911: Some WTC History You Might Not Know
by George Trinkaus
from a video-talk at the Portland Central Library, 7/12/05
I lived in New York in the 1960's, when the twin towers were planned and just going up. The 60's was an era of intense urban destruction and frantic build-up in New York. Some of the midtown areas cleared and targeted for "development" looked like they had been bombed, while other outlying residential areas, red-lined by the banks, decayed into abandoned free-fire zones.
I left New York in 1971 before the twin towers became the prominent feature of the Manhattan skyline. They were not part of my New York, I am glad to say, for I think I would have resented this development as I did some other new structures, like the hideous Pan Am Building that was stuck up over Park Avenue and Grand Central Station.
Rockefellers
The downtown mega-development known as the World Trade Center was the brainchild of the Rockefellers. I remember photos in The New York Times of Nelson and David glowing over architect's models of those obscene towers.
You never see the name "Rockefeller" in any of the official post-911 WTC histories. The golden name has been disassociated from the dark imagery of 911.
What is a conspiracy theory anyway without a Rockefeller in it?
The Rockefeller clout teamed up with the powerful New York and New Jersey Port Authorities, and this urban-removal juggernaut destroyed 75 blocks of historic lower Manhattan.
farewell, Radio Row
The area targeted for the WTC included a neighborhood I loved called Radio Row. The district began in the 1920's and grew into an experimenter's dream world of many blocks where exotic surplus electronics, the fall-out of defense technology, spilled out into the street. The electronics storekeepers organized. God knows how many other downtown communities organized. They got little coverage in The Times. All resistance was crushed.
Did the Rockefellers sign off on the 911 demolition? I don't know. One slender Rockefeller connection (through NBC and 911) is Paul Bremmer, the protege of Henry Kissenger, who, in turn, was the protege of the Rockefellers. Interviewed on NBC that momentous morning Bremmer was so on-message with the official propaganda line that I have speculated (in my NBC Spins 911) that the bin Laden memo all the media was reading from that day may have originated at Bremmer's own desk.
WTC already doomed
That grandiose Titanic called the World Trade Center, which had been planned to last for at two hundred years, soon revealed itself to be an engineering stupidity and technological embarrassment. The facade, made of cast aluminum, had been directly connected to the steel superstructure. This caused a battery-like electric flow between the two metals resulting in what's known as galvanic corrosion. This problem had been text-book predictable in the marine-air environment of lower Manhattan, hence the embarrassment. On 911 the media neglected to mention this detail in its voluminous romancing of WTC history.
The formidable-looking facade, weakening day by day, was in danger of peeling off and falling into the street, and the corrosive process was weakening the steel structure itself. You can see these prefabricated aluminum sections falling in the TV demolition footage (such as that taken by Dateline producer Christian Martin and shown on NBC on 911). Also, NBC's Pat Dawson reported how "the steel skeleton...peeled off and fell into the street." Those immense fallen panels, twisted Gothic suggestions of cathedral architecture, became the prominent features in the landscape at that patriotic shrine called Ground Zero.
That the buildings were full of asbestos became another of the WTC's liabilities, as that material acquired a bad rep. The towers may have been "sick buildings" in other environmental ways. They were white elephants waiting for replacement.
The entire WTC complex, including Building 7, had become, prematurely expendable and a candidate for demolition and replacement. Consider that the WTC had already paid for itself, had yielded profit to its Rockefeller and other investors, and had profited various banks and landlords, public and private, over and over during its life. Also consider the pressure on that prime location by insatiable New York developers eager to raze anything in sight on any pretext and to build downtown the latest gleaming office structures for the corporations and new luxury condos for the booming yuppie class.
a WTC demolition planned in '80's
A demolition was actually planned out in detail for the twin towers in the 1980's. The planners engaged architects who developed estimates for a complete take-down and rebuild and drafted conceptual drawings. The prominent firm of Emory Roth then took over as project architects and occupied a tower office.
The demolition of such gigantic steel structures, with their thick concrete floors, if lawfully performed in conformance with New York City codes, would have been an immensely arduous and expensive task and was estimated back then at $5.6 billion.
The costs included the slow and laborious task of cutting, with oxy-acetylene torches, the giant hardened steel members of the high-rise structures. (In those days one could not so easily melt steel at low temperatures, as for example by burning kerosene, the new official physics allowing for this process having not been established until a few weeks after September 11, 2001.)
I observe a lawful demolition
Circa 1970 I watched a conventional New York demolition proceed on an old steel and concrete high-rise, as viewed from my midtown office window at Third Avenue and 50th. Using cutting torches, workers laboriously cut free the old steel members into crane-manageable sections one by one. Then they bored holes into the thick concrete floors and placed small dynamite charges within. For safety, a ponderous steel mesh was laid down by crane over the floor area to be blasted. When the shrill warning whistle blew, I knew to swivel my chair toward the window. Then, bang, and the heavy steel mesh jumped. The mesh contained all of the shattered concrete debris within. Workers hosed the area with water to suppress the dust. Then they had to gather up the concrete chunks and cart them to funnels that conducted them down into dump trucks below. This went on laboriously for months, floor by floor.
Compare the actual 911 WTC demolition in which, evidently, the columns were blast-severed by shaped charges and the floors pulverized in microseconds by aerosol explosives, resolving into a white plume of concrete particulate floating off to Queens.
demolitions, lawful and unlawful
In a lawful demolition, it is customary at the outset to remove manually all fixtures, including florescent lighting fixtures and their toxic tubes, all the carpeting, drywall, and glass. And, of course, removed also in advance of any proper demolition are the human occupants of the building. All of this protocol was eliminated in the economical, streamlined demolition of the WTC on 911.
If the same labor-intensive procedures described above had been employed to lawfully deconstruct the twin towers, it would have taken years. All the while this hot downtown real estate would have languished as a construction zone and lose money.
Why not just blow the whole damn thing up all at once, call it a terrorist attack, and reap the obvious political benefits? What an opportunity!
In 1989 the architects assigned to the WTC demolition were told that the entire planned take-down and rebuild project had been canceled and that their WTC office was to be closed.
One source (technology exec Karl W.B. Schwarz) states that someone in the know told the laid-off Emory Roth architects that, "In 10 to 12 years they are going to blow it up and start over."
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[ This Message was edited by: NAILBOMB on 2006-05-27 07:20 ]