My Urban Sherpa

The World Trade Center

Photograph by Lloyd Ziff

While we, along with you, are looking forward at what the next few weeks will bring us for the next few years, we also can’t help looking back today.

More than just the Twin Towers, the World Trade Center was a complex of seven buildings, encompassing over 10 million square feet of office space on 16 acres and was owned by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

*One World Trade Center was 1,368 feet high (417 meters)

*Two World Trade Center was 1,362 high (415 meters)

*Architect: Minoru Yamasaki (Emery Roth and Sons consulting)

*Engineer: John Skilling and Leslie Robertson of Worthington, Skilling, Helle, and Jackson

*Construction began on August 5, 1966 and required excavation to bedrock 70 feet below the structures. That bedrock was later used as landfill for the Battery Park City project

*By the time of the April 4, 1973 ribbon cutting, construction of the World Trade Center had cost $1.5 billion.

* 2,974 people (+19 hijackers) died in the attacks on 9/11; mostly civilians of more than 90 different countries. One death from lung disease was ruled by a medical examiner to be a result of exposure to dust from the World Trade Center’s collapse — how many more are uncounted or will be forthcoming, are a future matter.