September 11: The WTC and Me

It was the third Saturday of October in 1988. I had flown to New York City earlier in the week, to interview for a couple of radio jobs. It was my first time in New York City.

I'd spent the previous four days interviewing or getting ready for interviews - and the previous four evenings meandering about Manhattan. I've never been much of a tourist-trap kind of person. But there was one thing I had to do:

I had to go up to the World Trade Center.

I'd seen them, of course; in pictures for decades, and below me as the plane descended out of the clouds heading toward LaGuardia. I thought "If they only had an angled catwalk between them, it'd be an "M", for "Manhattan".

I got off the subway on (I think) Chambers Streets, and looked up. The part that rocked me back on my heels and made me look like a total tourist was not the height, but the bulk, the sheer amount of matter on that big block. I walked along the base of the north tower, almost uncomfortable in being a 6'5 figure along side a 1100 foot wall, awed, staring upwards with my jaw slack and my eyes agog.

I waited in line for an hour as the snake of tourists snaked around the lobby, waiting to get on the elevator; I read a book I'd bought at the Strand bookstore (I was staying on the same block), and macked on a couple of Brooklyn girls that were ahead of me in line. Then, the rocket elevator ride to the top of the building.

It was a gorgeous, 85 degree day; I don't recall a hint of haze, even over Jersey. I could see, it seemed, hundreds of miles in every direction: ships like toys on the Hudson, the Brooklyn waterfront like a menacing black stormfront, the "swamps of Jersey" sitting there somewhere between Hoboken and Newark looking not remotely metaphorical, Queens and the Bronx and Brooklyn all uninterrupted waves of stubbly concrete washing out into Westchester and Lawn Gisland.

Standing on the observation deck near the top of it all, with the whole world stretched out below me, I could understand mankind's addiction to building really, really tall things. It all made sense to me.