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Q: With the passing of "time"... how and in what way have your opinions or visions changed, if any, as to what could be put into the space previously occupied by the World Trade Center?

Lynda A. Quintero
Bay Harbor Island, FL

Answered by Mike Wallace:
My original vision was to leave most of the area as a green space, to allow it to lie fallow, until some consensus emerged as to what to do with the space. In the meantime it would serve both as park and graveyard; rather as did Greenwood Cemetary, in Brooklyn, which was both New York's central park before there was a Central Park -- a place to stroll and picnic -- and home to some of the city's most honored dead. What I did not want to see was most of the space crammed with new commercial office buildings.

I had some hope that this might actually happen, in part because there was (and is) such an enormous amount of vacant office space in Lower Manhattan, and elsewhere around town. The glut was so big that the usual horrific real estate pressures were eased somewhat. Unfortunately there was one developer, Larry Silverstein, the leaseholder to the WTC towers and possible beneficiary of the WTC insurance policies, who is extremely keen to rebuild, indeed to hurl up even more office space than existed before. All the designers for the site were required to include in their plan millions of square feet of office space, to accomodate him, and millions more of shopping space, to accomodate Westfield America, who had the rights to the old WTC underground mall and wanted to restore the old status quo as much as possible.

For a time, after public outcry stopped the original designs from going forward, it seemed as if newly energized New Yorkers would take control of the site, and ensure it be used not for offices, only, but for housing (including affordable housing), and a mix of cultural, technological, nonprofit, media and other uses, thus diversifying a downtown economy dangerously reliant on finance. But it looks like business as usual is making a comeback.

The video reminds us that many people predicted that the WTC would be a disaster, that it would dump far more office space on the market than was needed, that it would suck tenants out of surrounding buildings, and leave the neighborhood worse off than it had been. This proved to be true, a state of affairs that lasted twenty years, and was only briefly interrupted by the dot.com mania of the late 90s. Given the ongoing disaggregation of the financial industry, it is folly to forget that history, and start sending office space skyward. Some is fine, but unless the focus is kept on infrastructure and mixed use development, the future does not look promising.

Q: Will the attack on New York actually increase the city's sense of its own exceptionalism? Will it feel it not only is the center of the world's economy, it now rates special status as the only place to suffer a major foreign attack on the mainland United States since the War of 1812 (or the Civil War). Will it cause the city to become more insular still? Will the city's absorption with the task of rebuilding, commemorating, memorializing, reinforce or mollify this tendency?

Andrew Saxe
Boston, MA

Answered by Niall Ferguson:
Sept. 11th has changed the nature of New Yorkers' sense of self-importance. Pre-9/11, the city gloried in its hard-ass cynicism. Since the WTC attacks, there's been a detectable softening of attitudes - witness the mellow mood during the blackouts. The interesting question is how far that's a consequence of 9/11 and how far a consequence of the reforms of the city's governance in the preceding decade.

Q: What was the most emotionally difficult part of making this film?

Bob Castro
Atlanta, GA

Answered by Ric Burns:
The most emotionally difficult scenes of the film were, of course, those covering the events of September 11th and its aftermath. As anyone who's chosen, or been assigned, to grapple with the extraordinarily large archive of video and photographic images from the day knows, it's toxic, and harrowing, material to confront.

Q: In discussing Sept. 11, why did you select Ed Koch and Mario Cuomo to be interviewed when both had been out of office for many years before 2001? Was there an attempt to interview Governor Pataki or Mayor Guiliani?

J.F.
Abilene, TX

Answered by Ric Burns:
We made a decision early on in the process of making the film that we weren' t going to interview people who you might think of as the "citizens" of ground zero - i.e., the survivors who got out of the buildings; the emergency personnel, firemen and police; the political figures like Mayor Giuliani and Governor Pataki who were directly involved in the events of the day; and the family members and loved ones of those who died. Many extraordinary films have been made since in the last two years focusing on the people most intimately and tragically effected by the day's events, and we didn't feel that we could add anything meaningful to what's already been done. We chose instead to talk with men and women who, like most others on the planet, were among the billions who looked on in shock and horrow at the day's events - and who also happened to know, through their own experiences as politicians, architects, historians, journalists, architectural critics, builders, engineers, photographers, or wire walkers, something intimate and revealing about the life and death of the buildings. That's how we came to interview Mario Cuomo and Ed Koch.

Q: You do such a fine job of presenting the range of views around contentious issues. In "Center of the World", for instance, the voices of enthusiasm for and opposition to the construction of the WTC Complex are given almost exactly equal exposure. I wonder if someday you would consider producing something that is not so journalistically neutral, something unapologetically advocative.

J.G.
Hoboken, NJ

Answered by Ric Burns:
That's a great question, and one that I'm not sure I can answer easily. A few years back I made a six-hour film about the way the American west was lost and won in the second half of the 19th century, called THE WAY WEST. It was, or became in the course of its unfolding, unapologetically regretful about the tragically destructive impact westward migration had on Native American peoples, and in that sense could be counted as advocative. I do think, as well, that our series on the history of New York is, in general, powerfully in favor, so to speak, of New York, warts and all. The most interesting subjects tend, of course, to be complex and intrinsically ambiguous or contradictory; and in struggling to do justice to them, one has an obligation not only to truth but to art and emotional depth and reality itself to present the fully range of that complexity; otherwise the film winds up being less about its putative subject, and more about its maker, which is usually, though not invariably, vast less interesting.

Q: How do you think it would be best to archive for general public viewing all of the details of that tragic day, the stories of hope and horror, of valor and vain, of loss and of pain along with the visual record of these events?

E.G.
Pittsburgh, PA

Answered by Ric Burns:
The New York Historical Society has already embarked on an ambitious effort to archive the historical artifacts and records of September 11th and its aftermath. I think it is crucial that there be a central custodial repository for the immense record that was left behind, textual, photographic, motion picture and otherwise.

Q: How much did it cost to buy out all the vendors/building owners to clear the land for the twin towers? What was the final cost of the construction? Did the towers ever achieve 100% occupancy before their destruction?

Pam Spaulding
Durham, NC

Answered by Carol Willis:
What would seem to be a simple and basic question -- What was the final construction cost of the World Trade Center? -- is very hard to answer with authority. Press releases from the Port Authority document the escalating costs from the original estimate of $350 million to $575 million in 1966, to $700 million in 1970. By the opening of the complex in 1973, that number had grown to $800 million. This number was published in the usually authoritative series on New York architecture and urbanism by Robert A.M. Stern and various co-authors, in the volume New York 1960: Architecture and Urbanism Between the Second World War and the Bicentennial. (New York, 1995), p. 202. However, another careful author, Anthony Robins provides a number almost twice as large: $1.5 billion in his book The World Trade Center. (1987), p. 49. I am still searching for other possible and credible numbers to add to this list.

Itıs also difficult to determine the value of the land and buildings that were acquired and cleared for the Trade Center site. As Pete Hamill described in the film, there were Polaroid prints of the low-rise commercial buildings, for example Cortland Street and Radio Row, were still in the Tower 1 offices of the PANYNJ executives responsible for the managing the twin towers. I saw them in the summer of 2001, looked through them quickly and planned to set up an appointment for later study. They were destroyed when the towers fell.

An arcane planning report issued by The New York City Planning Commission, "The World Trade Center: an Evaluation, 1966," contains a map and an analysis of the tax assessments for all the properties on the 14 city blocks that became the Trade Center site. This is a quotation from that report, p. 23:

The assessed valuation of the site, buildings, and land in 1965 was $18,184,700. Exempt property including City property, at 30 and 50 Church Street (The Hudson Terminal Buildings) total $15,328,000. Land values generally exceed the value of the structure on the land.*It is estimated that the public lands which would be acquired by the Port Authority would total a net of more than 200,000 square feet.

Finally, yes, the twin towers were full in the summer of 2001 when the vacancy rate was about 3 percent, a number that is considered fully occupied for in any commercial building given the regular changeover of leases. Of course, at 3 percent, the vacancy of the giant towers with some 9 million square feet was around 300,000 square feet of vacant space--a good-sized high-rise in many downtowns.