THE WTC'S DECLINE AND EXODUS



Talking about "9/11 institutions", what of the WTC complex itself? What was it exactly? Most people in the world are still, I think, under the impression those towering behemoths really were the pride of US bustling capitalism, with shiny modern offices and luscious furniture - and lots of happy tenants. Hence, in order for the public to start accepting that perhaps the WTC towers were empty (and hopefully everyone knows no one can die in an empty building), this basic myth has to be blown apart.

Here are some extracts of "Divided we stand" by Eric Darton (1999) which should be quite illuminating for people who don't know - or cannot come to terms with the notion - that the towers were, in fact a redundant, decrepit and largely vacated ghost structure long before 2001.




(from p.190)
DETAILS: THE PHYSICAL PLANT

Pacing out the periphery of the trade towers in the late 1990s, one nav-
igated a cracked badlands of sidewalk crudely patched with mismatch-
ing cement. The weathered, gray (originally white) Italian marble
paving on the plaza was a spiderweb of cracks, a condition that under-
mined the addition of benches and flowerbeds and the tinkling medley
of new-age harmonics emanating from a score of tiny speakers mounted
beneath Yamasaki's arcades. Construction equipment and barricades
around the site appeared to have been deployed and then abandoned
by a retreating army.

And up in the towers, where asbestos removal was still under way,
a host of details pointed toward a rift opening up within the trade cen-
ter itself. In 1985, when New York State moved most of its offices out,
Dean Witter consolidated its operations in twenty-four floors of Tower
2 under a twenty-year lease. Visiting the brokerage and investment
firm's offices and cafeterias, one invariably found them spotlessly
maintained. But on adjacent floors, particularly those with multiple
tenants, the paint was dingy, the carpets were stained, fixtures re-
mained broken, and burned-out fluorescent lights went unreplaced, as
did discolored ceiling tiles. And the listing of a company on the direc-
tory did not reliably indicate that a company was still there.

And who indeed was there, inhabiting the self-proclaimed heart of
world trade? In 1966, as the PA was bulldozing Radio Row, the City
Planning Commission reported that "the prime objective of the WTC is
to simplify and expand international trade by centralizing and consoli-
dating within the Center essential world trade services and activi-
ties.... The Center will contain only government agencies and private
firms which play a part in international marketing and in the adminis-
trative processing of world trade. " Yet according to its own
1993 occupancy survey, the Port Authority found that trade service and
import-export tenants accounted for only 5 percent of its leases.

The Port Authority closed out the 1990s with a stream of press re-
leases announcing the rental of unimaginably huge quantities of trade
center office space to "cutting-edge" firms like Sun Microsystems. Yet
around the complex a million square feet stood empty, and the build-
ings originally intended as great catalyzing chambers of world trade
were, by degrees, transforming into a kind of disjunctive real estate
layer-cake. One story above the carpeted, wood-paneled offices of a
Japanese securities firm, a group of artists filled bare walls with boldly
colored images and hung sculptures from the exposed ceiling girders of
a vast echoing cavern. As part of a Lower Manhattan Cultural Council
program that turned some of the vacant space in the towers over to
artists rent-free, 40,000 square feet of concrete floor lay paint-
spattered and strewn with the raw materials of a creative urge that has
never been easily reconciled with the imperatives of a bottom line.


On page 204, Eric Darton mentions what is defined as 'the modest economy boost'
of the WTC1993 bombings (I kid you not!) which allowed to relocate
350 bombed-out trade center tenants into vacant office space nearby...



from p. 204

In January 1996, Governor Pataki announced that he was moving
the trade center's last state tenant, the governor's office itself, to cheaper,
more convenient space in midtown.

ACCENTUATE THE POSITIVE

The February 1993 blast in the basement of the World Trade Center
killed 6 people, injured 1,000 others, displaced 50,000 workers, and
threw 900 Vista Hotel and Windows on the World employees out of
work, but it also provided a modest boost for the regional economy.
This, at any rate, was the conclusion the Port Authority came to in an
April 1993 report released six weeks after the bombing.

(...)

For the agency, this silver lining was due in part to the ease with
which the 350 bombed-out trade center tenants could be moved into
abundant vacant office space nearby. Breathing an almost palpable
sigh of relief, then-PA chair Richard Leone noted that relocating ten-
ants would have been far more protracted and expensive had the ex-
plosion occurred in the boom year of 1985.



In other words, may I tentatively presume that the 1993 bombings helped scare the sh#t out of the last remaining WTC tenants and make them get the hell outta there? You should also know that the official line (post-2001) was that "in September 2001 the WTC towers were at 95% capacity and had 400 tenants". Could that possibly have been a ...ehrm...a lie?

In any case, the material in Darton's book written in 1999 informs us that:
- After the 1993 bombings, 50,000 workers were displaced and 350 tenants were relocated outside the WTC.
- At the end of the nineties, " a stream of press releases announced the rental of unimaginably huge quantities of trade center office space."
So, this begs the question: Could they possibly have "re-populated" the WTC towers with a string of unimaginably phony press releases?