Before that grim event, the complex was on a roll, full of new construction projects, its desirability as an address unquestioned. Then came the attack on the World Trade Center: residents living in nearby Battery Park City had to be evacuated; many could not return to their apartments for half a year or more; and once they were back, they were forced to deal with ashes, inoperative telephones, and damaged property, worry about toxic air, and bear witness to the solemn excavation at Ground Zero and the uncanny absence of the Twin Towers. THE WORLD TRADE CENTER «N"11111 " MP milium \ мнишЫ >1Щ|И j il|iiiiMlj I Ititlliuti ] IMMliiIil _ UlllillHlii ИШ|1Ш|< MHIHItHt T HE WORLD TRADE CENTER HAD THIS FASCINATING OPACITY: TWO STEELGRAY SLABS STOPPING THOUGHT. THE MORE YOU LOOKED AT IT, THE LESS IT GAVE YOU back. The Twin Towers came out of the minimalist aesthetic of latei96os Donald Judd sculptures: their only decorative adornments were those elongated aluminum Y's, provoking you by their tightlipped abstraction, like the filigreed arches on the windows of mosques, or like a series ot whys. Were the towers clones derived from the DNA of some Platonic ideal? Were they emblematic of containerization, which had destroyed the Port of New York-the container being that standard, infinitely replicable rectangle, everywhere the same height, length, and depth? Shining like aluminum altars, 1,350 feet tall, the Twin Towers were our Stonehenge. Their architect, Minoru Yamasaki, was asked why he made two of them, 'd by side, instead of one gigantic structure, and he is said to have replied (the story may be apocryphal, but it's a good one anyhow) that double the height would have destroyed human scale. I never found them offensive or overbearing, but neither did I love them' they didn't invite dislike, they were wellmannered eighthundred pound gorillas in tuxes, having no need to beat their chests. (When they replaced the Empire State Building in the remake of King Kong, they offered the creature a toosmooth, unvaried fagade to convey precarious mountain perching.) They were at once the most dominant and least assuming facet of the New York skyline: Don't mind me, they said. It took seven years and a billion dollars to build them. Putting together the deal required immense muscle, supplied by David Rockefeller at the Chase Manhattan Bank; his brother Nelson, then governor of New York (who stocked one tower with state workers when the building failed to attract tenants); and the considerable resources of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Austin Tobin, then head of the Port Authority, kept up the masquerade that the spanking new towers were somehow going to be given over to trade and port functions.