What would happen to us

“ . . . we gaze at it in wonder, a kind of wonder which in itself is a form of dawning horror, for somehow we know by instinct that outsize buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction before them, and are designed from the first with an eye to their later existence as ruins.”

W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz (2001), p. 19

I once heard gravity in spacetime described in this way: spacetime is like a blanket held at all four corners and planets or stars or black holes are like balls sitting on the blanket. The more massive the object, the more gravity it has and the bigger the indentation, which means other objects roll towards it. I think of certain places as having this same gravitational pull, although they bend history instead of spacetime.

I was 22 on September 11, 2001. Because I was 22, I slept late and missed the entirety of the attack on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the crash of Flight 93. It was the first major geopolitical event of my adulthood, but I don’t remember feeling much about it in the immediate aftermath. All I remember is going to my job at a grocery store that afternoon and trying to figure out the correct way to behave in the face of customer after customer asking me how I was doing. It seemed far away and abstract, so I was doing fine, but it didn’t seem prudent to tell anyone that.

Many years later, I found the book 102 Minutes by Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn at my parents’ house and decided to read it because I knew shamefully little about 9/11. The book opened up a chasm in my brain and fuelled literal nightmares for years afterwards. I wouldn’t say I became obsessed with 9/11 as an event (United 93, the Pentagon attack, Osama bin Laden, and al Qaeda all seemed too neat and tidy, with villains and heroes and clear narrative arcs) but I did become obsessed with the history of the doomed World Trade Center and its architect Minoru Yamasaki, the equally doomed “jumpers,” and the very well-documented collapse of these landmark buildings.

As I learned about the history of the twin towers, and what had been there before they were built, I began forming a theory I clumsily called “pre-haunting,” which meant that although we think of hauntings as being causal and linear (bad thing happens which causes the place to be haunted) perhaps they’re neither. Perhaps a bad thing happening ripples both forward and backward in time which would explain why sometimes houses are haunted when nothing bad has happened (yet). I’ve certainly been in new houses that just feel fucked, but there’s nothing to attribute it to unless we want to guess that the house is built on an Indian Burial Ground™, but are we really going to let Jay Anson tell us why places are haunted?

Despite his success, architect Minoru Yamasaki certainly seemed to be born under a bad sign and perhaps his luck (or lack thereof) infected the World Trade Center. Yamasaki was born in Seattle in 1912 and attended the University of Washington, sidestepping the landslide of racism and barriers that always threatened to bury him. He became enamored with the modernist architectural movement although he was never fully accepted by the leaders of it. Instead of the clean lines and stark facades that were the hallmarks of modern designs, Yamasaki added whimsical details and ornamentation to his buildings. His work was seen as feminine and therefore weak.

In 1950 he was asked to design the gigantic Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis. It consisted of 33 stark 11-story buildings on a 33-acre plot of land. Because these would be homes for poor people, and eventually only poor Black people, the project was underfunded, so many of his design elements were eliminated and the construction was of poor quality. But Yamasaki’s optimism about human nature also caused him to design problematic features in the buildings, like elevators which only stopped every three floors, which he said would encourage a sense of community between the residents. Instead, it created situations where people were robbed and attacked in the stairwells. Pruitt-Igoe was deemed a failure and was demolished on national television in 1972 and most of the site remains vacant today. While the failure of this project was certainly not entirely, or even mostly, Yamasaki’s fault, he must have been devastated by the outcome. For much of his adult life he had chaotic relationships, was a heavy drinker, and suffered from ulcers.

In the early ‘60’s, at the height of his fame, Yamasaki was tapped by the Port Authority of New York to design the new World Trade Center complex, which needed to include ten million square feet of office space. He came up with many potential designs, eventually settling on twin towers that were planned to be 80 stories each. To meet the space requirements of the Port Authority, the towers were increased in size to 110 stories, making them briefly the tallest buildings in the world when they were completed in 1972 (North Tower, Tower 1) and 1973 (South Tower, Tower 2). They took less than three years to complete and 60 people died during the construction process (New York’s most lethal construction project, according to OSHA).

The neighborhood where the twin towers would later be built was called “Radio Row” and was the part of town where you could pick up radios (duh) and radio parts. It was described as “old  buildings . . . few of them taller than five or six stories, with a lot of discount radio and TV shops and clothes retailers and delis and luncheonettes and liquor stores and florists occupying street-level storefronts, many of the upper floors being used as storage space for inventory. Those structures filled the streets around the H&M terminal, and a few long city blocks to the west were the busy but aging ferry docks, the old wharves, the passenger piers among rutted streets and tumbledown warehouses on the Hudson River shoreline. Just to the north were the mostly abandoned remnants of the ancient Washington Produce Market.” (Glanz, p. 119-120)

The construction of the World Trade Center uncovered a treasure trove in the land underneath: “Beneath panel G44 [the “bathtub” that kept the Hudson River from flooding the foundation was made of panels] the workers discovered an immense underground cave, next to a valley a hundred feet deep that had been carved out by a glacial stream eons ago.  They had to pummel through the cave and hack their trench all the way to the bottom of the valley, and still they were never quite sure what the wall was resting on.” (Glanz 346-347) And: “The dig went down, down. Old artifacts began turning up in droves, as if time in Lower Manhattan were making one last, frenzied plunge backward before giving way to the inevitability of the aluminum-faced towers. Workers dug up cannonballs, animal carcasses, a goat’s horn, clay pipes, oyster shells, the muzzle of a cannon, a Portuguese fishing gaff, a century-old bedroom slipper, ancient bottles, and a time capsule from the cornerstone of the Washington Market containing some old newspapers . . . and the cards of some of the produce sellers at the market. And then they began to strike bedrock.” (Glanz, p. 354)

The Twin Towers were built very differently than older skyscrapers like the Empire State Building, with the bulk of the weight of the building supported by thin interior columns and the external walls. The stairwells were grouped in the middle and this left much of the floors open for rentable space. The windows were extremely narrow, which has been attributed to Yamasaki’s fear of heights. He apparently thought that the windows, not much wider than the average human body, would make people feel safer so high up in the air. 

When the buildings were completed, the response from the architectural community, and the general public, was mostly negative, with most of the complaints centering on their size and blandness. One critic described them as resembling filing cabinets, and it’s true that they were relatively undecorated and did indeed dominate the skyline. In almost every movie or TV show that took place in New York during the ‘70’s, ‘80’s, and ‘90’s the twin towers make an appearance.

Once New Yorkers got used to them, though, the Twin Towers were generally thought of as a positive addition to the landscape and the city. They were seen as benign giants and from what I’ve read, many people had fond feelings about them. But there were a series of unsettling events that happened there between the years they were built and their destruction:

• On February 13, 1975 a fire was started by a custodian on the 11th floor of the North Tower. It eventually spread to the 17th floor and took 3 hours to put out.

• A Boeing 707 narrowly missed crashing into the North Tower in 1981

• In 1990 Louis DiBono was ordered murdered by John Gotti in the parking garage underneath the WTC and the car that his body had been left in wasn’t found for three days. Di Bono owned the company who had been hired to do the fireproofing for the WTC, and while the connection isn’t a direct one, it’s interesting that the inadequate fireproofing is perhaps one of the reasons that the towers collapsed so soon after the impacts of the planes on 9/11.

• On February 26, 1993 terrorists drove a van filled with explosives into the parking garage under the North Tower with the goal of causing the North Tower to fall into the South Tower and kill tens of thousands of people. The van did indeed explode, but the base of the building was its strongest point and the damage, while extensive, was not nearly enough to cause the destruction they were hoping for.

• In 2000 a worker was crushed by a piece of heating equipment on the 41st floor.

• “I never liked staying there alone. It was a very spooky place.” Monika Bravo, Artist 

• " . . . when my husband (10 years before we met) was 25, he interviewed at Cantor Fitzgerald in February of 2001. This was his dream job . . . a huge bump in salary plus bonus and everything he had been working hard towards. He was ecstatic to get the interview and for the first time entered the World Trade Center (every finance person’s dream). He took the elevator up but hated every minute of it. It was an express to a local and took about 15 minutes to get to his floor. He felt the sway of the tower and said everything about the building made him uncomfortable . . . the height, being in the clouds and just the whole setup. After a few rounds he ended up getting the offer and while it was more money than he could have imagined for a kid in his twenties he just couldn’t stand the thought of being in that building. He wound up instead taking a position at Deloitte in 2 World Financial which was across the street from towers 1 &2. He took a significant cut in salary but he just couldn’t get comfortable with the building. On September 11 (only 6 months later) he watched the devastation from his office once the first plane struck. Everyone was at the windows just watching when the second plane hit and then he said it was all out mayhem. Everyone running for the stairs. He finally made it out but he said til this day they all saw the most awful things that no human should ever see. He ran for his life , like everyone else, up the west side drive as the second tower collapsed. He wound up getting to Grand Central on the last train out of NYC and said it was so quiet you could hear a pin drop. He suffered from really bad PTSD for about a year and luckily was able to work through a lot with a therapist. He says til this day, had he ignored his intuition and chased the dream, he’d be dead." (Reddit comment, 2024)

• “I was always a little afraid of them. I know that sounds really strange from someone who lived in Manhattan, but they set off a fear in me I didn’t get from other skyscrapers.” (Reddit comment, 2024)

We all know what happened on 9/11: the plane crashes, the fires, the jumpers, the collapses, first the South Tower, then the North. We likely know that the area, “Ground Zero,” has been described as a mass grave and that a forensic pathologist visiting lower Manhattan soon after 9/11 realized that there were bits of decomposing bodies everywhere she looked. We definitely know that the United States never recovered from this trauma and in the last 24 years we have descended into violence, conspiracy theories, authoritarianism, and intellectual and cultural stagnation. The 21st Century began on that morning, in that place, and set the tone for the world we live in. 

The Twin Towers were a physical place where horror and history fused in a very public and well-documented way. What happened on that site bent history, and you could argue that they were only attacked because of their size and what they represented, but the narrative arc of their short lives, the life of architect Minoru Yamasaki, and the ground where they were built points to a different interpretation: the indent in history was made before they were even built and in effect cause the ground to be haunted.

Bad things must happen at all buildings where many people work and visit, and I admit that there’s nothing strikingly different about the World Trade Center, but I find it interesting that they did seem to provoke a sense of unease in people. This could have been simply because of their size, but I wonder . . . maybe people could feel what was coming, that the world would change because of the events that would occur on that one square block. Seeing them in old movies and TV shows is like seeing two hulking ghosts, daring you to not think about what would happen to them. And what would happen to us.