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Month: May 2023
THE WORLD TRADE CENTER AS IT WAS
Photo by Documerica on Unsplash
I know what you’re all thinking. How could he possibly be writing about the towers?
It is truly difficult to think about the world trade center towers, having watched them crumble while looking out the window of an office down the hall from mine on Hudson Street. Like so many, almost 25 years later I cannot watch movies or tv depicting that day without a physical reaction.
This is not about that day. This is about working in Tower 2 only a few years after the building opened.
I went to work for the State of New York in 1972 at 1855 Broadway (61st Street). In ’73 we moved to Tower 2 which was filled with State offices. Tower 1 was populated with private companies.
The towers rose over a concourse filled with subway access, banks, stores and places to eat. I traveled by the Number One train, almost to the end of the line, to be dropped alongside the towers.
222 West 83rd had an elevator but nothing like these. My office was on 67 which required an express to 44 and a local for the rest of the trip. The express was called by most of us the “cattle car” which filled with an awful lot of people and shook the whole trip.
The elevators were in the central core of the building which we were told was a concrete bathtub designed to keep the Hudson River out. There were also “closets” which backed on to the core which held phone and electric cables. These closets breached the floors and contained fire stops where cables passed through the slab.
According to an FDNY report, a fire which damaged several floors in Tower 1 was made worse by the failure of someone who had worked in closets to return the fire stops, allowing fire to spread vertically and then burst out of the closets. This fire was discovered by a worker in Tower 2 who saw the flames in Tower 1 while working at night.
Most of us occupants of Tower 2 didn’t even know that it had occurred.
In my time in the Tower, I served as Fire Warden for my floor. I learned many things including how to get executives moving (it’s like herding cats) and that two floors up or down, depending on where the fire was located, should be enough protection.
I felt safe in that building that swayed (you could feel it on 67) in high winds; we had regular fire drills, our own police force (Port Authority Police) and never thought about possibly having to walk down 67 flights of stairs.
The Narcotic Addiction Control Commission (NACC) research division (downstate office) was situated in a corner of the floor. I shared an office with three (I think) other research staff. We came from all over the City. We also traveled all over the City visiting NACC facilities. There was even one on Staten Island in the Arthur Kill section. It was built in the kill zone of the two huge natural gas storage tanks. It was also hard to get to but also a relatively new facility where drug addicts were incarcerated. It was later, like other NACC sites, turned over to the Department of Correctional Services for use as a prison.
The years I worked in the Towers were joyful. So much was new and the neighborhood which included the concourse had so much to offer.
I left in 1976 having been laid off just in time to go to rabbinical school. When I returned there was, of course, no job and it was many months before I found something at the Vera Institute of Justice where I worked on a project for the NYS Department of Corrections as part of team that built a furlough system for incarcerated persons.
Don’t miss the book-here’s the amazon link
Also available at Barnes&Noble
Please feel free to communicate with Ken@leavingwest83rdstreet.com
Leaving West 83rd Street 