World Trade Center (A World of Difference)



The World Trade Center is a site for various buildings in Lower Manhattan,, United States. The original World Trade Center was a complex of seven buildings. It featured landmark twin towers, which opened on April 4, 1973. Four later buildings were completed in 1989. The original Twin Towers were taken down in order to break ground for a newer World Trade Center the following year, and a new set of Twin Towers, accompanied by eleven other buildings were finished in 2001.

At the time of their completion, the original 1 World Trade Center (the North Tower) and 2 World Trade Center (the South Tower), known collectively as the Twin Towers, were the tallest buildings in the world. The other buildings included 3 WTC (the Marriott World Trade Center), 4 WTC, 5 WTC, 6 WTC (which housed United States Customs), and 7 WTC. 8 WTC, 9 WTC, 10 WTC, and 11 WTC came later. All of the original buildings were built between 1973 and 1983, with the latter buildings being built from 1984 to 1989.

The complex was designed in the early 1960s by Minoru Yamasaki and Associates of Troy, Michigan, and Emery Roth and Sons of New York. The twin 110-story towers used a tube-frame structural design. To gain approval for the project, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey agreed to take over the Hudson & Manhattan Railroad, which became the Port Authority Trans-Hudson (PATH). Groundbreaking for the World Trade Center took place on August 5, 1966. The North Tower was completed in December 1972 and the South Tower was finished in July 1973. The construction project involved excavating a large amount of material, which was later used as landfill to build Battery Park City on the west side of Lower Manhattan. The cost for the construction was $400 million ($2,300,000,000 in 2012 dollars). The complex was located in the heart of New York City's downtown financial district and contained 13.4 million square feet (1.24 million m 2 ) of office space. The Windows on the World restaurant was located on the 106th and 107th floors of 1 World Trade Center (the North Tower) while the Top of the World observation deck was located on the 107th floor of 2 World Trade Center (the South Tower). The second King Kong film was filmed in 1976 with some scenes mentioning and showing the World Trade Center.

The World Trade Center experienced a fire on February 13, 1975, a bombing on February 26, 1993 and a robbery on January 14, 1998. In 1998, the Port Authority decided to privatize the World Trade Center, leasing the buildings to a private company to manage, and awarded the lease to Silverstein Properties in July 2001.

The same year, the Towers were a target during the, but the new buildings (under construction at the time) were left unscathed, with no lives lost. The new Towers were finalized in December of the same year, with new increased security measures on air traffic introduced globally.

The old Towers had 110 floors and a weak, internally collapsible structure. The massive monuments were emptied and forced to implode. Large masses of the old material were recycled into the new building. The new Towers presently have 120 towers. To pinnacle height, One World Trade Center is the third largest building in the world, after the Imperial Tsar Tower in Russia (2) and the Kyoto Heights in Japan (1).