The Towers (standard:non fiction, 1881 words)
Author: Michael Gates	Added: Jan 19 2002	Views/Reads: 3729/2348	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
This is an essay about my experience on September 11th, 2001, and my "relationship" with the twin towers of the World Trade Center.

"The World Trade Center is gone," I wailed. 

It was "that day," and I was talking to my mother on the phone. We had
finally reached each other after several dozen tries. ("All circuits 
are busy" was the phrase I heard most often on September 11th.) She 
wanted to know if my wife, who worked in Building 7 of the World Trade 
Center, was alive, safe. As it turned out, she was, so my anguish 
wasn’t for her (praise the Cosmic Muffin) but for the thousands 
lost--and for the towers, the twin monoliths that had been part of the 
backdrop of my life for 20 years. 

As anyone who lives in the New York metropolitan area knows, the twin
towers of the World Trade Center were a constant, looming presence, 
visible for scores of miles in all directions. Wherever you were in New 
York--or in Jersey City, across the Hudson River, where I live--you 
could orient yourself by looking for the twins. 

At 110 stories, the towers, designed by architect Minoru Yamaski, were
sometimes criticized as being too big; their lack of ornament was also 
disparaged as "bland." That’s wrong, I think. To me, they were 
majestic--so enormous that they transcended architecture. They were New 
York's answer to the pyramids, two surreal pillars holding up the sky. 

Whenever I visited the Trade Center, which included several smaller
buildings besides the towers, I felt both excited and a bit overwhelmed 
by the "city within a city." The complex encompassed an enormous 
underground shopping mall, sprawling subway stations, and a five-acre 
outdoor plaza modeled after St. Mark’s Square in Venice. 

The twins were the main attraction, though. Standing at the base of one
of them and staring up its neo-Venetian facade was a surefire way to 
induce an oddly pleasant feeling of vertigo--like being mildly drunk on 
the Promethean splendor of New York. 

I ascended to the observation deck at the top of Tower 2 three times
over the years, if recall correctly. You reached it via a high-speed 
elevator that was larger than many Manhattan bedrooms. It felt like 
going up in a rocket--your stomach seemed to have been temporarily left 
behind. 

You exited the elevator into a vast, window-lined room with--to put it
most prosaically--quite a view. The vista reminded me of one of my 
favorite childhood fantasies: sitting on a cloud and staring down at 
the world, like omnipotent Zeus. There were little metal seats next to 
the tall, slit-like windows; you could sit there and meditate on the 
roofs of skyscrapers. It was somewhat like looking out of an airplane’s 
window, except that the toy-like world below didn’t pass by. Time 
seemed suspended. 

There was a stairway to the roof, where you could stand on an outdoor
platform that seemed to hover in mid air. The top of the other tower, 
crowned by a huge broadcast antenna (used by every major TV station in 
New York), floated nearby. On a clear day you could see the curvature 
of the earth...I think. I imagined I could, anyway. 

I wasn’t always a tourist at the Trade Center. One of my freelance
editing clients, Morgan Stanley, was located in Tower 2, on the 72nd 
floor. I usually did my editing for them remotely, via e-mail, but one 
day I was asked to come into the office and proofread some documents. 
Entering the building involved a complicated series of steps. I had to 
line up in the lobby with about 100 other "guests," then present two 
forms of ID at a long desk manned by a score of what looked like 
airport ticket agents. I was given a stick-on badge to wear. At the 
elevator, I had to show some ID again, despite the badge. And once I 
arrived at Morgan Stanley’s offices, I had to explain myself to a guard 
in _their_ lobby. By then, I felt like I was entering CIA headquarters. 


The massive security--how naïve and pointless it now seems--was in
reaction to the 1993 bombing of the Trade Center. A terrorist named 
Ramzi Ahmed Yousef had parked a truck bomb in an underground parking 
garage. When it exploded, six people were killed and thousands were 
injured. The towers filled with smoke but were otherwise unharmed. It 
was said that the terrorists had hoped they would collapse. "How 
absurd," I remember thinking at the time. The towers were so enormous, 


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