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01.
Prelude / 8:07 AM |
06.
8:39 AM |
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01.
Prelude / 8:07 AM |
06.
8:39 AM |
8:39 AM
Donatello popped out of the janitor’s closet wearing the closest thing he could put together in a hurry resembling a makeshift janitorial jumpsuit. His get-up was complete with soiled boots, a beanie, and a glue-on beard, and a nametag/identification card on a necklace he found stored away. Accepting that his outfit was about as good as it was going to get (barring prosthetics that there was simply no time for) he had managed to slip his way into the South Tower of the 1,368 foot tall World Trade Center. He moved just past the main reception.
Don had never actually known where Chang Lao worked until then, never wanting to pry. This fact forced him to break into his friend’s briefcase and dig out his office address. He was sure the kid wouldn’t mind, not if as much was at stake as he had made it sound like an hour earlier.
He gazed around him and admired the expanse of the reception hall, giving a wistful sigh. Don was something of a student of New York’s history and had always regretted never getting a chance to visit the World Trade Center.
Now is a good a time as any, he thought with a smile.
The twin towers of the World Trade Center were surely more than just buildings. As Don understood it, they were proof of New York’s belief in itself. Built at a time when New York’s future seemed uncertain, the towers restored confidence and helped bring a halt to the decline of lower Manhattan. Brash, glitzy, and grand, they quickly became symbols of New York.
Well before Donatello’s time, the World Trade Center was conceived in the early 1960s by the Downtown-Lower Manhattan Development Association to revitalize the seedy radio row dominated by electronic stores. Chase Manhattan Bank chairman David Rockefeller, founder of the development association, and his brother, New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, pushed hard for the project, insisting it would benefit the entire city.
In 1962, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey began plans to build the center. Minoru Yamasaki and Associates of Michigan was hired as architect. Eventually, Yamasaki decided on two huge towers. Critics in the old papers Don had browsed at local libraries charged that a modern monolith would rob New York of character, ruin the skyline, disrupt television reception, and strain city services. However, the project was approved and construction began in 1966.
In order to create the 16-acre World Trade Center site, five streets were closed off and 164 buildings were demolished. Construction required the excavation of more than 1.2 million cubic yards of earth, which was used to create 23.5 acres of land along the Hudson River, now part of Battery Park City in lower Manhattan. During peak construction periods, supposedly three thousand five hundred people worked at the site. A total of ten thousand people worked on the towers; sixty died during its construction.
The North Tower was opened in December, 1970 and the South Tower in January, 1972; they were dedicated in April, 1973. They were the world’s tallest buildings for only a short time, since the Sears Tower in Chicago was completed in May, 1973.
Four smaller buildings and a hotel, all built nearby around a central landscaped plaza, completed the complex. The mall at the World Trade Center, which was located immediately below the plaza, was the largest shopping mall in lower Manhattan. The six basements housed two subway stations and a stop on the PATH trains to New Jersey.
Some fifty thousand people worked in the buildings while another two hundred thousand visited or passed through each day. The complex was so expansive it was even given its own zip code.Before he could continue reflecting on his extensive WTC trivia, Don suddenly felt a uniformed African American woman’s gaze firmly on him as he stepped around the corner from reception. He stopped, and made eye contact only briefly. She was coming closer.
"MacPherson," Don shouted hoarsely. He made a cough, fumbling for the name badge hung around his neck. Not facing the woman, he lifted it toward her and showed her the card. "I’ll be outta here in a jiffy... thought I’d get an early start today." Hoping that would suffice, he kept moving.
"All right, you take it easy... Mack?" he heard the young woman’s voice behind him. "You look awful..." She didn’t sound either entirely convinced or concerned at that point, but he quickly put some distance between them just the same.
Moving nonchalantly amongst the traffic of business-suited men and women so as not to appear out of place, he made his way to a maintenance door. He double-checked to make sure the coast was clear — his disguise would hold up on a glance but a closer look and he would surely be made — and ventured in.
A flight of stairs were in front of him.
"Ah, good. Stairs it is," Don said with a sigh, beginning up. "Damn, Lao... why is it you have to work on the sixty-fifth floor? Don’t you have to climb a corporate ladder first or something? Start you off in the basement or something?"
Grudgingly, but none the less determined, Donatello continued up the stairs. Best case, he could be in Lao’s office within ten minutes, leave the briefcase with Lao’s secretary — Don figured anybody who’s anybody in this place has probably got one and Lao seemed to be a somebody — along with a message illustrating the urgency in which he should get it, and be out with a quickness.
"Ooph!"
As he made it to something like the fifty-fourth floor, his footing abruptly gave way. Before he could even stop and wonder if he’d slipped or had tripped over something, a thunderous quaking and almost deafening thunderclap hit him like a ton of bricks.
"What in the..."
As the sensation passed, Donatello gathered himself and got back to his feet. Peering out the nearby window, at first all he could see was a thick blanket of the blackest smoke he could imagine wafting away from view on the wind. A gigantic hole had been torn into the side of the North Tower, red embers burning like pyres within its expanse as smoke continued to billow out.
He felt his knees getting weaker as he continued to view. Strange as it was, he found himself unable to look away.
"Good lord..."
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