Westfield Group. He is a member of the board of the Reserve Bank of Australia and a director of Daily Mail and General Trust plc (UK) and chairman of the the Lowy Institute for International Policy and the Football Federation of Australia Limited. He is chairman of the Nomination Committee." -Westfield Group

Zionist Circles Benefit From WTC Collapse
Who benefited when the World Trade Center towers collapsed? Who controlled access prior to Sept. 11? These burning questions continue to be ignored by the mainstream media.
Larry Silverstein, lease-holder of the World Trade Center, and Lewis Eisenberg, the man who negotiated the lease, are key supporters of Israel who have both held high positions in the largest Israeli fundraising institution in the United States.
Silverstein and his Australian-Israeli partner, Frank Lowy, are the real estate developers who obtained 99-year leases on the rental and retail spaces of the World Trade Center shortly before the catastrophe of Sept. 11.
Although their leased property is destroyed, the lease-holders themselves stand to gain billions of dollars from insurance.
Eisenberg, the former chairman of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, personally arranged the privatization of the World Trade Center property and oversaw the negotiations that delivered the leases into the private hands of Silverstein and Lowy.
Eisenberg was recently appointed finance chairman of the Republican National Committee.
How did these well-known supporters of Israel come to control the property? What actually caused the buildings to collapse? There are two schools of thought.
There is the “official” theory that hijacked planes crashed into the towers and the subsequent fuel fires caused the twin towers to fall.
The second theory, however, argues that other devices, such as explosive charges, were used to collapse the towers in a kind of controlled demolition for which the planes provided a useful distraction.
There remain significant amounts of eyewitness testimony and evidence to support the theory that explosives contributed to the collapse of the twin towers and Seven World Trade Center, which fell for no apparent reason during the afternoon of Sept. 11.
Seven WTC was a 47-story building built by Silverstein on property leased from the Port Authority.
There are video recordings and photographs which appear to show explosions occurring at the base of the towers prior to and during the collapses.
In a remarkable three-dimensional image published in the German magazine GEO EPOCHE, which dedicated the December 2001 issue to 9-11, there are five or six large and deep craters to be seen beneath the rubble. At least four huge craters are seen where the twin towers stood and one is squarely at the center of Seven-WTC. Another photograph shows what appears to be a sand-colored blast originating at the base of one of the towers and growing into an immense cloud of dust.
If explosive charges were used to collapse the towers, the question of who had access to the buildings prior to 9-11 emerges. Silverstein controlled access to the towers from the end of July when he obtained the 99-year lease.
Who Silverstein is and how he obtained these leases for a fraction of their value are questions that have been completely avoided by the mainstream media.
Silverstein is the New York City commercial landlord who built Seven World Trade Center in 1987. Silverstein won, with Lowy’s Westfield America, a 99-year right-to-lease of the World Trade Center from Eisenberg, the former chairman of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey on July 26, 2001. While Silverstein controlled the 10.6 million-square-foot office space in the WTC complex, Westfield leased the 427,000 square-foot retail mall.
Silverstein and Eisenberg have both held leadership positions with the United Jewish Appeal (UJA), a billion dollar Zionist “charity” organization.
Silverstein is a former chairman of United Jewish Appeal Federation of Jewish Philanthropies of New York, Inc. This is an umbrella organization which raises hundreds of millions of dollars every year for its network of hundreds of member Zionist agencies in the United States and Israel.
Eisenberg, who was instrumental in obtaining the lease for Silverstein, sits on the Planning Board of UJA/ United Jewish Federation.
Eisenberg was the key person in negotiating the lease for Silverstein and Westfield, who were in fact the low bidders in the final bidding process on the 110-story towers.
While the high bid came from Vornado Realty Trust, its path was reportedly blocked by demands to pay back taxes. In March 2001 the company pulled out after failing to reach a purchase agreement with Eisenberg. When Vornado pulled out, the door was opened for Silverstein and Lowy. Lowy obtained the retail lease in April while it took Silverstein until the end of July to obtain funding for the down payment.
One lender, GMAC Commercial Mortgage Corp., accused Silverstein of misallocating insurance money paid out after the Sept. 11 attack. In a complaint filed on Jan. 14 in the State Supreme Court in Manhattan, the lender, GMAC Commercial Mortgage Corp., asserts that Silverstein used some insurance money to pay lobbyists in Albany and in Washington to try to limit his liability to the victims.
Eisenberg is a “New York moneyman” and a former Democrat who supports the liberal wing of the Republican Party. He has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to “pro-choice” Republican candidates. The newly appointed finance chairman for the Republican National Committee, Eisenberg has also served as a vice president of the strong arm of the Israeli lobby, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
When New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman appointed Eisenberg chairman of the Port Authority in February 1996, Forbes magazine said the formerly disgraced Goldman Sachs partner “got real lucky.”
“What a strange political appointment,” the magazine said, “considering the part he played in the sex scandal that rocked Goldman and the financial community in the late 1980s.”
Eisenberg quit Goldman Sachs after his secretary accused him of sexually harassing her.
“The truth ended up being that, yes, they had a brief affair, but, no, she was never harassed,” Forbes wrote, adding, “all charges were dismissed, though Eisenberg did resign.”
Silverstein is engaged in a lawsuit to double his insurance pay-off and may win as much as $7.1 billion from the insurance companies by arguing that the destruction of the towers was two insured events instead of one. The property was insured for $3.55 billion. Silverstein Properties Inc. had asked the judge to rule on the one-loss-or-two issue in a lawsuit against 20 of the 22 insurers on the property. District Judge John S. Martin Jr. rejected a motion for summary judgment in June.
A trial is scheduled Sept. 3, although a request for a delay by the insurers is under consideration.
While Silverstein Properties, a family-owned business, is “disappointed that the issue was not decided at this time, they are confident that they will prevail at trial,” said Howard Rubenstein, a spokesman for Silverstein." -American Free Press, By Christopher Bollyn

► United Jewish Appeal - Federation of New York
Mission:  Caring for those in need, rescuing those in harm's way, and renewing and strengthening the Jewish people in New York, in Israel, and around the world.
Our Leadership:  Past Chairs, Board of Directors, Larry A. Silverstein
FAQ:  1. What is the UJA-Federation Annual Campaign and where does my contribution go?
UJA-Federation raises funds to support an array of services provided by over 100 health, human service and educational agencies in the New York metropolitan area, as well as in Israel...
4. Is it possible to pay my pledge with stocks or bonds?
Yes. You can pay all or part of your pledge to UJA-Federation with stocks, mutual funds, or State of Israel bonds.

► Lewis M. Eisenberg
"For many years, Mr. Eisenberg was a partner of Goldman Sachs & Co. In 1990, he founded Granite Capital International Group, an investment management company headquartered in New York City. Mr. Eisenberg also served from 1995 to 2001 as Chairman of the Board of Commissioners of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. The Port Authority is also, of course, the owner of the World Trade Center, and Mr. Eisenberg led the agency through the first three months of recovery and clean-up after the terrorist attacks of September 11. He was recently named a member of New York’s Lower Manhattan Redevelopment Authority, which will spearhead the rebuilding of Ground Zero.
His community and charitable activities include leadership in health and healthcare related institutions. He is on the Planning Board of UJA/United Jewish Federation.
Mr. Eisenberg is a long-time Republican activist and was recently elected Finance Chairman of the Republican National Committee. He has raised millions of dollars for the Republican Party and Republican candidates. He served on New York Governor George Pataki’s transition team and was a key advisor to New Jersey Governor Christine Whitman." -Republican Jewish Coalition

► Zionism: "A Jewish movement that arose in the late 19th century in response to growing anti-Semitism and sought to reestablish a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Modern Zionism is concerned with the support and development of the state of Israel." -American Heritage Dictionary

Was it just a huge coincidence—and nothing short of a miracle—that the entire WTC complex of seven buildings which Mr. Silverstein just leased six months before the attacks was destroyed with only one non-WTC complex structure destroyed (a small four-story church) or was the destruction of the entire WTC complex simply one part of an elaborate scheme that included purposely destroying the money-losing complex to make a huge profit from the insurance money payouts?

► "The list of collapsed buildings (as confirmed by the New York Times through Saturday, 2001.0915) included all seven buildings of the World Trade center complex — including WTC 6, the U.S Customs House to the north; WTC 3, the 22 story Marriot World Trade Center hotel just west of Tower Two; and WTC 4 and 5, the Plaza Buildings to the east (although satellite images suggest much of WTC 5, the north Plaza Building, was still standing). Other nearby buildings were significantly damaged, including the St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church, and One Liberty Plaza, a 54 floor, 743' tall building across Church Street to the east." -GreatBuildings.com

► "It was a boondoggle. When I hear people refer to it as a "symbol of capitalism," I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. It was not built by a private developer, but by government, in the form of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, our local bi-state agency that’s supposed to manage local transportation facilities...It wasn’t even effective; development in Lower Manhattan has continued to lag, despite huge subsidies. WTC was a monument to big government, corporatism, incompetence, and megalomania. It lost money. Because it was built in blissful disregard of the collapsing office market in Lower Manhattan, they couldn’t rent all of it when it opened. More than a million square feet of space just sat there, empty. The complex would have gone bankrupt if strings hadn’t been pulled to move state agencies into it. Under reasonable accounting assumptions and leaving out government subsidies of one kind or another, (such as the entire thing’s exemption from local taxes due to its being owned by a government agency) it was a financial disaster, partly because its cost overran estimates by more than 100%." -Front Page Magazine (06/11/02)

► "Larry Silverstein and Frank Lowy—the chairman of Westfield, a huge shopping-mall company that leased the Trade Center's retail space—believe that their leases give them the right to rebuild, and the Port Authority has said it intends to honor them. Silverstein and Westfield are the beneficiaries of insurance policies on the twin towers that could pay them between three and a half and seven billion dollars for their loss. If they get the larger amount—the matter is in litigation—they will have so much money that they could pay for new skyscrapers all by themselves, without borrowing a cent, although the L.M.D.C. and the Port Authority would retain control over the designs." -New Yorker (12/30/02)

If Mr. Silverstein was part of scheme to rid the WTC complex and collect the insurance money to rebuild it, there would have to be a motive for him to do it.  Was his motives to destroy the WTC because the twin towers were always money losers, they were hated by many New Yorkers and building critics, it would have been too costly to remove the asbestos in the towers so they could demolish it and start over, and by destroying them, the government would pay for it's cleanup?

► "The director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) announced today that the agency is releasing an additional $57 million to assist New York City in debris removal at the World Trade Center site. This brings the total amount to date FEMA has provided for public assistance to more than $339 million.
FEMA public assistance funds are being used to help the city repair damaged infrastructure, restore critical services, cover costs associated with immediate response activities, and the removal, transport and sorting of debris. FEMA and the state of New York work together to deliver Public Assistance funds. FEMA provides public assistance grants directly to the state. The state, in turn, reimburses eligible applicants, such as the City of New York." -FEMA (11/09/01)

► "Though this may be hard for some to believe, especially in these sentimental times, the so-called Twin Towers at the World Trade Center were hated by many New Yorkers, who before September 11, 2001 would have been happy if the goddamned things had never been built and after September 11th are glad that they're gone.
Built for an enormous amount of money between 1966 and 1970 by the Port Authority of the State of New York...the Twin Towers were always money-losers as rental properties and required huge subsidies (tens of millions of dollars a year) from the State of New York to remain solvent. Because all of the windows in both towers were sealed up tight...the WTC complex was ludicrously costly to heat and light. Furthermore, visiting business men and women weren't satisfied to remain within the WTC's purportedly self-sufficient universe, and wished to venture (and shop and do business) outside of it. In the 1980s, advances in information and telecommunication technologies decentralized the financial markets, which in turn "rolled back" the necessity for foreign institutions to be in close physical proximity to each other, Wall Street and the rest of lower Manhattan, which is precisely what the gigantic size and centralized location of the Twin Towers were intended to provide.
In New York City, obsolete buildings are infrequently saved, whatever their historical or architectural interest. Most often, they are simply torn down and replaced. The only thing that saved the Twin Towers from demolition was the fact that they were filled with asbestos, which would be released into the air if the buildings were destroyed by controlled explosions. In 2000, the Port Authority calculated that it would cost $1 billion -- i.e., much more money than the Port Authority could afford to spend -- to remove the asbestos before the buildings were destroyed. And so the Port Authority was stuck with the Twin Towers, that is, until 26 April 2001, when it found a consortium of business interests (Westfield America, led by Larry Silverstein, the owner of the building at 7 World Trade Center) that was willing to lease the property. Supposed to last for 99 years, the $3.2 billion lease mandated that the Port Authority continue to pay taxes on the property. "This is a dream come true," Silverstein said at the 23 July 2001 celebration of the lease's signing. "We will be in control of a prized asset, and we will seek to develop its potential, raising it to new heights."
And so, quite paradoxically, the mass-murdering hijackers who destroyed the Twin Towers by flying fully fueled passenger airplanes into them did Westfield America an immense favor. Even though Westfield America would obviously have preferred that both the planes and the buildings were unoccupied (save for the hijackers themselves) at the time that the former were used to destroy the latter, the terrorists got rid of the towers quickly, efficiently -- the towers fell down instead of over -- and in such a way that Westfield America didn't have to pay for any of it, including the asbestos, which was "removed" from the site by the wind, the rain and the search-and-rescue teams employed by the City of New York in the months after the buildings exploded, collapsed and gave off thick clouds of toxic dust.
There has been a lot of speculation about the facts that both towers collapsed and were utterly destroyed by the airplanes. Most of these "conspiracy theories" are weakened or completely undermined by the ignorance of their authors.
If there is any "conspiracy" here, it concerns the fact that then-NYC-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani ordered the speedy removal and burial in a landfill of all of the structural steel members found at the site. Giuliani's motivation for this highly unusual and very suspicious action was simply to prevent fire investigators from proving that the collapse of 7 World Trade Center -- which wasn't struck by one of the planes -- was in fact caused by the explosion of the fuel tank that Giuliani ordered installed in the building so that his prized "Emergency Command Center" on the 23rd floor could function, even in the event of a "disaster" that might cause the building's electricity to be cut off." -New York Psychogeographical Association/Not Bored (11/30/01)

► "DEAR ANN COULTER:
...in your article supporting the rebuilding of the World Trade Center as it was before, you overlook a dirty little secret about the towers that we New Yorkers, mindful of the world’s sympathies, have managed to keep: Almost everyone hated them.
I realize that the WTC has become a symbol of everything good about America that those bastards were out to destroy. But lest anyone be puzzled about why we almost certainly aren’t going to rebuild the WTC the way it was, let’s recall the reasons why on September 10, 2001, no one would have been terribly upset if it had been peacefully replaced by something else:
It was ugly. It may have made a great exclamation point on the skyline for tourists to look at, particularly after the neighboring World Financial Center was designed specifically to make it fit in better with the rest of Lower Manhattan, but approaching it on foot from the street, it was ugly. Most people don’t realize that those two towers were surrounded by a cluster of ugly brown metal buildings less than ten stories high. These were what you saw close-up on ground level. The towers themselves weren’t particularly attractive from the ground, just vertiginous and a little intimidating. They had banal and unimpressive entrances. And the effect on the skyline is debatable: when WTC went up, its square bulk overshadowed the marvelous old ornamented and needle-tipped towers that you can see in old photographs, like 40 Wall Street, the Cities Service building, and the National City building. And it wasn’t much better on the inside: it had narrow recessed windows you couldn’t see out of, resulting in mediocre views. Its lobbies and public spaces were decorated in a kind of high-‘70s pseudo-glamorous kitsch, with white marble, giant chandeliers, and chrome plating everywhere. It was a boondoggle. When I hear people refer to it as a "symbol of capitalism," I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. It was not built by a private developer, but by government, in the form of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, our local bi-state agency that’s supposed to manage local transportation facilities. Of course, in the ‘60s, when this thing was conceived, they had gotten bored of doing such things and had branched into real-estate development while letting the transportation facilities crumble. It was built as a result of a corrupt deal between liberal Republican governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York and the state of New Jersey, in exchange for the Port Authority’s taking over the money-losing Hudson & Manhattan Railroad. Its other purpose, no better, was to prop up real estate values in Lower Manhattan, an act of absolutely no benefit to the public and geared solely to enriching local property owners at taxpayers’ expense. It wasn’t even effective; development in Lower Manhattan has continued to lag, despite huge subsidies. WTC was a monument to big government, corporatism, incompetence, and megalomania. It lost money. Because it was built in blissful disregard of the collapsing office market in Lower Manhattan, they couldn’t rent all of it when it opened. More than a million square feet of space just sat there, empty. The complex would have gone bankrupt if strings hadn’t been pulled to move state agencies into it. Under reasonable accounting assumptions and leaving out government subsidies of one kind or another, (such as the entire thing’s exemption from local taxes due to its being owned by a government agency) it was a financial disaster, partly because its cost overran estimates by more than 100%. And it never had more than 5% of its tenants in "world trade" related businesses, its intended market. It wrecked the street grid of Lower Manhattan. WTC replaced all that with a vast superblock like something from Brasilia, which disrupted traffic flow and made New York’s notorious traffic jams even worse.
It was shabbily constructed. The inadequate fireproofing that has been reported is just the tip of the iceberg. It is no accident that tower #7, which was actually further from the impact, collapsed, while the older New York Telephone building next door did not. It didn’t have enough fire stairs. The elevator shafts were enclosed in no more than sheetrock in many places, helping the fire to spread. It was a pain to do business in, because it took twice as long to get in and out of as any other skyscraper in New York. Due to that huge plaza, you couldn’t take a cab up to the door, but had to slog through rain, snow, or sweltering heat just to get to the front door. Then you had to take not one but two elevators to get wherever you were going: a bizarre combination of a "local" and an "express" elevator that I’ve never seen in any other building. It was so tall your eardrums hurt if you didn’t continually swallow on the way up. At street level, it was surrounded by a huge concrete plaza that was alternately sweltering (as it was completely unshaded by so much as a sapling) in summer and windswept (due to the vortex effect of the towers) in winter. The rest of the time, it was an open-air zoo of homeless people. The American Institute of Architects Guide to New York City rightly records that the shopping mall underneath it "drains the plaza of any meaningful activity." This mall, which brought the sophistication of Paramus, NJ to the world’s greatest city, killed the retail life of the streets of Lower Manhattan by siphoning off purchasing power. Pigeons got more out of it than people did. To build it, they had to demolish the old Electronics District of New York, destroying thousands of jobs and a good number of homes. It diverted billions in public investment from New York’s real infrastructure needs like the subways and the airports. It failed to provide easy connections between the different subway lines that ran beneath it. It was energy-inefficient. Its windows were untinted glass, leading to huge solar heat gain. It was built with inefficient pre-oil shock technology throughout.
It is no accident that when WTC was in effect expanded by the construction of the World Financial Center next door in the ‘80s, just about every design principle was reversed:
Sick irony or no, al Qaeda has given New York a chance to correct one of its great urban-planning mistakes. If they had blown up our wretched Penn Station, we would not be demanding that it be rebuilt as it was. It would be a pity to waste this opportunity rebuilding something that we know, in our heart of hearts, was a mistake top begin with.
Note: Here’s what New York’s premier architectural critic at the time, Ada Louise Huxtable, had to say about the World Trade Center when it opened:
"The towers are pure technology, the lobbies are pure schmaltz, and the impact on New York... is pure speculation. In spite of their size, the towers emphasize an almost miniature module... The module is so small, and the 22-inch wide windows so narrow, that one of the miraculous benefits of the tall building, the panoramic view out, is destroyed... These are big buildings but they are not great architecture. The grill-like metal facade stripes are curiously without scale... The Port Authority has built the ultimate Disneyland fairytale blockbuster. It is General Motors Gothic." (excerpted from Stern, Mellins & Fishman, New York 1960.)" - Front Page Magazine (06/11/02)

► "The World Trade Center represented the essence of American financial power, but critics hated the towers and the public never embraced them.
The towers were acknowledged as a wonder of modern engineering, yet were riddled with quirks, like the way pencils rolled off desktops on the top floors when the wind began to gust. Real estate developers in the '60s and '70s derided the World Trade Center as government-sponsored folly. Yet this past summer the twin towers morphed into the most valuable piece of privately run real estate in New York.
And while the twin towers were embraced worldwide as the symbol of New York's grandeur and prowess, locals, not to mention merciless critics, were cool to the sprawling complex, if not outright contemptuous of the "dreary" creation.
"Even though New Yorkers didn't necessarily love the buildings, they will be remembered with such pain," says Carol Willis, founding director of New York's Skyscraper Museum."
In the 1950s David Rockefeller, co-chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank, had recently opened up headquarters downtown and wanted to stimulate the surrounding real estate market. Concerned that most businesses flocked to midtown, and even financial professionals deserted downtown after work, Rockefeller envisioned a world-class complex that would be the center of international trade.
With his brother Nelson serving as New York's governor, Rockefeller lined up support from the bi-state, New York/New Jersey Port Authority agency. A wealthy, quasi-public commission (voting members are appointed by each state's governor), the Port Authority was created at the turn of last century and given "full power and authority to purchase, construct, lease and operate terminal, transportation and other facilities of commerce."
For the most part, that meant operating Hudson River crossings as well as Newark's airport. But at the urging of the Rockefeller brothers, the Port Authority agreed to build the World Trade Center. In the 1970s, critics suggested the towers No. 1 and No. 2 be called by their true names, David and Nelson.
Midtown's real estate developers adamantly opposed the project, afraid the new complex would glut the market with too much new office space and open the floodgates to a downtown migration.
Displaced local businesses located along a now-forgotten downtown section of the city known as Radio Row also protested. But the Port Authority enjoyed the power of eminent domain, giving it free rein to raze buildings for construction. (This was at a time when neighborhood objections to construction were routinely ignored by government-sponsored developers.)
When the towers were officially opened in 1972, New York Gov. Rockefeller again came to the towers' aid, solving a widespread vacancy problem by housing tens of thousands of state employees in the buildings. The state paid just $10 per square foot in rent. When vacancies began to shrink in the mid '80s and new tenants were paying office rents in the $30-$40 range, New York state opted to move its employees out, conveniently freeing up valuable space for the Port Authority to lease.
Although the twin towers were never seen as one of the city's most prestigious business addresses, by the '90s early shipping and merchant marine tenants from the '70s had been largely replaced by multinational banks and investment brokers such as Morgan Stanley Dean Witter. At the time of the attack the towers' occupancy rate was a robust 98 percent. Few if any of its remaining tenants had any real connection to port trade.
How best to remember the World Trade Center? The irony is that over the years many critics wished the towers were never there to begin with. Writing for the New York Times, architectural commentator Paul Goldberger often referred to the twin towers as "banal," and once suggested the World Trade Center represented "New York's most disliked building."
Hardy instead opts for "arrogant." Arrogant in the way the bullying, flat-top towers "gave no recognition to the skyline" around them; "arrogant in their placement." Hardy suggests it wasn't until the nearby Cesar Pelli-designed World Financial Center office complex was constructed in 1985 that the lower Manhattan skyline again began to jell.
The World Trade Center's off-putting, five-acre concrete plaza, created to set the towers off as two jewels, also never made much sense. "The plaza has always been alienating," says skyscraper historian Willis. "It's so vast, so out of scale with human beings. They would try to populate it during the lunchtime hour with outdoor dance performers and set up a stage. But inevitably the stage would look like a toy. Plus, there was always heavy wind swirling around. It was not an oasis, but more like a tundra. It was not the type of place that drew people to it."
And then there were the unusually narrow office windows that robbed tower inhabitants of what should have been an indisputable perk: the view. Yamasaki was afraid of heights and decided in order to make everyone feel secure while they worked in the offices, the windows, set between columns, would be just 18 inches across, narrower than Yamasaki's own shoulder span.
The problem with Yamasaki's window design, says Willis, is the towers offered "no sense of the spectacular panorama" for the workers inside, which is why she, like many professionals, declares the towers' interior "a failure, aesthetically."  The irony is that one of the tower's selling points was its unique floor construction of prefabricated trussed steel, only 33 inches in depth. That allowed everyone a chance to look out the windows because the massive office space was uninterrupted by columns, a modernist ideal of the day.
In the end, the views, due to poor design, were a bust.
Not only were the towers obscenely tall, but massively wide as well. The towers' floors were 40,000 square feet, offering up an acre of space per floor; 220 acres between the twin towers.
Together, they boasted 10 million square feet in office space. That's larger than the Pentagon and more space than some entire American downtown business districts, such as St. Louis, Miami and San Diego.
Record-breaking skyscrapers built today, many of them in Southeast Asia, are taller than the twin towers, but much narrower and nowhere near as massive all the way around.
"The professional critics of architecture were never really brought around. They say the towers were boring and unadorned," says Gillespie, who can't point to a single prominent critic or architect who over the years came forward to defend the twin towers.
The World Trade Center reached its financial summit this summer when the Port Authority privatized the complex, selling a 99-year lease to local developer Larry Silverstein for $3.2 billion, the most expensive real estate deal of its kind.
Preparing to take over the lease this summer, Silverstein, suddenly New York's largest commercial landlord, told the New York Times, "I've been looking at the Trade Center for years, thinking what a great piece of real estate, what a thrill it would be to own it. There's nothing like it in the world." - Salon (09/17/01)

► "The twin towers were not beautiful, or poetic. They had not the art deco grace of Manhattan's Empire State Building nor the Chrysler Building. The towers were sheer power expressed in steel, concrete, aluminum and glass, bearing in their staggering ascension a certain arrogance, too.
These towers -- part of a seven-building complex -- were two gigantic boxes, forcing themselves upon the quirky rhythms of the Manhattan skyline.
When the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey leased the towers in the spring to a Paramus, N.J., real estate firm for $3.25 billion, the biggest such deal ever, the New York Times ran a piece headlined: "Learning to Love the World Trade Center."
It had never been easy.
From the beginning, the towers were considered an unfortunate example of urban renewal, an unsightly answer to the question of how to improve conditions in a shabby section of lower Manhattan. Sixteen acres of neighborhood were sacrificed to the project. According to the Times, the towers disrupted flight patterns of birds, which crashed into the towers by the dozens and fell dead to the pavement." -Baltimore Sun (09/12/01) [Archive]

Was it just a coincidence that Silverstein Properties executives were going to have a meeting inside the 88th floor of one of the towers the night before the attacks to discuss the risk of terrorism to the twin towers, but then cancelled it?

► "Less than three months after Silverstein bought the 99-year lease for $3.2 billion, terrorists crashed two hijacked airliners into the twin towers. The 10-million square-foot complex and his 2-million-square-foot building to the north burned and collapsed. The July transaction was the biggest real estate deal ever involving a single property.

The New York Times reported, without citing sources, that Silverstein Properties executives canceled a meeting Monday night to discuss the risk of terrorism to the towers, because one person was unavailable. The meeting was to have taken place on the 88th floor of one of the towers." -Bloomberg (09/12/01)

Was it luck that Mr. Silverstein and two of his children, who all work on the 88th floor of the north tower, were not at work on 9/11?

► "On the morning of September 11, 2001, Silverstein was in his Park Avenue apartment, squabbling with his wife, Klara, about how he had to get to work on the 88th floor of the north tower, where he was moving his company’s offices.
Klara gave him an icy stare. Silverstein had a dermatologist’s appointment—after a lifetime of boating, he has a history of facial carcinomas—and there was no way he was missing the appointment." -New York Metro (04/18/05)

► Mike Sees City Taking Control At Ground Zero

"After a last-minute breakdown in the front-running bid, Mr. Silverstein’s team won by a hair. His son, Roger, and his daughter, Lisa, were working for him in temporary offices on the 88th floor of the W.T.C. north tower