IIRC the very reason that al-Qaeda targeted the WTC (twice!) is because of their fame and commercial value. So color me shocked that anyone in their teens or later in America didn’t know these buildings, where they were, and that they were part of the WTC. (I admit I didn’t know that there were 7 WTC buildings until later, because I think one of the smaller ones was a building in one of the Sim City games.)
I’ve never seen the KK remake, but yeah, pretty much any movie set in NYC from the mid 70s to 2001 had the Twin Towers in it. They were as much a NYC icon as the Statue of Liberty, Empire State Building, and definitely in the pantheon of famed tall buildings. I tend to keep track of things like “tallest building in the world” though.
Non-American here.
I had no idea what the twin towers were, in fact, I thought they were talking about the twin towers we have here in my city when I heard it on the radio.
Sure, I knew what the towers were (in the sense that I knew they were the tallest buildings in New York and briefly had been the tallest in the world). That morning, a guy I didn’t know passed me in a hallway and told me a plane had hit “the World Trade Center”. I figured it was an accident, akin to the bomber that smacked the Empire State Building back in '45.
Later on that morning, though, the shit suddenly got real.
same here. i mean, it was a staple of the manhatten skyline in just about every pre-9/11 TV show and movie, compounded with the fact that it was amongst the tallest buildings in the world, the terrorist attack, a lyric by Notorious B.I.G.'s about those attacks…
i think a lot more people (even moreso today because of the kiddies) wouldn’t know that it was previously attacked in 1993. my own sister (born 1996) asked me why “Juicy” had “blow up like the world trade” as a lyric if it was made before 9/11.
No, the car had a boot on it before – Barney had driven it to NY, left it there, and it was covered in tickets. Homer was waiting for the next police officer to come so he could pay his ticket and get the boot off of it. But then he drank too much crab juice, left to pee, and the guy came and left while he was in the bathroom. (That’s probably my favorite episode)
I knew what the WTC buildings were but don’t recall hearing them referred to as “the twin towers” or “towers” until 9/11.
In fact, when my daughter called me at work to tell me the first tower had collapsed, it didn’t sink in that she meant the entire building had collapsed. I had always thought of “tower” as not the whole building but as the top part of a building – like a tower in a castle, or like the top stories of the Smith Tower Building in Seattle, which have a steeple kind of look to them.
26, Arkansas. I’d never even heard of either the World Trade Center or the Twin Towers. Yet, when my choir director interrupted our early morning rehearsal to tell us about it, I still knew it was a big deal somehow. I know that, even in our small podunk town, and it being a public high school, there were rumors that we were going to be next. People were too upset to think straight.
German here, 33 when the towers fell, never been to the U.S… For me, the WTC had been one of the iconic sights of NY as long as I can think back, just like the Statue of Liberty or the Empire State Building, though I didn’t know the term “Twin Towers” or the fact that the whole complex consisted of more than the two towers before 9/11.
Yes I knew what they were. They were famous for their height in the USA. I believe most American’s knew what they were if they were adults at that time.
