A City in the Sky and a World Apart

The vast dimensions of the World Trade Center created a veritable vertical city. The rentable area in the complex, twelve million square feet, at the time of construction exceeded the total downtown office space of Philadelphia, Los Angeles, or Boston. The population of workers in the towers numbered around 47,000 in 2001, and about 100,000 commuters passed daily through the subway and PATH stations. Many shopped in the concourse beneath the plaza, making it, per square foot, the highest grossing mall in the country.

But in many ways, the sixteen-acre site stood a world apart from the rest of the city. The superblock was divorced from the street life of lower Manhattan, and the monumental towers rising from a generally vacant plaza established a zone of inactivity at the heart of the complex. Most New Yorkers had no occasion to step inside the Trade Center unless they worked there or shuttled to the top-floor restaurants of Windows on the World or the observation deck by express elevators.

This section of the exhibition recalls the life of the towers through video and audio clips that animate the architecture and collect the comments of key figures responsible for its design and operation; others simply record memories of the buildings. The room also attempts to evoke the experience and scale of the structures through light columns that reproduce the 18-inch steel box columns and the 22-inch window bay that marked the distinctive dimensions of the Twin Towers.