Their Lost Village in the Sky

This time last week, Norma Hessic could stand on her balcony in Rockaway Beach, Queens, listen to the ocean, feel the salt breeze against her cheeks and see the place where she worked, 13 miles away. It made her proud.

The twin towers of the World Trade Center stood tall on the horizon, the ultimate vertical expression of the world’s most vertical city. They were postcard symbols of global capitalism, American economic vitality and of New York City itself, but they were more than that to Hessic.

Looking at them, she could visualize her office, on the 82nd floor of 1World Trade, the north tower. She could picture the man who ran the freight elevator. “Good morning, little lady,” he would say as he took her hand and let her ride with him, although it was against the rules. She’d often bring him a cup of tea in the middle of the day.

There were the security guards, so friendly they’d greet her with a hug and a kiss on the cheek. Her desk was stacked with pictures of her children and grandchildren, and her view encompassed virtually all of New York City, from the Empire State Building to the 12-story seaside apartment building where she now stood.

“It was really a wonderful building,” said Hessic, a Jamaican immigrant who has lived in New York for 30 of her 56 years and is chief of staff for New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Council. “It just gave me, I don’t know, such a wonderful sense to be sitting so far up in the air. On a clear day I could see where I lived in Queens. I would point out to my boss and say, ‘You see that building? That’s where I live.’ Every summer I would go to my terrace and watch the sun set against the trade center ....It was the most beautiful sight you could see.”

New Yorkers like to say their city is a collection of urban villages, self-contained neighborhoods where everybody knows their dry cleaner, their bodega owner and their corner newsstand operator. The World Trade Center didn’t entirely fit the mold--no one actually lived there--but some people still thought of it as one huge international village.

It was home to companies from around the world and to U.S. firms whose economic might stirred markets from Wall Street to the most distant village square. It was America’s largest workplace, where 50,000 people came each day to type, to talk, to cook, to wash, to guard, to serve, to guide, to write, to haul, to fix, to buy and to sell.

It was a compass, the most visible signpost of downtown. When you emerged from the No. 1 subway train at Canal Street and momentarily lost your bearings, all you needed was a reassuring glimpse of the twin towers to know which way was Soho, which way TriBeCa.

It was the 800-pound gorilla of modern architecture, so loathed by some when it opened that there were people who seriously called for it to be torn down, and yet so accepted eventually that it became unthinkable to imagine the city without it.

Unthinkable.

Norma Hessic was on her balcony late last week, phone to her ear, eyes on the Atlantic Ocean. There were surfers and pleasure boaters and, farther out, what appeared to be a battleship. Except for the warship, it was all familiar. Then she swung her gaze northwestward, toward lower Manhattan.

“It’s foggy,” she said, “and everything’s very faint, but I can see an outline, minus my two gorgeous buildings.” She wrapped her voice around that word, “gorgeous,” her Jamaican lilt trembling a bit. She faltered for a moment, at a loss for words.

Towers Loved, Reviled

“Pretty? No. I’m one of the people who like the older looking buildings. But ... it was a statement. It was New York.” --Connie Caboy, a Manhattan outplacement counselor who says she dated a construction worker who helped build the World Trade Center and left her name on one of its arches.

Every morning before work, Kash Patel would stand near the window of his 78th floor office in the north tower and stare out over the city.

“I never stopped being amazed,” said Patel, a vice president of Avenir, a computer products and consulting firm that was headquartered there. “I always spent a few minutes there, looking north. It would change--the weather, the light. It was just an incredible view. Especially on a pretty day like Tuesday.”

And it wasn’t just the views that drew Avenir to the World Trade Center four years ago. The tenants of the World Trade Center had undergone a revolutionary change in recent years as old-guard import and export companies and shipping companies made way for some of the most successful high-tech firms in the world. Oracle had just opened there. Sun Microsystems was there. Avenir wanted to be there.

“We started our business in Metuchen, N.J., six years ago, in this very tiny office near the train station,” said Patel. But as the dot-com boom took shape, Avenir expanded. There were new offices in London and Virginia. A manufacturing plant in Cochin, India. And as the company grew, so did its aspirations.

“We’re a small company, and for us, image is important,” Patel said. “When we say we’re working out of the World Trade Center, people are impressed.”

It was not always so.

Throughout its short 31 years, the World Trade Center was like a precocious bad boy--brash, commanding, beloved and reviled, and yet bred for a greatness it may never have had the maturity to achieve.

The center’s landmark twin monoliths, which became icons of American capitalism, were once dismissed as the epitome of banal architecture and condemned as icons of corporate welfare.

David Rockefeller, co-chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank, and Nelson Rockefeller, governor of New York, conceived the center in the late 1960s as a venue to consolidate the city’s bountiful interests in international trade--the shippers, bankers, insurers and customs officials--while rejuvenating an underachieving chunk of southern Manhattan.

Using their collective financial and political might, they got the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey to float millions in tax-free bonds to build a 72-story building on the lower East Side. Once this plan was approved, with little further public discourse, the project was transformed into two 110-story buildings on the lower West Side, with a quarter of the space to be occupied by state offices.

The sleight of hand engendered bitter attacks.

“The name of Rockefeller is synonymous with capitalism, yet here is an entirely socialistic enterprise that has been enthusiastically approved by two of the brothers,” said Theodore Kheel, a downtown lawyer who for years conducted a campaign to have the buildings razed.

Meanwhile, the $1.2-billion construction project lasted more than a decade and gave everyone something to hate. Evicted property owners sued, losing only at the state Supreme Court. Broadcasters were upset because the towers blocked signals from the Empire State Building. The steel industry said it was un-American because 25% of the steel was imported from Japan. Environmentalists harped on sewage discharges and the profligate use of electricity. Pedestrians groaned over congestion and a brutal wind-tunnel effect.

The media feverishly joined the fray.

The New York Sunday News published an almost gleeful description of how one demolition expert would do the job.

It quoted urban historian Lewis Mumford denouncing the skyscrapers as “ridiculously unprofitable” and predicted their fate “is to be ripped down as nonsensical.”

But prophetically, the story also gave voice to a trade center tenant who had abandoned a charming older building for the brutish new neighbor.

“The whole thing here is a singing experience, listening to all the exotic languages in the elevator, seeing the entertainment in the lobby, feeling the spaciousness,” said John Weiting, the editor of a marine trading journal. “My impression in a nutshell is: Now I’m where the action is.”

People, it turned out, couldn’t help but react to the center’s sheer braggadocio.

“They told the architect, ‘Build something that will be noticed,”’ said author Eric Darton, who treated the center like a living person in his book “Divided We Stand: A Biography of New York’s the World Trade Center.” “And it got noticed. It’s like if you’re walking down the street and saying, ‘I’m the baddest guy on the block,’ someone’s going to take you on.”

Its architect, Minoru Yamasaki, was widely criticized for building an abstraction, but he saw its meaning differently. “World trade means world peace, and, consequently, the World Trade Center buildings in New York

It may be impossible to pinpoint the exact moment the World Trade Center passed from scorn to idolatry. Angus K. Gillespie, the author of one of the two books that have been written about the World Trade Center, said he thinks the turnaround tracked the economic boom of the 1980s when it began making money “hand over fist” in leases.

But Gillespie, a professor of American studies at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J., also believes the Port Authority set the stage by several inspired decisions that ultimately “won the hearts and minds of the people.”

One was in the design itself. By topping one tower with a restaurant for the wealthy and the other with an observation deck for the common citizen, it gave a wide spectrum of New Yorkers and tourists a reason to come to the building. Another brilliant stroke was the handling of three 1970s daredevils: Philippe Petit, who tightrope-walked between the towers; George Willig, who scaled one tower, and Owen Quinn, who parachuted from one. The city, for example, sued Willig for $250,000, but the next day settled for $1.10--one penny for each floor he scaled. Mayor Abe Beame collected the fine in a public ceremony.

Finally, the 1993 bombing by Islamic terrorists gave the towers a new profile worldwide, and turned them into a symbol of New York’s resilience. A fountain was erected in memory of the six people who died. People walked past it Tuesday of last week on their way to work.

About two months ago, a new chapter was written when Manhattan developer Larry Silverstein agreed to pay the Port Authority $3.2 billion for a 99-year lease on the towers. Silverstein, 70, who has been trading in Manhattan real estate since the 1950s, called the complex the world’s most spectacular asset.

Two months later, the asset vaporized. Silverstein lost not just the twin towers, but 7 World Trade Center, the 47-story office tower he built in the 1980s.

Diverse Work Force

“On the elevator, I thought, I’m going up in the tallest building in the biggest city in the country. You feel like the people there are the American economy, like it’s centered there, like any place else was a satellite.”--Brian J. Bernstein, 38th floor, north tower, Lehman Bros.

Every morning, commuters would pour into the trade center from city subways and interurban PATH trains from New Jersey, rising up out of the ground on escalators and stairways like some subterranean army equipped with briefcases instead of sidearms. Others arrived by ferry, bus, car and foot.

Once in the building, people could shed their herd instincts. Offices were spacious, often plush, with those massive windows that offered both light and unparalleled views. You could shop at Banana Republic or Victoria’s Secret, do your banking or cleaning, get your shoes shined, get a checkup, buy half-price tickets to a Broadway show, book an airline ticket, eat, sleep--in short, participate in a complete, if hermetically sealed, version of urban life. It was not uncommon for someone from, say, New Jersey to enter the building in its basement, spend an entire day indoors and return home without having stepped outdoors in New York.

For seven years, Port Authority employees greeted Beijing-born Lingling Sun by name as she took the elevator to her 33rd floor office in the north tower, where she oversaw North American distribution for China Daily, China’s only English-language newspaper. Sun’s company was one of 15 Chinese-owned firms in the towers and one of dozens of foreign-owned companies and institutions that put the world into the World Trade Center.

“We’ve grown so attached to it,” said Sun, who on Tuesday watched bodies fall to the ground and badly burned colleagues stumble down smoky stairwells. “Name just one person in the world who doesn’t know the World Trade Center. I was so proud I was working there.”

Afshin Aydon, a 27-year-old photographer for Turkish-run Showtime Pictures, which operated the photo concession on the second and 107th floors in the south tower, remembered Valentine’s Days at the trade center. As many as 50 couples would exchange vows on the observation deck, and there were always plenty of requests for pictures. “I made a killing on those days,” Aydon said.

Deborah Goldman and George Rosenstock got married at the trade center, although not on Valentine’s Day and not on the observation deck. They were married on June 5, 1983, at Windows on the World, the restaurant on the 107th floor of the north tower. Like many New Yorkers, the couple had been there for drinks at sunset. It was a sumptuous setting, with one of the world’s most romantic views. There was a risk, however.

“It was early June, and every single weekend leading up to [the wedding] was totally fogged in and cloudy,” Goldman recalled. “We were saying that we could have gotten married at the Knights of Columbus Hall in Brooklyn for a whole lot less money than this was costing us. But the day of the wedding, the weather broke. It was sunny and clear, and you could see the Statue of Liberty and the harbor .... People still talk about it.”

Restaurant critics were not always kind to Windows on the World, but no matter: With a setting like that, it didn’t need to be Lutece. When the planes struck, the restaurant was not yet open to the public. More than 110 people, however, were attending a business conference in one of the restaurant’s meeting rooms on the 106th floor, and another six diners who were members of a private club linked to the restaurant were having breakfast there. Seventy-five of the restaurant’s 430 employees were on duty.

Not a single person who was there has been heard from since.

In the past week, Goldman, now an attorney in Torrance, has come to realize that she can never return to the site of her wedding. She and her husband had planned anniversary dinners there and promised to take their 12-year-old son. “Now,” she said, “it’s rubble.”

Loss--and Rebirth?

“So many of them are missing now. The building had so many young workers. People in their 20s. Young people with new families .... There was not only my son, but Matt and Damien and Charlie and others--young men who grew up together and went to high school together and now work together. They are all missing. All of these young people.” --Eiliene Lugano, whose son, Sean, worked on the 88th floor of the south tower at Keefe, Bruyette & Woods, a financial services firm.

Within hours of last week’s attack, people began to talk about rebuilding the trade center. New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani vowed that the city would do everything it could to make that happen. And after secluding himself for two days, the building’s new landlord, Silverstein, told the Wall Street Journal that he feels a moral obligation to help rebuild the complex. “It would be the tragedy of tragedies not to rebuild this part of New York,” he said. “It would give the terrorists the victory they seek.”

But Silverstein said the towers would not necessarily be built as they were, at the same commanding height. Although he didn’t say so, it seems obvious that it would be difficult to get tenants to move into replicas of the buildings that were destroyed. And maybe, in a sense, it doesn’t matter. It would never be the same.

The losses, like the buildings, were on an outsize scale, a Paul Bunyan tale told by Stephen King.

Some of the world’s brightest, most capable business people worked in the World Trade Center; many now are gone. Fred Alger Management was a small mutual fund company housed on the 93rd floor of the north tower. Fifty-five people worked there, juggling investments valued at $16 billion. Now 38 are missing, including the company president, David Alger. Just one person is left from a team of six portfolio managers that Alger led.

For every person missing or dead, there are concentric and overlapping waves of loss, spreading around the world. Some are direct and obvious: Children lost parents, parents lost children, friends lost friends.

Sometimes, they’re a little more oblique. Norma Hessic sits at home wondering what happened to the security guards who kissed her, the elevator operator who gave her a lift--the people she saw day after day, year after year, but never knew well enough to ask their last names.

“In my telephone book, I’d just have their first name and number,” she said. “Now my telephone book is no more.” The shock, the severing of connections--it’s tearing her up.

“I just have this need to see faces,” she said. “I really do.”