> The vision was meant to use the trade facility and urban renewal as tools to clear and revitalize what had become a “commercial slum”.
What this refers to is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Row#New_York_City
Basically you cannot have Akihabara or Shenzhen style electronics markets because the sort of people that built the WTC don't like their chaotic appearance.
Happily, I saw a little discussion of it in 2008 when the advocates of letting the auto companies fail were pushed back by statistics showing how many second and third tier suppliers would be destroyed. But the fourth tier, the shenzhen / radio alley-type stuff is still ignored. Very similar to how most companies want to simply hire skills and assume that they will magically appear when in years past, companies took an active hand in creating them by having a career development path in-house.
Perhaps the AI bubble will be viewed in the future as the last gasp of companies that depleted the soil that they grew in and now struggle to survive without anyone that knows how to do the work anymore. Maybe LLMs will be all that remains, our Moai.
http://www.ccru.net/archive/markets.htm
In 'highly developed' economies the anarchy of concrete market-places has been replaced by the securitized space of the shopping mall (interiorized, guarded, and surveilled). Instead of dark and crowded alleys, lined by open stalls - which encourage a multiplicity of tactile interactions - the mall substitutes shop windows and brightly lit retail displays.
Before the Chinese traded electronics in Shenzhen, they traded it in Hong Kong. Yes, as Hong Kong transformed into a financial center, it got rid of the electronics traders.
It was a ringing bell, bringing the attention back to the old ugly worldorder of great games, land-empires and bloody conquest and the inability to isolate from hostile ideologies, even if you are the usa and living on a giant island. Bush went to iraq and the failure to build any working state there- showed not only the failure of neoncons, but also of the whole "all cultures are equal" and academic impotence. There explanation models had nothing for this but tired rehashes of colonial/anti-colonial ideology, no predictions, no real help, just "belief in universal values and western culture, and righton" - and that was it. No help for the 2 billion stuck in religious ember, not real analysis to free the wasted geniuses trapped under burkas. Silence, ideology and absence, thats whats left.
There's a high number of coincidences about the towers getting destroyed. It's no conspiracy, it's because the towers and NYC meant something in the eyes of the world with regards to the USA.
Just rattling off a few of the wild ones:
The episode of The Lone Gunmen which predicted an attack with a plane on the towers.
The Sega Master System game (I forget the name, but I own it) where it depicts a missile hitting the towers on the opening screen. It's pixels with little wings, and super spooky in retrospect.
The Dream Theater live album released on 9/11 which showed the NYC skyline burning.
There's so much stuff, I almost don't blame the conspiracy theorists. But they have the causality backwards. They also really like to ignore the fact that 8 years earlier somebody tried to blow up the towers and killed 6 people...
Tom Clancy's book "Debt of Honor" is very similar in a spooky way as well. Including the hesitation to shoot down commercial airliners being used as weapons. [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_Music [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt_of_Honor
Everything new is "gross" for the people who are on their fifth year of therapy with no end in sight. It's always someone else's fault but don't change anything because community character is the most important thing.
Some of the best “preserved” (via this ‘build nothing change nothing’ tactic) communities in my expensive socal city are dead. They were turned from diverse beach communities into dead information technology/finance monoliths.
China's rise wasn't "inevitable" it was underwritten when Nixon went to China and they subsequently got their most favored trading nation status.
Now known as Brookfield place. Yet another ill-advised re-branding. I believe this was done after the GFC to attract non-finance companies.
[1] https://johnj.com/posts/man-on-wire/ [2009]
Edit: add year
I worked for a bit on the 95 or 96th floor. Inside they were less impressive. The lowish ceiling and skinny windows made it feel confining. To me, in the 90s, they felt old and dated on the inside.
During their lifetimes the towers were host to the birth of 17 babies and 19 murders"
That is unusually high number of death during construction.
After 25 years, I still get emotional looking at these imageries. The emotion is raw. I'm still mad that this happened.
He wanted to radicalize Muslims worldwide against the West and drain American resources through prolonged wars.
It's also interesting how infrequently Americans know OBL's motivations for the 9/11 attacks. A big part of it was the American support of Israel, and OBL's belief that this would lead to further oppression of Muslim people in Palestine.
He did terrible things but was pretty accurate in his predictions.
"Of Chicago's five tallest buildings, three were completed within a 5-year span between 1969 and 1974."
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_buildings_in_C...
(I'm not saying this was good. It was a terrible tragedy. The attack itself obviously, and then what followed as well.)
Most high rises taper, but these towers just went straight up as rectangles. And the effect was almost dizzying. They were just so tall.
I used to love drawing the NYC skyline as a kid — such an iconic thing. New York used to be much grittier, but I loved the energy of it as a kid. Was an incredible thing to experience.
I could ramble for hours about all the things I loved about the trip, but one of the things that stuck out was all the young kids taking the subway by themselves or in small packs of friends out pretty late etc. They all seemed so much more street smart and independent than my own similar aged kids (we live in a quiet neighborhood in Seattle). I also grew up fairly sheltered in the suburbs where I had very little exposure to the “real world” as they say…
I’d be fascinated to hear more about what it’s like to grow up in such a massive city.
In 2001, I lived in Chicago, and I took a trip to Italy in September of 2001. I remember flying into Newark airport early that month, and marveling (as I always did) about the New York skyline, including the Empire State Building and the WTC.
I returned eight days later, on the first day that flights resumed after 9/11, and I remember flying into Newark again, and there was still smoking climbing into the air around where the WTC once stood.
Dad also bemoaned the loss of Radio Row to build the WTC, as he was a big Ham enthusiast as a kid.
The actual scene from the movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QL6d0ASmvfs
The camera work for that was stunning.
I'm sure there are some civil engineers in here who would just love to weigh in so now I wait. :)
By themselves they were impressive, but, jutting out of the ground as they did, without peer, made for a jarring skyline. The fact that they did not taper and were twin made it worse.
The new tower is much better integrated into NYC skyline aesthetically. A shame I did not visit before returning to Ghana a couple of years ago.
kinderjaje•4d ago
The towers also provided an extraordinary employment opportunity for the construction workers of the region. More than 3,500 people were employed continuously on-site during construction.
> A total of 10,000 people were involved in its construction. Tragically, 60 people were killed during construction.
During their lifetimes the towers were host to the birth of 17 babies and 19 murders.
Fifty thousand people called the towers their place of work and on many days tens of thousands visited.
chistev•6h ago
n1b0m•5h ago
I also couldn’t find any evidence for the 19 murders. Six people were killed in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, which was an act of terrorism. Plus 9/11.
jmulho•2h ago
https://npdf1.org/crime-scene-world-trade-center/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gotti