Many New Yorkers viewed the Twin Towers as boxy and unapproachable. One person called them “glass-and-metal filing cabinets.” But despite the criticism, it didn’t take long for the towers to become an iconic part of the skyline. The towers also became recognizable targets for terrorists. On Feb. 26, 1993, a Pakistani national named Ramzi Yousef planted a truck bomb in the parking garage of the North Tower. The explosion didn’t do much damage to the buildings, but the bomb killed seven people including an unborn child, and injured 1,042.
September 11, 2001, is a day we all remember or have heard of. The Twin Towers were attacked by the terrorist group Al-Qaeda in jet planes. The towers fell and left rubble all over the city, but few people know what happened afterward.
On July 24, 2001, Larry Silverstein and the Port Authority completed the largest real estate transaction in the city’s history, winning the bid to lease the WTC site buildings 1,2,4, and 5 for the next 99 years at a price of $3.2 billion. WTC 1 and 2 were the Twin Towers. Seven weeks later, Silverstein owned rubble. It took Silverstein about eight hours to start rebuilding efforts at the World Trade Center.
A design competition for the redevelopment of the WTC was started. A lot of different designs were considered but none of the other designs ultimately prevailed over Daniel Libeskind’s “Memory Foundations.” Libeskind envisioned several buildings standing along an arch around the original site of the Twin Towers, and the buildings are designed to align in ascending order of height when viewed from the Statue of Liberty. Centrally planted is a single skyscraper with a symbolic height of 1,776 feet, commemorating the year of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
Silverstein felt that this competition wasn’t necessary. He chose the architect David Child from the architecture company, Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill. In an attempt to compromise, the two architects developed a joint proposal combining the different plans, creating a building that once again had the spire desired by Libeskind with an open-air structure. The compromise proposal failed and Child was commissioned to redesign the building again without the ambitious open-air structure. The plan for the building as it stands today came about.
A twisting glass monolith called Freedom Tower would become the country’s new tallest building. It would still retain the symbolic height of 1,776 feet. On April 27, 2006, four years and 228 days after the 9/11 attacks, construction began on 1 World Trade Center (or Freedom Tower). Now that the political wrangling and design disputes were essentially over, it was up to thousands of workers to get the job done.
Workers placed rebar in preparation for 23,000 cubic yards of concrete that would make up the foundation. By 2007, a series of super columns were being erected along the perimeter of the skyscraper’s belowground structure. The foundation was nearly complete by 2008, but very little progress had been made aboveground. Throughout most of the construction, the site remained part rebuilding, part recovery. The pace of construction was about a floor a week. The glass started to arrive in late 2010. Construction came to a halt in Oct. 2012 when Hurricane Sandy hit the New York area with torrential rains and wide-scale floods. The spire started to go up in Dec. 2012. On May 10, 2013, the Freedom Tower was completed.
