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Q: Is it possible that someone will want to put up new buildings on the scale of or bigger than the World Trade Center anytime soon?

John England
Seattle, WA

Answered by Carol Willis:
Great height and bigness are not necessarily the same thing, although they certainly were in the case of the twin towers, which were the tallest AND the largest highrise buildings in the world, in terms of interior volume. With 209 feet on each side, the towers had floor areas of more than 40,000 square feet, or about an acre, multiplied by 110 twice. Although they were surpassed in 1974 by Chicago's Sears Tower, with its 1450-foot height and 4.5 million square feet of interior space, the World Trade Center towers together comprised about 9 million square feet, by far the world's largest office complex.

Although evolving plans for what seems will be the first tower at ground zero, the 1776-foot Freedom Tower, boast that it will return the title of world's tallest building to New York, a significant portion of the upper section, probably above around seventy stories, will be open structure, not occupied space. The interior volume will likely be around 2 million square feet, or about half the size of one of the World Trade Center towers.

It seems unlikely that skyscrapers of the scale of the World Trade Center or the Sears Tower will be built in the United States again. In the aftermath of 9/11, the fear of tall buildings as targets has been much discussed, and polls do show anxiety in the populous. This in itself would affect what a developer might venture to build or a financier would be willing to loan money for. But the major reasons that building size probably reached the historical zenith in the 1970s are: 1) American cities are decentralizing, especially in employment; 2) zoning laws and often public protests in New York limit the size of buildings; and 3) very tall buildings are relatively more expensive to build per square foot of rentable space.

Both bigness and a yen for height remain goals in other parts of the world, especially in Japan, China, and throughout the Pacific Rim. Just completed in Tokyo is the Roppongi Hills complex developed by the Mori Building Company and designed by New York architects KPF. Though it contains 9 million square feet of commercial space, its major tower is only 55 stories. In Taiwan, a new tower has just topped out that will become the world's tallest, called Taipei 101. It will be surpassed by the Shanghai World Financial Center, also by KPF, soon to be constructed in Shanghai which will exceed 1600 ft with a total floor area of around 4 million square feet.

Q: Can you describe what Radio Row was like before the World Trade Center was built there? People, shops, homes, etc?

M.S.
Madison, WI

Answered by Mike Wallace:
On the surface Radio Row was just a wholesale/retail/resale outlet area, bounded by West, Church, Liberty, and Vesey Streets, with its axis along Cortlandt Street. From the 1920s on, its dilapidated old buildings, featuring radios and parts (some obtained from radio operators whose ships docked at nearby westside piers) drew radio amateurs from far and wide to get components to build devices and set up stations. After the second war, Radio Row sold war surplus electronics (equipment that originally cost thousands went for $25-50), televisions, radios, and high-fidelity sound equipment and parts, and particularly an infinite variety of vacuum tubes, the goods piled so high they spilled out onto the street. As late as the 60s the district had the largest concentration of electronic parts and equipment stores anywhere in Gotham.

I suspect, however, it was more than just a consumer outlet area, like Canal Street or later 47th Street, but something of a petrie dish for a then nascent electronics industry. Some important firms grew up there, like that of Charles Avnet, who began selling surplus radio parts in 1921, went on to produce radio antennas during the war for the military, merged with two other Courtland Street denizens, and expanded to become a major electronics company (and then moved away). The area's destruction by the WTC may perhaps have contributed to one of the most puzzling questions of NYC's recent history‹why California, and not Gotham, became host to Silicon Valley.

New York had long been a leader in the development of new communications technologies. It had crucibled the telegraph, hi-speed printing presses, motion pictures, radio, and tv, and rolled over its primacy with each new invention. As late as the 1950s, Gotham seemed poised to do the same with computers, but it proved to be the invention that didn't bark in the night. Despite the area's pioneering work in transistor development, despite the regional presence of Bell Labs and IBM, despite wartime electronics contracts and a thriving electrical engineering area in Radio Row, it would be Silicon Valley, not Silicon Alley that captured the lead.

To some extent, it may be that New York shot itself in the foot; the World Trade Center's being erected on the ruins of Radio Row was emblematic of a widespread demolition of manufacturing facilities around town and their replacement with office towers, and the city passed up opportunities to develop university-based hi tech engineering centers a la Stanford or MIT. There were many other reasons for New York's faltering, such as the mammoth flow of military contracts that galvanized aerospace development in California, Massachusetts, Texas and Florida, but the future may yet judge that we managed to nip our own computer industry in the bud. And who knows what possibilities may yet be precluded if we throw up millions of square feet of office space downtown rather than diversifying its economy; we may be set to repeat the very same mistakes we made before.

Q: It seems like the World Trade Center was an obvious target. Before September 11, do you think Americans had a blind spot to how the world viewed them?

N.F.
Rochester, NY

Answered by Niall Ferguson:
Well, not so blind. On September 15, 1999, the United States Commission on National Security for the 21st Century issued a report entitled "New World Coming." Its conclusion was that, "The United States will be attacked by terrorists using weapons of mass destruction, and Americans will lose their lives on American soil, possibly in large numbers." That the World Trade Center was a likely target was also clear -- it had already been attacked once in 1993. So it wasn't so much blindness, I suspect, but an entirely understandable inability to imagine the precise tactic Al Qa'eda would employ.