September 8, 2011 • 43 mins
The World Trade Center was once a global symbol of progress. Since the attacks of Sept. 11, the area has undergone a massive rebuilding process. Chuck and Josh take a look at the World Trade Center, its memorial and its symbolism in this special episode.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to Stuff You Should Know
from House Stuff Works dot Com? Hey, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with me as always is
Charles W. Chuckers Bryant, and that makes this a very
(00:23):
um congested episode of Stuff you Should Know, right, Yeah,
we were just reminiscing about the uh, what was it
eight or nine? I don't remember, probably oh nine when
Josh was sick for a like I said, he was
sick for a season, and that's really not too far off. Yeah,
but you mean recently pointed out that I wasn't sick
at all last year, and I don't think I've ever
(00:43):
not been sick for a year. So it has to
do probably with taking better care of myself, not smoking.
Probably I get the stomach thing. I don't usually get
regular sick. Yeah, you do get stomachs ye. Man. It's
not even like a bug. It's like a staff of
actual or a bowl of the stomach or something horrible
like that. It just gross. So I are you willing
(01:06):
to muddle through this one with me sounding like this?
I think people can forgive that we needed to get
this one out in time for the September eleventh anniversary. Yeah,
the tenth anniversary of the September eleventh attacks, UM on
the World Trade Center. Uh, the attack Uh, well the
plane that went down Flight ninety three in Pennsylvania. Have
(01:26):
you seen that movie? Um? And then uh, the attack
on the Pentagon. UM. The tenth Anniversity is going to
be a big sad, soul in occasion. You know, it
seems like the last couple of years it's been you
know it September eleventh and this this is a time
to stop and reflect for a moment. But I think
(01:47):
it's all gonna come barreling back on the tenth anniversary. Yeah,
I think people have been anticipating that. And the opening
of the of the memorial, which we're gonna talk about,
has a lot to do with that, obviously it does.
It's gonna officially dedicated and opened on September eleventh, two
thousand eleven. Yeah, and then um, the museum, which we'll
also talk about, will be open the following year, I
(02:08):
think on September eleven, two twelve. And that thing sounds
pretty amazing. Yeah, I'm very excited about going to these. Um,
maybe excited it's not the right word. No, I'm excited
if I'm looking forward to it. Yeah, there's nothing. It
doesn't mean you're flippant about it. No, I'm excited to
see them as well. That's okay, Okay, thanks. I get
(02:28):
excited every time I go to those things. It's a
good place for remembrance, Josh, Yes, that's Memorials make an
excellent spot for remembrance. Let's talk about the spot where
the memorial, the World Trade Center Memorial, which what which
is what we're talking about, is going to be situated
the original spot where the World Trade Center complex was situated.
(02:50):
Beginning work started in the sixties and was completed in
I think ninety three on the towers. I think work
for the whole World Trade Center complex wasn't completed until yeah,
fourteen years, fourteen years after the towers that were completed,
So it was like nineteen yeah something. Yeah, right, Um,
(03:11):
But tell me about the tell me about the spot,
the World Trade Center spot. It's a very um ambitious project.
It was Josh, seven buildings total um spanning sixteen acres.
It's a lot of room and each tower itself, I
think had a footprint of an acre. Yeah right, yeah. Uh.
They had office space to the tune of about uh
(03:33):
fifty thousand total workers in about thirty five thousand, and
those were split among four hundred and thirty companies in
the buildings. It was ten million square feet of office space.
It's incredible, it was. It was originally UM. Speaking of ambition,
I read an article called The Height of Ambition. It
was a two thousand to New York Times article and
it's required reading for anybody. It's really good. It's all
(03:56):
about the construction, it's about the attacks. It's a really comprehensive,
great article. But they were saying like that there was
no way they were going to go UM any less
than ten million square feet when they decided to there,
like that's it, We're doing ten million, and that's so
that's such an enormous amount of office space that other
(04:18):
real estate developers in the city were like, that's going
to like imbalance the market. That's so much, it's gonna
flood this place all at once. Yeah. I remember at
the time, uh, you know, in September eleven, thinking that
the death Hole was gonna be like ten people because
I knew how many people work there, and it would
(04:38):
have been had it had the buildings not stayed up
for um an hour or so, or had it been
an hour or so later, right once people were all
in there. Yeah, because you said there's about fifty thousand
people that worked at the World Trade Centers UM, and
then there's another maybe UM seventy thousand, forty thousand to
seventy thousand people who could muted through because there was
(05:01):
a subway station underneath in the path train station and
the mall, and people coming to have lunch with like
their husband or wife or whatever. So seventy thousand additional
people passed through that that complex every day. Indeed, Josh,
if we're talking size, we've got a couple of stats.
The North tower UM, the original World Trade Center one,
(05:23):
although there's a new one which we're gonna talk about, uh,
hundred sixty eight feet uh and then seventeen thirty feet
with its large antenna. And then the South tower was
about six ft shorter than the North tower, which I
thought found interesting. I wonder if that was a I
wonder why they did that. Maybe the bedrock was six
(05:44):
ft six ft lower, has to be something like that.
I don't think it was I'm sure they got to
the final measurement and we're like, you have to be
kindding right, because they were both a hundred ten stories.
It's not like w C t C two was short
changed the floor or a half floor. Two hundred eight
thousand one metric tons. Yeah, and one of them. It's
(06:08):
tough to find comparisons for this, but um, it's an
Afford Explorer. These each one weighed about equivalent to a
hundred and seventy two thousand Ford Explorers. That's heavy. That's yeah,
that's a heavy building. And that's a lot of weight.
And we'll we'll get to that weight. And what happened
to a lot of that weight coming up shortly to right?
(06:30):
Uh So. One of the cool things that you found
was originally when they planned the towers, they didn't know
what kind of sway that a person could take. Let's say,
if you're working on story like this towers swaying back
and forth in the wind, what kind of that would
do to people? Yeah, no one had ever These were
(06:51):
when they were built, the tallest structures in the world.
You can't just have office space up there that people
are getting sick on because they're dizzy, right, because no
one would rent it out. But they didn't know that
it um. They didn't know, well, maybe somebody could take
six ft of sway on either side. They had no idea,
maybe people can take like almost no sway. So they
had a guy in Eugene, Oregon who was a psychologist,
(07:12):
basically purchased an office building, put parts of it up
on Jack's and like test people. He had him come
in for I exams, but was really testing them to
see how much sway they could put up with him
found not much, like a couple of inches either way.
After a couple of minutes of that, the people start
freaking out, get dizzy, get nauseated. So they were like,
(07:33):
you have to do something because your building is going
to sway a lot more than this, that's right, and
you can't have your tenants getting sick. So they built
in shock absorbers that prevented this way. So I think
most people know by now just from breakdown of the
what happened with the collapse, that it was an exoskeleton
design and it was connected with a core steel core
(07:54):
connected it with a hat trust at the top. Yeah,
so you had columns going out on the outside where
they normally would have been put inside, so that opened
up much more office space. So the columns are on
the outside, and there's a steel court in the center
like you said, and it was connected by a hat trust.
They just fit over the top and connected everything to
the center. So it just stabilized the whole thing and
(08:16):
it made it light but very strong. Right. I think
it was about open air inside the building itself, which
has a lot to do with why it collapsed. Um,
there was a police station port authority in New Jersey. Uh,
New York and New Jersey had a police desk, they
had its own uh, they had their own zip code
(08:38):
and eight dedicated mail carriers. Yeah, I couldn't. I'm sure
it's still there. It has to be. The zip it
still has its own zip code, right, one O four eight. Yeah,
I looked that up. Actually, I think they held onto
that zip code and to assign you know, the New
World traits in our complex that same zip code. If
I'm not mistaken, I would hope. So this is a
(08:58):
couple of weeks ago. Yeah, but yeah, eight postal carriers
just for the WTC complex like they worked within. You know,
I guess it's sixteen acres, but it's probably not as
big as your usual beat in New York. I would
I wouldn't think so. No, I think they call it beats.
That's just cops. I wouldn't it no copy, um chuck.
(09:19):
Also these um, just to give another idea of scale, Um,
there were each of the towers themselves. Just the towers
had elevators, each each one had um almost uh well,
almost twenty two thousand windows. And apparently you could have
built a sidewalk standard sidewalk I take it from New
(09:41):
York to Washington, d C. With just the concrete used
in just the towers. So these were massive, colossal structures,
just the towers. The whole complex itself was colossal, but
the tower, it's just the towers are enough to like
get the point across, you know. Well, and all you
ever really hear about still is usually the WTC one
(10:01):
and two. But all of the buildings were eventually raised
the whole complex, right, and um, we should also say that,
you know, everybody kind of came on board. But in
the beginning there were very big detractors to the World
Trade Center projects, including those real estate developers who were like,
this is going to be a drain on the market.
And one of the guys whose named Lawrence Ween, who
(10:23):
was an Empire State building co owner. Right, And he
took out a full page and the New York Times
that had a picture of one of the World Trade
Center towers with a plane flying into it to basically
suggest that this was a hazard to air traffic, right,
And it actually almost came true in one when an
(10:43):
Air Alina's flight just narrowly missed the North tower but
made off. Okay, it was safe, that's right. Yeah. Uh, however,
that was the first attack on the World Trade Center. Uh.
And Islamic Islamistic streamist group detonated about a thousand pounds
of explosives and a rented truck underneath the World Trade
(11:06):
Center and killed six people, injured thousands and they are included,
which I thought was a classy move in the World
Trades and a memorial years later. I never really considered that,
but I thought it was pretty nice thing to do
that That truck left half a football sized football field
sized crater and it apparently rocked the whole building. Like
(11:27):
you think, Well, six people died, It couldn't have been
that big. It was a huge blast. It was just
in the wrong place. But they were trying to take
the building down, you know, yeah, from below, so that UM.
Within a few days or weeks after UM, the February attach,
things were back to business as usual. Governor Andrew Cuomo
was the first to move back into the office building right,
(11:51):
and things were just like I said, business as usual
until the morning of September eleven, two thousand one came
on day a can having four blocks north of the
World Spathe Center. The second building that was hill by
the plane has just completely collapsed. The entire building has
just collapsed, as if the tunolition team set off. When
(12:12):
you see the old nilition to the Gold buildings down
on itself and it is not there anymore, it should be.
It collapsed, collapse. The whole building has collapsed. So that
pretty much speaks for itself. I think, where were you
that morning? I had just gotten back from New York.
(12:32):
Actually I was there for vacation and a Radiohead concert
and in New Jersey or actually it was Liberty State
Park and flew home on September like the seventh or something,
so I was in it. Actually I was living in
l A. But I flew back to Atlanta and then
got stuck in Atlanta because everything was grounded. So I
(12:57):
was in my friend Big John's where house and Big
country Boy, and he woke me up up here. Yeah.
Remember it was like one of the towers has been hit,
and you just when I started watching CNN and figuring
out what was going on, like this is not an accident. Yeah,
I think both of us kind of came to the
(13:18):
conclusion pretty quick too. So I hung out in his
warehouse all day, only watched it on TV basically, and
you know, yeah, and I have to say, like it
didn't sink in as hard um then as it did
when we were researching this for this podcast. Man, I
was watching just find finding that clip we just played.
(13:38):
I watched about like an hour of it does it Happened?
Coverage and it was just it really drew me in
and just depressed me like crazy. But like it got
through to me finally after ten years, like it's really
hit me how how huge this is. Yeah. I'd plowed
through a bunch of videos this week too and last week,
(14:00):
and it was you know, because I hadn't researched it
for a long time, after probably since like two thousand three,
than many years of not even really considering it much
and then all of a sudden it's all back on
and coming up this September, and I think this being
older too, especially for me being an older you know,
ten years older, and it's gotten through to me a
(14:21):
lot more like, yeah, God, how are you you were
in your early twenties, mid twenties. I was like, God,
that's crazy, Yeah something just a little kid, so chuck.
We mentioned, um, how there could have been tens of
thousands more people who could have died had the buildings
(14:41):
not stayed up. And there were a couple of big
questions after the collapse of the World Trade Center towers um.
Number one, why did they fall They didn't have to
fall um? And number two, why didn't they just fall
over immediately? And the answer to the second question is
that does nine that exoskeleton connected to a central steel
(15:04):
core by a hat trust could have kept that thing
up indefinitely. Well, the reason they fell was a fatal flaw. Right.
Those steel columns that make up the exoskeleton tapered um
at the top because they had to support less weight,
making the whole structure lighter, requiring less steel. Right, So
(15:24):
the planes when they flew into the higher floors. They
were flying into steel columns that were only as thin
as like a quarter inch across, so they just severed them. Yeah,
the problem is with the true fatal flow is the
heat from the fire though. Yeah, I read a big
article yesterday on this about this physicist Um basically explained
(15:48):
how they came down to sort of rebut the idiots
who say that it was a controlled demolition by the
US government and like steel can't get that hot and melting,
blah blah blah, And he explained the difference between heat
and temperature. And I wish I was smart enough to
relay that now, but I would just advise, just google,
(16:09):
like why did they collapse? And there's a really good
article on that. So it's one of the first hits.
For our purposes, we're gonna take it on face value
that the heat from the raging fires Um created uh
enough high enough temperature that the steel within a steel
melted and the weight distribution throughout the exoskeleton was even
(16:31):
further compromised until these things started going from what the
connection to the hat trust was snapped, and then that
was that there was no support any longer. So these
floors obviously could support the weight of the floors on
top of them. Because they had been up since nineteen
seventy three, they can support the static weight. When the
floors start collapsing on one another, it becomes moving heavier
(16:55):
weight and it's created a domino effect essentially. Right, it
just plowed right into the floors beneath and picked up
more and more steam as it went. Apparently the material
from the highest floors. By the time they reached the ground,
we're traveling about a hundred and twenty miles, and that
could have been even faster, according to that physicist, and
he said the fact that they fell straight down was
(17:17):
uh sensible and fortunate because they could have swayed and
toppled over, which you know stories falling to the left
or to the right is going to take out do
a lot more damage. Obviously. Well, the South tower did
do some damage. The North Tower came down almost completely
in its footprint, and it just compacted itself into this
(17:38):
dense acre size square of debris that went from street
level seventy underground to the bedrock and just filled its
own footprint almost completely. Um the the other towers UM
three and seven were completely trashed. UM Tower six was
(17:59):
still intact, but it had a huge chunk of the
North tower against it. UM, and that the one they
had to take out for those reasons, Like otherwise it
might have been okay. That one they actually did demolish.
So the Yeah, the whole site kind of just became
a loss. UM there I guess an estimated three hundred
(18:21):
thousand tons of scrap metal were generated, most of it
sold the Indian China. UM, and there was a big hubbub.
I didn't know this, did you? Did you hear about
this when it happened. Um, the mafia diverted like two
fifty five tons of scrap metal to its own junkyards
for profit UM and got caught pretty quickly because the
(18:43):
FBI was on that case. But UM they after that,
there were I think a hundred thousand truckloads of debris
trucked out to UM uh the landfill in New Jersey.
I believe it's called Fresh Kill Landfill UM and UH
those all got police escorts after the FBI found out
(19:04):
the mafia was diverting scrap metal, right obviously, Yeah, that's
a good move. Uh. The cleanup was very quick. I
remember at the time thinking that it happened way quicker
than I thought it would. Well, yeah, they were. They
were like, this is gonna take a year, maybe two,
maybe three exactly. It took eight year or nine months. Yes,
(19:25):
it also came in under budget. Uh. They thought it
was gonna cost a couple of billion dollars and that
was clearly overinflated because it only costs six and fifty
million UH to clean up, which is a lot of money,
but nothing compared to to bill a lot less. UM.
They did get a little criticism because they thought they
(19:46):
kind of hurried the clean up a little too much.
Considering the potential toxic materials found at the site. A
lot of people thought, you know, maybe we should take
our time here, study this a little more, or see
what's what we have to deal with before we start
sending people down there. Well, one group called it the
most the worst toxic site in our history. Did he
(20:09):
mean Nation's history? I don't know. It's a good question.
It could be Nation, New York World, I don't know.
There was a lot of toxic stuff um. For example,
two hundred thousand pounds of lead plus cadmium from the
fifty thousand pecs in the World Trade Center offices right, UM,
(20:29):
mercury from the fluorescent lights. There apparently about half a
million fluorescent tube lights that all had mercury in them
to work. UM. Have you heard of polycystic aromatic hydrocarbons?
They're apparently, um they caused laryngeal cancer, UM and a
couple of other cancers. And they come from partially burned
(20:52):
UM fossil fuels. What else chuck asbestos, lots of asbestos,
benzene um die ox in from oil and fuel. So
not the kind of stuff you want to be breathing in.
And people found you know, years afterward, we're getting sick,
a lot of the first responders getting sick and dying.
Even Yeah, the bass player from um TV on the
(21:15):
radio was the first responder, and he came down with
cancer and like in his late thirties or something and died,
that's right. And within the last year. I didn't did
I know that he was a first responder as as
what what was his uh what kind of responder was?
You do know? I don't remember, but he was. He
was the first responder to the ground zero. So they've
(21:37):
there was a uh combined payout of six d and
twenty five million dollars to some of the first responders
and cleanup workers after a lawsuit was filed, and that
was just that was. They came to that settlement within
the last year or two. Right, Yeah, they've been hammering
that out forever. Yeah. And then there was the Zadroga Bill,
which is massive. Seven point were billion dollars in compensation
(22:02):
for everything from like economic impact to health. But there's
a big well there's a big outcry because they didn't
include cancer. Yeah, they couldn't find a definite link. Um.
I mean this is one of those where I say,
throw it in there, like cover everything. Apparently that's not
(22:22):
the case. Well no, but it's left open so that
it can be amended to include cancer later, like if
somebody's like, here's your definitive right study on it that
shows the link. But apparently the link is enough for
people who are engaged in like personal litigation. Uh, they've
been generally successful and just doing New York. Okay, just
(22:43):
not a class action kind of thing. Well just not
there's a Droga bill, got you, yeah, Okay, Well, uh,
No one died during the cleanup of the Ground zero,
which is pretty amazing considering what a dangerous place. It was.
You know, there were like huge voids that were covered up,
you know by things that uh you know, big gaps
and holes that you could easily fall into. Yeah, like
(23:06):
you know those tiger traps. Yeah, where it's just kind
of covered with a little bit of twigs or leaves.
There were like seventy ft drops that looked like they
were stable, solid rubble or whatever. But yeah, there's a
picture of a huge earth mover like sliding down with
a guy and it's like, oh my god. Yeah, I'm
really surprised no one died during that clean up. Yeah,
sixty men died building the thing. Wow, that was the seventies. Uh.
(23:32):
So that brings us Josh to ten years later. Yea,
the nine eleven Memorial and Museum, which we both said
we're excited to go see because it's a pretty amazing design.
To me, they hit all the right notes, and a
lot of people have complained about the actual building, The
New World Trade Center one has been beaten up pretty
(23:53):
badly in the press. A lot of people think they
should have just mimicked the original twin towers, except maybe
a little higher, as like a show of our strength
as Americans, right, with the giant birden exactly with Donald
Trump on top looking the bird. But Trump was one
of the ones actually who hates the new uh w
(24:14):
TC one and it is uh well, originally it was
called the Freedom Tower. Could not smack of the Bush
era more. Yeah, they changed that that or um world
War two when we started calling French fries freedom fries.
Was that World War two? And that came about again
after this. Yeah. And then also um sauerkraut was called
(24:36):
liberty cabbage. That's just crazy jingoistic, you know. Yeah. Uh So,
like I said, Trump is is not a big fan
of the design. He or the architect who designed w
TC one, the new one. What's his name, Daniel um Oh,
Daniel Lipskin? Is that him? He's been much battered. Yeah,
I kind of feel bad for the guy, you know,
(24:57):
he's trying to trying to do a good job. I'm
sure it is going to be the tallest building in
the US after it's completed, at a symbolic height of
seven hundred and seventy six ft sev Seventeen seventy six,
obviously for the you know, USA all the way, seventeen
(25:18):
seventy six, very important day in our history and all
the buildings are going to be done between six and
uh w TC. One is right now at the eight floor,
which is they're they're close to done. How many floors
is it going to be? UM? I think well, part
(25:42):
of what people are complaining about is the top third
of this building is just hollow space, so a lot
of people complained about that. So I don't know how
many actual floors. It may be pretty close then if
they're the eightieth floor now, and I think they've concrete
it up to this of any second floor, glassed it
up to the fifty three and then seven. World Trade
(26:05):
Center was UM opened in two thousand six. That's already there.
But the one that's that's being dedicated UM well in
a few days by the time this thing comes out
is the World Trade Center Memorial. Right, There's been a
couple of other memorials, like the Sphere, which is Fritz
(26:26):
Koenig Um sculpture that was just iconically associated with UM.
The World Trade Center was found in the rubble. It
basically dusted off and put in Battery Park with an
eternal flight, and then there was tribute and lights which
are the two beams and anybody who's ever seen Spike
Lee's twenty is familiar with those UM and those are
brought out every year. That's really cool looking. It is
(26:48):
very cool. It's like UM forty four. Each tower is
made up of forty four UM xenon searchlights focused into
a single column that just shoots right up into space.
Know if they're gonna do that still, Yeah, I wondered too,
they should do that every year. I agree, just for
that one day, you know, Yeah, I think it'd be cool,
but they, you know, to get a more permanent exhibit.
(27:10):
UM design competition was held in two thousand three by
the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, Right, and uh, it was international,
so people from all over the world submitted design. It's
like a ton of them, Yes, sixty three countries in total,
five thousand, two hundred one submissions. And the guy who
won for the memorial went to Tech Georgia. Tech's Yeah,
(27:34):
and he was working as a New York City Housing
Authority architect until he won. And then I imagine he's
making a little bit more money now at Handel Architects
as a partner. Yeah. His name is Michael Aharin. That's
how to get a job a partnership pretty quick in
as an architect. I think that's how to make your
career look at like Maa Lynn, Yeah, who did the
Vietnam Memaria was the first thing she ever did? Is
(27:55):
a yeah, well, I think, yeah, yeah, have you ever
seen the documentary her very neat how'd she come up
with the idea? She talks all about it, like the
first third of the documentaries about that and like what
she went through, Um, like there's a big problem that
she was Asian, you know, um that kind of thing. Um,
but I don't remember. I don't remember if it just
(28:17):
came to her what, But she talks about it. I mean,
that was perfect and its simplicity totally is perfect. But
it was very much taken the wrong way, as I
think there's always a group of people who take a
memorial the wrong way. Although and I think Michael Air
has been criticized, but I don't think anybody's like this
is a smack in the face to the people who died,
(28:38):
And yeah, I think it sounds pretty amazing. Tell them
about it. Well, the centerpiece, it's gonna um the memorial itself.
There's a museum underneath underground, which we'll get to but
the Memorial Plaza is about eight acres of what will
be forest land UM with the two original footprints of
(28:59):
the World Trade Center towers are now intact as fountains waterfalls, Yeah,
the world's largest waterfalls. Two thousand gallons of water I
think per minute flow through these things. And they're these huge, massive,
almost acre sized squares, like you said, that just fill
in the footprints of the of the World Trade Centers
(29:19):
UM and they're just amazing the thing there. We can't
really describe them any better than that because they're that simple.
But unless you see a rendering of them or there's
some really cool architectural animations of them too, um, they're
just they just take your breath away. And they're The
memorial um that Air designed is called reflecting absence UM,
(29:40):
and the whole point is to just kind of show
we're missing something here and we're always going to be
missing something here. Yeah, that's why I thought it was
such a brilliant design. It was not some I don't know,
it just made sense. You know, why build something up
when you can say so much more by creating these
two big voids and then the water flowing. It's all
(30:00):
very symbolic, you know, the recirculating water and living, you know,
breathing life into the city. And the trees or like
sweet gums and oaks. White oaks, yes, swamp white oaks
are there's gonna be like four hundred of them on
the plaza. And the plaza was designed by UM Peter
Walker and partners from Berkeley UM in conjunction with Michael Ahard.
(30:21):
I think that was the submission where these two people
jointly coming up with this plan and he was like,
I am the landscape architect, I need some help, yeah,
or vice versa, you know. Um, but Peter Walker came
up with this idea to you suspended paving systems to
support the white oaks, because um, an urban an urban
tree or a tree in urban forest like this, they
(30:43):
don't live that long. Um. But and the reason why
is because the soil becomes too compact and you have
to have paving for people to walk around on. So
what they came up with was a suspended paving system
which uses like columns and beams like a grid to
create this hollow space that will support pavement but will
also allow routes to go through. So these trees, these
(31:04):
swamp white oaks should thrive and live like many many
decades longer than ones that you know, were just planted
wherever along the street. That's right, and they could potentially
get up to about sixty ft tall, kind of creating
a canopy park. So that was one of the things
they wanted, was was a quiet place, sort of a
retreat from the city where you feel like you're sort
(31:26):
of insulated from from the rest of the city and
the noises of the city and the swamp white oaks also,
Chuck are gonna be brought in UM from all over
the area of New York, but also from places around
UM where Flight ninety three went down in Pennsylvania and
in the DC area that you're gonna have trees from
other nine eleven impacted areas brought I thought that was cool. Yeah,
(31:49):
I read an article on the family who's UM supplied
the trees basically for the project. Yeah, it was pretty cool.
And then also around the reflect thing Absence memorial, they're
going to have UM basically a bronze wall with the
names of all nearly three thousand victims of the and
(32:09):
two thousand one attacks on the World Trade Center. UM
cut into them Yeah, so you can do the little
uh charcoal rubbings on paper if you want. They shine
light through them at night. Uh. They're grouped together by
either where they died or where they worked, or if
there was a special request a group people like with
(32:30):
friends of theirs that worked in the building that they've
done that too, that's cool. So that's kind of cool. Um.
And then probably the most noticeable feature within this little
urban forest, UM is going to be a glass building
that's that forms the atrium or the entryway to the
Memorial museum, that's right. Uh. And the most noticeable feature
of that are going to be these two steel tridents
(32:52):
which um made up the Yeah, they made up the
the exterior that the exo skeleton UM. The the apparently
went up and then at this at the seventy ft mark,
the seventh story, Uh, they split into three and then
they supported steel beams that went all the way up
to the top of the building. Right. So these things
were left standing I think on the north tower. UM.
(33:15):
So they took those off to Kennedy with a bunch
of other artifacts and kept them in a hangar. And
now they've been returned to the site and they built
the atrium around these two things. Yeah, they used a
lot of pieces of the World Trade Center in the
museum itself to partially just you know, remind people and
then also to show again show scale of you know,
I think the tridents themselves are close to a hundred
(33:36):
feet tall nine I think ninety because they branched at
the seventy ftmark and they go up to like the
ninety footmark. So um. And then also check the museum
itself is largely underground. Um, and they're in the footprints
of the World Trade Center towers and parts around them.
(33:57):
But basically the whole thing is set up to give
you an underground down view of how incredibly massive these
buildings were by leaving like the concrete footings any steel
supports that they can um intact and then just all
and I guess playing off the vastness of the space. Yeah,
that had to do with the museum and the design
(34:20):
up top. Two was I think you can in the
museum down below you can stand in between the two
footprints still and uh, they've created a lot of just
open space, it seems like, right. But then there's also
like at the at the corners of the Princess maybe
like some I think there's an aluminum clad volumes whether
it's called to basically give this kind of ghost outline
of the buildings, so to give you an even better
(34:41):
idea of their scale. UM. And all this is underground,
Like we said, the plaza actually above serves as a
green roof to the museum UM, and you go through
the hrium and then you to to get to the
museum itself underground. You go through UM, you go down
a ramp UM and that's very symbolic of the ramp
that was used to clean out the ground zero site.
(35:04):
It was used during construction of the original towers UM.
So it's it's kind of like throwing you back in
time and during the construction and the cleanup UM, which
you know, really marks the history of this site. Those
two things. Yeah, there's a couple of other notable aspects
to the museum that they're going to have. The Survivor stairs,
(35:24):
which if you google that, I mean, they're pretty famous.
They were one of the sets of stairs that you know,
it said hundreds, but I would imagine maybe even thousands
of people used to escape. It was like one of
the only ways out. Yeah, it was along World trade
center six. I think so in two thousand and eight
it was lowered down into the side again for it's
(35:46):
you know, final resting place there in the museum. And
the other big thing is the last column in the
west chamber of the museum. It's going to house this
and it was returned to the site. You might remember
the last column and was where it was one of
the last standing obviously, and that's where people uh decorated uh,
this column with with memories of their loved ones and
(36:07):
and have you seen this person that kind of thing. Right.
They're also gonna have the slurry wall in there, which
was surprisingly intact. They it was. It was an original
huge wall that they built to keep the Hudson from
flooding it. And after the attacks, after the class of
the building, this wall was just standing there. It didn't
have any support, but it was still keeping the Hudson out.
So they reinforced it and rebuilt it. But they took
a sixty two by sixty four foot section of the
(36:29):
slurry wall and it's going to make up a significant
part of the museum itself. This huge man, this must
be enormous under there, because I mean, beyond all these
huge elements. They have all the void open space, so
I'm very much looking forward to going to that. Um
we I think we skipped over the Memorial Glade. UM
in the park above the museum, there is a section
(36:53):
called the Memorial Glade, which is going to be an
open area where they'll have like ceremonies and and things
like that, and a that's surrounded by sweet gums, which
should be autumn red on September eleven, is what they say.
They play it that way, at least the museum itself.
Like the exhibits that they're going to have, they're gonna
(37:15):
have permanent exhibits of artifacts from you know, the clean
up from the rescue from the attacks, um, personal story
pre attacked too. I think they're gonna have obviously some
I'm sure they're going to have some information on there,
like the construction and all that. Yeah, and then probably
the people who did it. Imagine there'll be some information
there yeah. Um. And also they're gonna have some stuff
on the d C in Pittsburgh Losses or not Pittsburgh,
(37:39):
Pennsylvania Losses. But there's um a very controversial exhibit that's
going to be added. It looks like it's going to
be added as far back as um or as recently
as April. That's as far back as I can find
any press. I found something more recently, I think it is.
It's gonna they're going forward with it. Well, um, there
there were there were a lot of human remains found, uh,
(38:03):
and a lot of them were put together and said,
you know, this is this person, this belonged to this person. Um.
But after a while, like the matches ran out. Um
and the Medical Examiner still has over nine thousand pieces
of human remains, and the last match was made in
two thousand nine, So they're kind of losing hope that
they're ever going able to identify who they belong to.
(38:25):
And a lot of people are unidentified at this point. Well,
a lot of the families of the fort of the
victims who haven't been identified, or saying keep trying, don't stop.
Medical Examiner and the people who are running the museum
are saying, no, we have a better place for him.
Why don't we put them in the museum, And they
(38:46):
have it planned to put them behind a quote from
virgil Um that says, no day shell erase you from
the memory of time. And the letters themselves are going
to be made of World Trade Center steel. Um. But
they're you know, a lot of people find the schoolish
and ghastly, like you can't put human remains on display.
And in this article in the New York Times, they
(39:07):
interviewed a lot of curators who are like, it depends,
you know, like you can't just put human remains in
a museum. You're not supposed to do that. But if
it's a memorial on the side of an atrocity, like
Ashwitz has lots of human remains, Um, the Cahmer Rouge
Museum has all sorts of human remains. So this is
museum wise speaking appropriate. But really, I mean, it's up
(39:32):
to your you know, what you think is morally acceptable
or not. Yeah, I think what I read most of
the upset comes from the fact that they were underground
in the museum, and they were supposedly told that they
were going to be kept in a in a tomb
right in the park, above ground, right and away from tourists.
Like this, this plan is to put them right in
(39:53):
the exhibit, like here's some of the remains of the victims.
But there would be tour I mean, I guess there
would be tourist up top as well, But I mean
I see their difference though. Yeah, no, there's a big
difference for sure. But I think just about everybody agrees
they should be kept on the site somewhere. It's just
in what capacity, right, Chuck. Let's say I have a
(40:15):
hundred bucks sitting around and I'm like, I want to
contribute to this memorial. What can I do? You can
buy a cobble stone. I was a little disappointed to
see that the cobble stones weren't engraved, because that's usually
what you do. Yeah, there's a website that links your
cobble stone to your name, so it's not an actual
(40:36):
engrave cobblestone. But you can still donate a hundred bucks,
I will get you a cobble stone on the path
of the plaza itself. Five dollars will get you a
cobble stone on the memorial glade that we told you
about in A thousand bucks will get you one a
granite paper that will be a walkway to the memorial itself,
(40:57):
and that is a nine one on memorial dot org
slash donations, and I imagine you can just donate period
if you want. You'll get your cobblestones but if that's
not important to you, then it's probably good good cause,
I would say. And if you're gonna be in New
York this September eleven, um, the September eleven Memorial will
(41:19):
officially open that day. And if you're going to be
in New York September eleven, two thousand twelve, the Memorial
Museum is expected to be open, then yeah, they're they're
people like our shooting video of the the waterfalls being
tested and stuff out of their office window and it's
um pretty amazing. So UM. We've got a couple of
(41:41):
articles on site. We have how the World Trade Center worked,
or I guess the World Trade Center is what it's called, um,
and it's very comprehensive. I think Tom Harris wrote it,
so you can type a World Trade Center and that
should also bring up how the World Trade Center Memorial works,
which coming soon, right it. It It will be up by
the time this comes out, So yeah, I hope so um.
(42:03):
And again, if you want to learn more about the memorial,
you can go to nine one one Memorial dot org
um and you can donate there too. And uh is
that it? I think this is our nine eleven podcast.
We've been asked by a bunch of people to do one,
and and unless we're inspired to actual yeah, I actually
go over the grizzly details. I would say this will
(42:26):
serve you concur Yeah, I don't know if I want
to do that one. That's all right. Do you want
to send us an email? We'd love to hear from you.
Send it to Stuff Podcast at how stuff works dot com.
(42:47):
Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff
from the Future. Join how Stuff Work staff as we
explore them as promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. Brought
to you by the reinvented two thousand and twelve Camry.
It's ready, Are you
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to Stuff You Should Know
from House Stuff Works dot Com? Hey, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with me as always is
Charles W. Chuckers Bryant, and that makes this a very
(00:23):
um congested episode of Stuff you Should Know, right, Yeah,
we were just reminiscing about the uh, what was it
eight or nine? I don't remember, probably oh nine when
Josh was sick for a like I said, he was
sick for a season, and that's really not too far off. Yeah,
but you mean recently pointed out that I wasn't sick
at all last year, and I don't think I've ever
(00:43):
not been sick for a year. So it has to
do probably with taking better care of myself, not smoking.
Probably I get the stomach thing. I don't usually get
regular sick. Yeah, you do get stomachs ye. Man. It's
not even like a bug. It's like a staff of
actual or a bowl of the stomach or something horrible
like that. It just gross. So I are you willing
(01:06):
to muddle through this one with me sounding like this?
I think people can forgive that we needed to get
this one out in time for the September eleventh anniversary. Yeah,
the tenth anniversary of the September eleventh attacks, UM on
the World Trade Center. Uh, the attack Uh, well the
plane that went down Flight ninety three in Pennsylvania. Have
(01:26):
you seen that movie? Um? And then uh, the attack
on the Pentagon. UM. The tenth Anniversity is going to
be a big sad, soul in occasion. You know, it
seems like the last couple of years it's been you
know it September eleventh and this this is a time
to stop and reflect for a moment. But I think
(01:47):
it's all gonna come barreling back on the tenth anniversary. Yeah,
I think people have been anticipating that. And the opening
of the of the memorial, which we're gonna talk about,
has a lot to do with that, obviously it does.
It's gonna officially dedicated and opened on September eleventh, two
thousand eleven. Yeah, and then um, the museum, which we'll
also talk about, will be open the following year, I
(02:08):
think on September eleven, two twelve. And that thing sounds
pretty amazing. Yeah, I'm very excited about going to these. Um,
maybe excited it's not the right word. No, I'm excited
if I'm looking forward to it. Yeah, there's nothing. It
doesn't mean you're flippant about it. No, I'm excited to
see them as well. That's okay, Okay, thanks. I get
(02:28):
excited every time I go to those things. It's a
good place for remembrance, Josh, Yes, that's Memorials make an
excellent spot for remembrance. Let's talk about the spot where
the memorial, the World Trade Center Memorial, which what which
is what we're talking about, is going to be situated
the original spot where the World Trade Center complex was situated.
(02:50):
Beginning work started in the sixties and was completed in
I think ninety three on the towers. I think work
for the whole World Trade Center complex wasn't completed until yeah,
fourteen years, fourteen years after the towers that were completed,
So it was like nineteen yeah something. Yeah, right, Um,
(03:11):
But tell me about the tell me about the spot,
the World Trade Center spot. It's a very um ambitious project.
It was Josh, seven buildings total um spanning sixteen acres.
It's a lot of room and each tower itself, I
think had a footprint of an acre. Yeah right, yeah. Uh.
They had office space to the tune of about uh
(03:33):
fifty thousand total workers in about thirty five thousand, and
those were split among four hundred and thirty companies in
the buildings. It was ten million square feet of office space.
It's incredible, it was. It was originally UM. Speaking of ambition,
I read an article called The Height of Ambition. It
was a two thousand to New York Times article and
it's required reading for anybody. It's really good. It's all
(03:56):
about the construction, it's about the attacks. It's a really comprehensive,
great article. But they were saying like that there was
no way they were going to go UM any less
than ten million square feet when they decided to there,
like that's it, We're doing ten million, and that's so
that's such an enormous amount of office space that other
(04:18):
real estate developers in the city were like, that's going
to like imbalance the market. That's so much, it's gonna
flood this place all at once. Yeah. I remember at
the time, uh, you know, in September eleven, thinking that
the death Hole was gonna be like ten people because
I knew how many people work there, and it would
(04:38):
have been had it had the buildings not stayed up
for um an hour or so, or had it been
an hour or so later, right once people were all
in there. Yeah, because you said there's about fifty thousand
people that worked at the World Trade Centers UM, and
then there's another maybe UM seventy thousand, forty thousand to
seventy thousand people who could muted through because there was
(05:01):
a subway station underneath in the path train station and
the mall, and people coming to have lunch with like
their husband or wife or whatever. So seventy thousand additional
people passed through that that complex every day. Indeed, Josh,
if we're talking size, we've got a couple of stats.
The North tower UM, the original World Trade Center one,
(05:23):
although there's a new one which we're gonna talk about, uh,
hundred sixty eight feet uh and then seventeen thirty feet
with its large antenna. And then the South tower was
about six ft shorter than the North tower, which I
thought found interesting. I wonder if that was a I
wonder why they did that. Maybe the bedrock was six
(05:44):
ft six ft lower, has to be something like that.
I don't think it was I'm sure they got to
the final measurement and we're like, you have to be
kindding right, because they were both a hundred ten stories.
It's not like w C t C two was short
changed the floor or a half floor. Two hundred eight
thousand one metric tons. Yeah, and one of them. It's
(06:08):
tough to find comparisons for this, but um, it's an
Afford Explorer. These each one weighed about equivalent to a
hundred and seventy two thousand Ford Explorers. That's heavy. That's yeah,
that's a heavy building. And that's a lot of weight.
And we'll we'll get to that weight. And what happened
to a lot of that weight coming up shortly to right?
(06:30):
Uh So. One of the cool things that you found
was originally when they planned the towers, they didn't know
what kind of sway that a person could take. Let's say,
if you're working on story like this towers swaying back
and forth in the wind, what kind of that would
do to people? Yeah, no one had ever These were
(06:51):
when they were built, the tallest structures in the world.
You can't just have office space up there that people
are getting sick on because they're dizzy, right, because no
one would rent it out. But they didn't know that
it um. They didn't know, well, maybe somebody could take
six ft of sway on either side. They had no idea,
maybe people can take like almost no sway. So they
had a guy in Eugene, Oregon who was a psychologist,
(07:12):
basically purchased an office building, put parts of it up
on Jack's and like test people. He had him come
in for I exams, but was really testing them to
see how much sway they could put up with him
found not much, like a couple of inches either way.
After a couple of minutes of that, the people start
freaking out, get dizzy, get nauseated. So they were like,
(07:33):
you have to do something because your building is going
to sway a lot more than this, that's right, and
you can't have your tenants getting sick. So they built
in shock absorbers that prevented this way. So I think
most people know by now just from breakdown of the
what happened with the collapse, that it was an exoskeleton
design and it was connected with a core steel core
(07:54):
connected it with a hat trust at the top. Yeah,
so you had columns going out on the outside where
they normally would have been put inside, so that opened
up much more office space. So the columns are on
the outside, and there's a steel court in the center
like you said, and it was connected by a hat trust.
They just fit over the top and connected everything to
the center. So it just stabilized the whole thing and
(08:16):
it made it light but very strong. Right. I think
it was about open air inside the building itself, which
has a lot to do with why it collapsed. Um,
there was a police station port authority in New Jersey. Uh,
New York and New Jersey had a police desk, they
had its own uh, they had their own zip code
(08:38):
and eight dedicated mail carriers. Yeah, I couldn't. I'm sure
it's still there. It has to be. The zip it
still has its own zip code, right, one O four eight. Yeah,
I looked that up. Actually, I think they held onto
that zip code and to assign you know, the New
World traits in our complex that same zip code. If
I'm not mistaken, I would hope. So this is a
(08:58):
couple of weeks ago. Yeah, but yeah, eight postal carriers
just for the WTC complex like they worked within. You know,
I guess it's sixteen acres, but it's probably not as
big as your usual beat in New York. I would
I wouldn't think so. No, I think they call it beats.
That's just cops. I wouldn't it no copy, um chuck.
(09:19):
Also these um, just to give another idea of scale, Um,
there were each of the towers themselves. Just the towers
had elevators, each each one had um almost uh well,
almost twenty two thousand windows. And apparently you could have
built a sidewalk standard sidewalk I take it from New
(09:41):
York to Washington, d C. With just the concrete used
in just the towers. So these were massive, colossal structures,
just the towers. The whole complex itself was colossal, but
the tower, it's just the towers are enough to like
get the point across, you know. Well, and all you
ever really hear about still is usually the WTC one
(10:01):
and two. But all of the buildings were eventually raised
the whole complex, right, and um, we should also say that,
you know, everybody kind of came on board. But in
the beginning there were very big detractors to the World
Trade Center projects, including those real estate developers who were like,
this is going to be a drain on the market.
And one of the guys whose named Lawrence Ween, who
(10:23):
was an Empire State building co owner. Right, And he
took out a full page and the New York Times
that had a picture of one of the World Trade
Center towers with a plane flying into it to basically
suggest that this was a hazard to air traffic, right,
And it actually almost came true in one when an
(10:43):
Air Alina's flight just narrowly missed the North tower but
made off. Okay, it was safe, that's right. Yeah. Uh, however,
that was the first attack on the World Trade Center. Uh.
And Islamic Islamistic streamist group detonated about a thousand pounds
of explosives and a rented truck underneath the World Trade
(11:06):
Center and killed six people, injured thousands and they are included,
which I thought was a classy move in the World
Trades and a memorial years later. I never really considered that,
but I thought it was pretty nice thing to do
that That truck left half a football sized football field
sized crater and it apparently rocked the whole building. Like
(11:27):
you think, Well, six people died, It couldn't have been
that big. It was a huge blast. It was just
in the wrong place. But they were trying to take
the building down, you know, yeah, from below, so that UM.
Within a few days or weeks after UM, the February attach,
things were back to business as usual. Governor Andrew Cuomo
was the first to move back into the office building right,
(11:51):
and things were just like I said, business as usual
until the morning of September eleven, two thousand one came
on day a can having four blocks north of the
World Spathe Center. The second building that was hill by
the plane has just completely collapsed. The entire building has
just collapsed, as if the tunolition team set off. When
(12:12):
you see the old nilition to the Gold buildings down
on itself and it is not there anymore, it should be.
It collapsed, collapse. The whole building has collapsed. So that
pretty much speaks for itself. I think, where were you
that morning? I had just gotten back from New York.
(12:32):
Actually I was there for vacation and a Radiohead concert
and in New Jersey or actually it was Liberty State
Park and flew home on September like the seventh or something,
so I was in it. Actually I was living in
l A. But I flew back to Atlanta and then
got stuck in Atlanta because everything was grounded. So I
(12:57):
was in my friend Big John's where house and Big
country Boy, and he woke me up up here. Yeah.
Remember it was like one of the towers has been hit,
and you just when I started watching CNN and figuring
out what was going on, like this is not an accident. Yeah,
I think both of us kind of came to the
(13:18):
conclusion pretty quick too. So I hung out in his
warehouse all day, only watched it on TV basically, and
you know, yeah, and I have to say, like it
didn't sink in as hard um then as it did
when we were researching this for this podcast. Man, I
was watching just find finding that clip we just played.
(13:38):
I watched about like an hour of it does it Happened?
Coverage and it was just it really drew me in
and just depressed me like crazy. But like it got
through to me finally after ten years, like it's really
hit me how how huge this is. Yeah. I'd plowed
through a bunch of videos this week too and last week,
(14:00):
and it was you know, because I hadn't researched it
for a long time, after probably since like two thousand three,
than many years of not even really considering it much
and then all of a sudden it's all back on
and coming up this September, and I think this being
older too, especially for me being an older you know,
ten years older, and it's gotten through to me a
(14:21):
lot more like, yeah, God, how are you you were
in your early twenties, mid twenties. I was like, God,
that's crazy, Yeah something just a little kid, so chuck.
We mentioned, um, how there could have been tens of
thousands more people who could have died had the buildings
(14:41):
not stayed up. And there were a couple of big
questions after the collapse of the World Trade Center towers um.
Number one, why did they fall They didn't have to
fall um? And number two, why didn't they just fall
over immediately? And the answer to the second question is
that does nine that exoskeleton connected to a central steel
(15:04):
core by a hat trust could have kept that thing
up indefinitely. Well, the reason they fell was a fatal flaw. Right.
Those steel columns that make up the exoskeleton tapered um
at the top because they had to support less weight,
making the whole structure lighter, requiring less steel. Right, So
(15:24):
the planes when they flew into the higher floors. They
were flying into steel columns that were only as thin
as like a quarter inch across, so they just severed them. Yeah,
the problem is with the true fatal flow is the
heat from the fire though. Yeah, I read a big
article yesterday on this about this physicist Um basically explained
(15:48):
how they came down to sort of rebut the idiots
who say that it was a controlled demolition by the
US government and like steel can't get that hot and melting,
blah blah blah, And he explained the difference between heat
and temperature. And I wish I was smart enough to
relay that now, but I would just advise, just google,
(16:09):
like why did they collapse? And there's a really good
article on that. So it's one of the first hits.
For our purposes, we're gonna take it on face value
that the heat from the raging fires Um created uh
enough high enough temperature that the steel within a steel
melted and the weight distribution throughout the exoskeleton was even
(16:31):
further compromised until these things started going from what the
connection to the hat trust was snapped, and then that
was that there was no support any longer. So these
floors obviously could support the weight of the floors on
top of them. Because they had been up since nineteen
seventy three, they can support the static weight. When the
floors start collapsing on one another, it becomes moving heavier
(16:55):
weight and it's created a domino effect essentially. Right, it
just plowed right into the floors beneath and picked up
more and more steam as it went. Apparently the material
from the highest floors. By the time they reached the ground,
we're traveling about a hundred and twenty miles, and that
could have been even faster, according to that physicist, and
he said the fact that they fell straight down was
(17:17):
uh sensible and fortunate because they could have swayed and
toppled over, which you know stories falling to the left
or to the right is going to take out do
a lot more damage. Obviously. Well, the South tower did
do some damage. The North Tower came down almost completely
in its footprint, and it just compacted itself into this
(17:38):
dense acre size square of debris that went from street
level seventy underground to the bedrock and just filled its
own footprint almost completely. Um the the other towers UM
three and seven were completely trashed. UM Tower six was
(17:59):
still intact, but it had a huge chunk of the
North tower against it. UM, and that the one they
had to take out for those reasons, Like otherwise it
might have been okay. That one they actually did demolish.
So the Yeah, the whole site kind of just became
a loss. UM there I guess an estimated three hundred
(18:21):
thousand tons of scrap metal were generated, most of it
sold the Indian China. UM, and there was a big hubbub.
I didn't know this, did you? Did you hear about
this when it happened. Um, the mafia diverted like two
fifty five tons of scrap metal to its own junkyards
for profit UM and got caught pretty quickly because the
(18:43):
FBI was on that case. But UM they after that,
there were I think a hundred thousand truckloads of debris
trucked out to UM uh the landfill in New Jersey.
I believe it's called Fresh Kill Landfill UM and UH
those all got police escorts after the FBI found out
(19:04):
the mafia was diverting scrap metal, right obviously, Yeah, that's
a good move. Uh. The cleanup was very quick. I
remember at the time thinking that it happened way quicker
than I thought it would. Well, yeah, they were. They
were like, this is gonna take a year, maybe two,
maybe three exactly. It took eight year or nine months. Yes,
(19:25):
it also came in under budget. Uh. They thought it
was gonna cost a couple of billion dollars and that
was clearly overinflated because it only costs six and fifty
million UH to clean up, which is a lot of money,
but nothing compared to to bill a lot less. UM.
They did get a little criticism because they thought they
(19:46):
kind of hurried the clean up a little too much.
Considering the potential toxic materials found at the site. A
lot of people thought, you know, maybe we should take
our time here, study this a little more, or see
what's what we have to deal with before we start
sending people down there. Well, one group called it the
most the worst toxic site in our history. Did he
(20:09):
mean Nation's history? I don't know. It's a good question.
It could be Nation, New York World, I don't know.
There was a lot of toxic stuff um. For example,
two hundred thousand pounds of lead plus cadmium from the
fifty thousand pecs in the World Trade Center offices right, UM,
(20:29):
mercury from the fluorescent lights. There apparently about half a
million fluorescent tube lights that all had mercury in them
to work. UM. Have you heard of polycystic aromatic hydrocarbons?
They're apparently, um they caused laryngeal cancer, UM and a
couple of other cancers. And they come from partially burned
(20:52):
UM fossil fuels. What else chuck asbestos, lots of asbestos,
benzene um die ox in from oil and fuel. So
not the kind of stuff you want to be breathing in.
And people found you know, years afterward, we're getting sick,
a lot of the first responders getting sick and dying.
Even Yeah, the bass player from um TV on the
(21:15):
radio was the first responder, and he came down with
cancer and like in his late thirties or something and died,
that's right. And within the last year. I didn't did
I know that he was a first responder as as
what what was his uh what kind of responder was?
You do know? I don't remember, but he was. He
was the first responder to the ground zero. So they've
(21:37):
there was a uh combined payout of six d and
twenty five million dollars to some of the first responders
and cleanup workers after a lawsuit was filed, and that
was just that was. They came to that settlement within
the last year or two. Right, Yeah, they've been hammering
that out forever. Yeah. And then there was the Zadroga Bill,
which is massive. Seven point were billion dollars in compensation
(22:02):
for everything from like economic impact to health. But there's
a big well there's a big outcry because they didn't
include cancer. Yeah, they couldn't find a definite link. Um.
I mean this is one of those where I say,
throw it in there, like cover everything. Apparently that's not
(22:22):
the case. Well no, but it's left open so that
it can be amended to include cancer later, like if
somebody's like, here's your definitive right study on it that
shows the link. But apparently the link is enough for
people who are engaged in like personal litigation. Uh, they've
been generally successful and just doing New York. Okay, just
(22:43):
not a class action kind of thing. Well just not
there's a Droga bill, got you, yeah, Okay, Well, uh,
No one died during the cleanup of the Ground zero,
which is pretty amazing considering what a dangerous place. It was.
You know, there were like huge voids that were covered up,
you know by things that uh you know, big gaps
and holes that you could easily fall into. Yeah, like
(23:06):
you know those tiger traps. Yeah, where it's just kind
of covered with a little bit of twigs or leaves.
There were like seventy ft drops that looked like they
were stable, solid rubble or whatever. But yeah, there's a
picture of a huge earth mover like sliding down with
a guy and it's like, oh my god. Yeah, I'm
really surprised no one died during that clean up. Yeah,
sixty men died building the thing. Wow, that was the seventies. Uh.
(23:32):
So that brings us Josh to ten years later. Yea,
the nine eleven Memorial and Museum, which we both said
we're excited to go see because it's a pretty amazing design.
To me, they hit all the right notes, and a
lot of people have complained about the actual building, The
New World Trade Center one has been beaten up pretty
(23:53):
badly in the press. A lot of people think they
should have just mimicked the original twin towers, except maybe
a little higher, as like a show of our strength
as Americans, right, with the giant birden exactly with Donald
Trump on top looking the bird. But Trump was one
of the ones actually who hates the new uh w
(24:14):
TC one and it is uh well, originally it was
called the Freedom Tower. Could not smack of the Bush
era more. Yeah, they changed that that or um world
War two when we started calling French fries freedom fries.
Was that World War two? And that came about again
after this. Yeah. And then also um sauerkraut was called
(24:36):
liberty cabbage. That's just crazy jingoistic, you know. Yeah. Uh So,
like I said, Trump is is not a big fan
of the design. He or the architect who designed w
TC one, the new one. What's his name, Daniel um Oh,
Daniel Lipskin? Is that him? He's been much battered. Yeah,
I kind of feel bad for the guy, you know,
(24:57):
he's trying to trying to do a good job. I'm
sure it is going to be the tallest building in
the US after it's completed, at a symbolic height of
seven hundred and seventy six ft sev Seventeen seventy six,
obviously for the you know, USA all the way, seventeen
(25:18):
seventy six, very important day in our history and all
the buildings are going to be done between six and
uh w TC. One is right now at the eight floor,
which is they're they're close to done. How many floors
is it going to be? UM? I think well, part
(25:42):
of what people are complaining about is the top third
of this building is just hollow space, so a lot
of people complained about that. So I don't know how
many actual floors. It may be pretty close then if
they're the eightieth floor now, and I think they've concrete
it up to this of any second floor, glassed it
up to the fifty three and then seven. World Trade
(26:05):
Center was UM opened in two thousand six. That's already there.
But the one that's that's being dedicated UM well in
a few days by the time this thing comes out
is the World Trade Center Memorial. Right, There's been a
couple of other memorials, like the Sphere, which is Fritz
(26:26):
Koenig Um sculpture that was just iconically associated with UM.
The World Trade Center was found in the rubble. It
basically dusted off and put in Battery Park with an
eternal flight, and then there was tribute and lights which
are the two beams and anybody who's ever seen Spike
Lee's twenty is familiar with those UM and those are
brought out every year. That's really cool looking. It is
(26:48):
very cool. It's like UM forty four. Each tower is
made up of forty four UM xenon searchlights focused into
a single column that just shoots right up into space.
Know if they're gonna do that still, Yeah, I wondered too,
they should do that every year. I agree, just for
that one day, you know, Yeah, I think it'd be cool,
but they, you know, to get a more permanent exhibit.
(27:10):
UM design competition was held in two thousand three by
the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, Right, and uh, it was international,
so people from all over the world submitted design. It's
like a ton of them, Yes, sixty three countries in total,
five thousand, two hundred one submissions. And the guy who
won for the memorial went to Tech Georgia. Tech's Yeah,
(27:34):
and he was working as a New York City Housing
Authority architect until he won. And then I imagine he's
making a little bit more money now at Handel Architects
as a partner. Yeah. His name is Michael Aharin. That's
how to get a job a partnership pretty quick in
as an architect. I think that's how to make your
career look at like Maa Lynn, Yeah, who did the
Vietnam Memaria was the first thing she ever did? Is
(27:55):
a yeah, well, I think, yeah, yeah, have you ever
seen the documentary her very neat how'd she come up
with the idea? She talks all about it, like the
first third of the documentaries about that and like what
she went through, Um, like there's a big problem that
she was Asian, you know, um that kind of thing. Um,
but I don't remember. I don't remember if it just
(28:17):
came to her what, But she talks about it. I mean,
that was perfect and its simplicity totally is perfect. But
it was very much taken the wrong way, as I
think there's always a group of people who take a
memorial the wrong way. Although and I think Michael Air
has been criticized, but I don't think anybody's like this
is a smack in the face to the people who died,
(28:38):
And yeah, I think it sounds pretty amazing. Tell them
about it. Well, the centerpiece, it's gonna um the memorial itself.
There's a museum underneath underground, which we'll get to but
the Memorial Plaza is about eight acres of what will
be forest land UM with the two original footprints of
(28:59):
the World Trade Center towers are now intact as fountains waterfalls, Yeah,
the world's largest waterfalls. Two thousand gallons of water I
think per minute flow through these things. And they're these huge, massive,
almost acre sized squares, like you said, that just fill
in the footprints of the of the World Trade Centers
(29:19):
UM and they're just amazing the thing there. We can't
really describe them any better than that because they're that simple.
But unless you see a rendering of them or there's
some really cool architectural animations of them too, um, they're
just they just take your breath away. And they're The
memorial um that Air designed is called reflecting absence UM,
(29:40):
and the whole point is to just kind of show
we're missing something here and we're always going to be
missing something here. Yeah, that's why I thought it was
such a brilliant design. It was not some I don't know,
it just made sense. You know, why build something up
when you can say so much more by creating these
two big voids and then the water flowing. It's all
(30:00):
very symbolic, you know, the recirculating water and living, you know,
breathing life into the city. And the trees or like
sweet gums and oaks. White oaks, yes, swamp white oaks
are there's gonna be like four hundred of them on
the plaza. And the plaza was designed by UM Peter
Walker and partners from Berkeley UM in conjunction with Michael Ahard.
(30:21):
I think that was the submission where these two people
jointly coming up with this plan and he was like,
I am the landscape architect, I need some help, yeah,
or vice versa, you know. Um, but Peter Walker came
up with this idea to you suspended paving systems to
support the white oaks, because um, an urban an urban
tree or a tree in urban forest like this, they
(30:43):
don't live that long. Um. But and the reason why
is because the soil becomes too compact and you have
to have paving for people to walk around on. So
what they came up with was a suspended paving system
which uses like columns and beams like a grid to
create this hollow space that will support pavement but will
also allow routes to go through. So these trees, these
(31:04):
swamp white oaks should thrive and live like many many
decades longer than ones that you know, were just planted
wherever along the street. That's right, and they could potentially
get up to about sixty ft tall, kind of creating
a canopy park. So that was one of the things
they wanted, was was a quiet place, sort of a
retreat from the city where you feel like you're sort
(31:26):
of insulated from from the rest of the city and
the noises of the city and the swamp white oaks also,
Chuck are gonna be brought in UM from all over
the area of New York, but also from places around
UM where Flight ninety three went down in Pennsylvania and
in the DC area that you're gonna have trees from
other nine eleven impacted areas brought I thought that was cool. Yeah,
(31:49):
I read an article on the family who's UM supplied
the trees basically for the project. Yeah, it was pretty cool.
And then also around the reflect thing Absence memorial, they're
going to have UM basically a bronze wall with the
names of all nearly three thousand victims of the and
(32:09):
two thousand one attacks on the World Trade Center. UM
cut into them Yeah, so you can do the little
uh charcoal rubbings on paper if you want. They shine
light through them at night. Uh. They're grouped together by
either where they died or where they worked, or if
there was a special request a group people like with
(32:30):
friends of theirs that worked in the building that they've
done that too, that's cool. So that's kind of cool. Um.
And then probably the most noticeable feature within this little
urban forest, UM is going to be a glass building
that's that forms the atrium or the entryway to the
Memorial museum, that's right. Uh. And the most noticeable feature
of that are going to be these two steel tridents
(32:52):
which um made up the Yeah, they made up the
the exterior that the exo skeleton UM. The the apparently
went up and then at this at the seventy ft mark,
the seventh story, Uh, they split into three and then
they supported steel beams that went all the way up
to the top of the building. Right. So these things
were left standing I think on the north tower. UM.
(33:15):
So they took those off to Kennedy with a bunch
of other artifacts and kept them in a hangar. And
now they've been returned to the site and they built
the atrium around these two things. Yeah, they used a
lot of pieces of the World Trade Center in the
museum itself to partially just you know, remind people and
then also to show again show scale of you know,
I think the tridents themselves are close to a hundred
(33:36):
feet tall nine I think ninety because they branched at
the seventy ftmark and they go up to like the
ninety footmark. So um. And then also check the museum
itself is largely underground. Um, and they're in the footprints
of the World Trade Center towers and parts around them.
(33:57):
But basically the whole thing is set up to give
you an underground down view of how incredibly massive these
buildings were by leaving like the concrete footings any steel
supports that they can um intact and then just all
and I guess playing off the vastness of the space. Yeah,
that had to do with the museum and the design
(34:20):
up top. Two was I think you can in the
museum down below you can stand in between the two
footprints still and uh, they've created a lot of just
open space, it seems like, right. But then there's also
like at the at the corners of the Princess maybe
like some I think there's an aluminum clad volumes whether
it's called to basically give this kind of ghost outline
of the buildings, so to give you an even better
(34:41):
idea of their scale. UM. And all this is underground,
Like we said, the plaza actually above serves as a
green roof to the museum UM, and you go through
the hrium and then you to to get to the
museum itself underground. You go through UM, you go down
a ramp UM and that's very symbolic of the ramp
that was used to clean out the ground zero site.
(35:04):
It was used during construction of the original towers UM.
So it's it's kind of like throwing you back in
time and during the construction and the cleanup UM, which
you know, really marks the history of this site. Those
two things. Yeah, there's a couple of other notable aspects
to the museum that they're going to have. The Survivor stairs,
(35:24):
which if you google that, I mean, they're pretty famous.
They were one of the sets of stairs that you know,
it said hundreds, but I would imagine maybe even thousands
of people used to escape. It was like one of
the only ways out. Yeah, it was along World trade
center six. I think so in two thousand and eight
it was lowered down into the side again for it's
(35:46):
you know, final resting place there in the museum. And
the other big thing is the last column in the
west chamber of the museum. It's going to house this
and it was returned to the site. You might remember
the last column and was where it was one of
the last standing obviously, and that's where people uh decorated uh,
this column with with memories of their loved ones and
(36:07):
and have you seen this person that kind of thing. Right.
They're also gonna have the slurry wall in there, which
was surprisingly intact. They it was. It was an original
huge wall that they built to keep the Hudson from
flooding it. And after the attacks, after the class of
the building, this wall was just standing there. It didn't
have any support, but it was still keeping the Hudson out.
So they reinforced it and rebuilt it. But they took
a sixty two by sixty four foot section of the
(36:29):
slurry wall and it's going to make up a significant
part of the museum itself. This huge man, this must
be enormous under there, because I mean, beyond all these
huge elements. They have all the void open space, so
I'm very much looking forward to going to that. Um
we I think we skipped over the Memorial Glade. UM
in the park above the museum, there is a section
(36:53):
called the Memorial Glade, which is going to be an
open area where they'll have like ceremonies and and things
like that, and a that's surrounded by sweet gums, which
should be autumn red on September eleven, is what they say.
They play it that way, at least the museum itself.
Like the exhibits that they're going to have, they're gonna
(37:15):
have permanent exhibits of artifacts from you know, the clean
up from the rescue from the attacks, um, personal story
pre attacked too. I think they're gonna have obviously some
I'm sure they're going to have some information on there,
like the construction and all that. Yeah, and then probably
the people who did it. Imagine there'll be some information
there yeah. Um. And also they're gonna have some stuff
on the d C in Pittsburgh Losses or not Pittsburgh,
(37:39):
Pennsylvania Losses. But there's um a very controversial exhibit that's
going to be added. It looks like it's going to
be added as far back as um or as recently
as April. That's as far back as I can find
any press. I found something more recently, I think it is.
It's gonna they're going forward with it. Well, um, there
there were there were a lot of human remains found, uh,
(38:03):
and a lot of them were put together and said,
you know, this is this person, this belonged to this person. Um.
But after a while, like the matches ran out. Um
and the Medical Examiner still has over nine thousand pieces
of human remains, and the last match was made in
two thousand nine, So they're kind of losing hope that
they're ever going able to identify who they belong to.
(38:25):
And a lot of people are unidentified at this point. Well,
a lot of the families of the fort of the
victims who haven't been identified, or saying keep trying, don't stop.
Medical Examiner and the people who are running the museum
are saying, no, we have a better place for him.
Why don't we put them in the museum, And they
(38:46):
have it planned to put them behind a quote from
virgil Um that says, no day shell erase you from
the memory of time. And the letters themselves are going
to be made of World Trade Center steel. Um. But
they're you know, a lot of people find the schoolish
and ghastly, like you can't put human remains on display.
And in this article in the New York Times, they
(39:07):
interviewed a lot of curators who are like, it depends,
you know, like you can't just put human remains in
a museum. You're not supposed to do that. But if
it's a memorial on the side of an atrocity, like
Ashwitz has lots of human remains, Um, the Cahmer Rouge
Museum has all sorts of human remains. So this is
museum wise speaking appropriate. But really, I mean, it's up
(39:32):
to your you know, what you think is morally acceptable
or not. Yeah, I think what I read most of
the upset comes from the fact that they were underground
in the museum, and they were supposedly told that they
were going to be kept in a in a tomb
right in the park, above ground, right and away from tourists.
Like this, this plan is to put them right in
(39:53):
the exhibit, like here's some of the remains of the victims.
But there would be tour I mean, I guess there
would be tourist up top as well, But I mean
I see their difference though. Yeah, no, there's a big
difference for sure. But I think just about everybody agrees
they should be kept on the site somewhere. It's just
in what capacity, right, Chuck. Let's say I have a
(40:15):
hundred bucks sitting around and I'm like, I want to
contribute to this memorial. What can I do? You can
buy a cobble stone. I was a little disappointed to
see that the cobble stones weren't engraved, because that's usually
what you do. Yeah, there's a website that links your
cobble stone to your name, so it's not an actual
(40:36):
engrave cobblestone. But you can still donate a hundred bucks,
I will get you a cobble stone on the path
of the plaza itself. Five dollars will get you a
cobble stone on the memorial glade that we told you
about in A thousand bucks will get you one a
granite paper that will be a walkway to the memorial itself,
(40:57):
and that is a nine one on memorial dot org
slash donations, and I imagine you can just donate period
if you want. You'll get your cobblestones but if that's
not important to you, then it's probably good good cause,
I would say. And if you're gonna be in New
York this September eleven, um, the September eleven Memorial will
(41:19):
officially open that day. And if you're going to be
in New York September eleven, two thousand twelve, the Memorial
Museum is expected to be open, then yeah, they're they're
people like our shooting video of the the waterfalls being
tested and stuff out of their office window and it's
um pretty amazing. So UM. We've got a couple of
(41:41):
articles on site. We have how the World Trade Center worked,
or I guess the World Trade Center is what it's called, um,
and it's very comprehensive. I think Tom Harris wrote it,
so you can type a World Trade Center and that
should also bring up how the World Trade Center Memorial works,
which coming soon, right it. It It will be up by
the time this comes out, So yeah, I hope so um.
(42:03):
And again, if you want to learn more about the memorial,
you can go to nine one one Memorial dot org
um and you can donate there too. And uh is
that it? I think this is our nine eleven podcast.
We've been asked by a bunch of people to do one,
and and unless we're inspired to actual yeah, I actually
go over the grizzly details. I would say this will
(42:26):
serve you concur Yeah, I don't know if I want
to do that one. That's all right. Do you want
to send us an email? We'd love to hear from you.
Send it to Stuff Podcast at how stuff works dot com.
(42:47):
Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff
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