The opposition to the World Trade Center on the West Side site came from a lot of different directions. And one was simply the resident businesses of Radio Row, that was a vibrant wholesaling and retailing district that had been implanted there in the 1920s and had a kind of identity that people thought of when they thought of New York in the Lower West Side.

But I think the more forceful and the more deeply controversial aspects of the development of the World Trade Center had to do with the competition between the private sector's development and response to the need for office space, and the tremendous forces and reserves of revenue that the Port Authority had, in order to give them a kind of unfair advantage in competing in the real estate market. And so there were many people within the New York real estate industry who were opposed to the World Trade Center's ten million square feet of new office space flooding the market, because they legitimately feared that that space would throw out of whack the whole commercial private market in real estate in New York.