I visited them in early 1999.
I know this is a very old thread, but the first time I came to New York City in the summer of 2001 and when I saw the twin towers I couldn’t believe it. I was simply in awe of them, and I promised myself I would go back and explore. Less than a year later they were gone forever. 
Wow this is an old thread!
I still get a thrill of seeing them in the background of NYC based shows, where they were not featured, just incidentally in the shot. My wife thinks I’m a bit weird.
I’m a bit like that myself, even though I’ve never been to New York City and never saw them with my own eyes. It’s weird, seeing something that huge on a TV show or in a movie which no longer exists.
I live in New Jersey, and go into and out of NYC quite regularly. I saw those buildings from the bus literally hundreds of times. They were there, representing NYC.
I only went to them once, with my brother’s family.
My nephew complained about the Spiderman trailer with the towers. I told him that everybody should remember the towers and what happened there. Never forget they existed and were destroyed.
I asked a younger nephew once what he knew about the towers. He said “Some planes flew into them.” I told him “Never say it like that. Some PEOPLE hijacked the planes and flew them into the towers.” His eyes got big, his mouth dropped, and finally he asked “Why would they do that?” I said “Because they were evil people who hated our country.” All his life, he thought two planes flying into the towers was an accident!
I lived in Brooklyn for 5 years in the nineties and saw them every day. I remember seeing them while I carried our oldest son around the neighborhood to get him to sleep.
Wow, this is an old thread.
My father in law was a commodities broker, not in NY, but he had friends and we got on one of the trading floors in the WTC. We also used to switch from PATH to the subway often when we were taking our daughter to NY for auditions.
And we went once to the Vista hotel next to the WTC for a Cajun buffet set up by Paul Prudhomme, and stayed here that night since we expected - and did - drink lots of Cajun martinis. We had to show the newbies how to eat crawfish.
I only saw the towers once, from a distance, from a window at Newark Airport. Still impressive enough to realize a year later that something big, and something close to home, was going on.
Wow what an old thread, and it started the night of 9/11.
I grew up upstate, and have been to the top of the Empire State Building when it was tallest in the world, but for some reason my family never went up the WTC towers.
I too like seeing them in old movies and shows. And now the memorial they have there is nicely done.
Good for you, Annie!
My father used to own a small plane* and he took me and my brother on a sight-seeing tour along the Hudson in August 2001. I took a picture of the WTC from the window. Only time I ever got to see it.
*One of the reasons he stopped flying, which I didn’t hear about until years later, was that he was actually up in the air on the morning of 9/11 :eek:.
I know a guy whose brother was in one of the towers, above where the plane hit. They actually managed to connect by phone before the tower went down. Talk about creepy.
I was in the towers many times, once for a work-related formal dinner, and a couple of times to photograph the view from the top. And of course in the lobbies and underground shops. I also took some interesting photos of the towers from the outside.
Two of my former coworkers, both female, worked for Cantor Fitzgerald. One of them had a baby that she usually took to the daycare there. That morning the baby was a little colicky, so she left her at home with her husband. So, though she died, the baby survived. And her husband has since remarried.
I loved the view of the towers at night, coming down on the Westside Highway.
does anybody remember the fighter airplanes flying over Long Island that afternoon and night? (9/11/01)
Oh God, after all these years I’d never heard there was a daycare in the towers.
I visited the Towers a couple of times with my brother on a vacation in the mid-80s. I had my birthday dinner at Windows on The World; what I remember most is getting told I couldn’t take my jacket off at the table.
When we were up on the observation deck on another visit, we saw Billy Crystal up there.
Just remembered something else:
One day, 25 years ago, I was moving to a new apartment in NYC. Everything was packed, my phone was disconnected, and I was waiting for the movers. And waiting. And waiting. Finally I went down to the laundromat on the street level and called the movers from their pay phone. I was told they couldn’t get from Brooklyn to Manhattan, since all the bridges and tunnels were closed. We had to reschedule for the next day.
That’s how I found out about the first bombing in 1993.
Thank you. I don’t want anyone anywhere to forget that this was a deliberate attack.
I went into NYC on Sunday, September 9th to see Broadway on Broadway, a free concert held in Times Square. Mayor Guilliani was there, and he made the statement “Half of the New York City economy is the tourist dollar, and half of the tourist dollar is spent on Broadway shows.”
It took Broadway 2 years to recover from 9/11.
When our family sailed into NY in 1971 (after spending a year in Switzerland we had too much stuff to fly with) we saw them for the first time. Holy shit, who ordered them? My wife who grew up in Brooklyn was especially astonished.
My next experience with the WTC was on Feb. 26, 1993. I was walking from my daughter’s apartment on E. 21st in Manhattan to meet my brother for lunch. He worked in a building just south of the WTC plaza–Banker’s Life Building I think it was called. I was walking down Broadway and, at around 12:30, I strolled down Dey St. to Greenwich St., the east side of the plaza where I was astonished to see a pair of fire engines heading in opposite directions. There was also one totally gridlocked on Dey St. In the meantime smoke was coming out of a window at maybe the 20th storey. I got my brother (they didn’t allow visitors into the building except to second floor security, but they called him) and we stood outside his building and watched people streaming out of the building, but it was lunch time so we thought nothing of it. Then my wife and daughter arrived and we went off to lunch. We had no idea of the bombing until later that day. Just a little taste of what would come. My brother’s building was, I believe, a total loss. But he had died in 1999 so never knew of 9/11.
Although I am a native New Yorker, I was only in the WTC once. I visited the observation deck in around 1975 with my girlfriend at the time, who wanted to take a couple of young relatives there. I always wanted to go to Windows on the World but never got around to it. But I saw them from street level many times.
To be honest, I was never enamored of them architecturally. Their rectangular shape was boring compared to the soaring Empire State and Chrysler Buildings, which are my idea of what a skyscraper should be. But they were certainly iconic of New York.
A friend of my brother had a job interview in one of the buildings the morning of 9/11 but overslept and missed it. My brother worked on Wall Street at the time, and bought something at a show at the WTC the evening before. On 9/11 he came out of the subway stop there on his way to work after the first plane hit but before the second. He went on to work, where they ended up on lockdown all day. To get home, he had to walk up to 42nd Street to catch a subway home since the system had been shut down in lower Manhattan. Two of my other brothers worked for the City, for the subways and sanitation, and worked briefly on the cleanup for a few days before it became more systematic.
I only knew one person personally who died in the WTC, a high school acquaintance who had become a fire chief. There were some relatives of friends also, but no one I knew directly.
I was living in Panama at the time, and the first I heard was when the janitor of the building I lived in told me some big building in New York had blown up, but couldn’t tell me anything more. I knew something big was up when I drove in to work and saw the US Embassy surrounded by police. When I got in to work everyone was watching on TV. I tried calling New York to see if my brothers were OK but of course all the lines were busy. I finally got news by calling my sister-in-law upstate.
Most New Yorkers disliked the towers, especially the way they dwarfed the rest of the skyline. But after 9/11, downtown just seemed like a generic city, with nothing distinctive. In spite of their boring shapes, they defined the skyline as distinctively New York.