The mighty have fallen

The World Trade Center towered above New York, symbolising everything brash and confident about not only the US, but the West. EUGENE BINGHAM reports.

Floating a quarter of a mile into the sky, the bar on top of the World Trade Center carried a grand boast, fit for the city it lorded over. Boldly, it was called The Greatest Bar on Earth.

Three floors from the top of the north tower of New York's landmark twins of concrete and steel, the sleek bar was no mere drinking hole.

It was the kind of place where the rich and famous would sip cocktails while watching the sun fade over the far-off horizon; where musicians played the night away over the conversations of people capping off multimillion-dollar business deals; a magnet for tourists.

"It was always a place we'd take visitors and go and have a martini," said a New York New Zealander, Anthony Vile.

No more. Like the hundreds of firms over which it was stacked, The Greatest Bar on Earth has been reduced to rubble.

The twin towers of the seven-building World Trade Center complex stood for all that was extravagant and prestigious about the Big Apple. But as the New York work day cranked up on Tuesday morning (Wednesday NZ time), hijackers executing an audacious plan to attack those indisputable statements of America's economic superiority flew two jetliners straight into the buildings.

Within two hours, both towers had collapsed before the eyes of the world, killing thousands of people.

The terrorists' dramatic strike on the Pentagon in Washington and the fatal hijacking of Flight 93, which smashed to the ground near Pittsburgh, were tragedies in their own right. But it has been the demolition of the World Trade Center that has catapulted this act of terrorism above all others in terms of its magnitude and drawn comparisons with Pearl Harbor.

For one thing, the scale of the human tragedy is staggering. At least 5000 people are feared dead beneath the remains of the centre alone.

The potential death toll was mind-blowing - every day 40,000 people worked there, while tens of thousands of tourists took the 58-second ride up one of the 239 lifts to the viewing platforms.

The terrorists had aimed their assault directly at the core values of Western capitalism. They could hardly have hit a more symbolic target.

The centre housed more than 430 companies conducting the business of banking, finance, insurance, international trade, and law. Some of the biggest names in the financial world leased premises there. Major bond brokerages, such as Cantor Fitzgerald, which transacts a quarter of the US Government bond market, are now counting the cost of the most cruel losses. Firms such as investment bank Morgan Stanley, which had 3500 employees in the centre, deal in figures that make New Zealand companies' turnover look like petty change.

Then there was the small change of the global economy - the swathe of small businesses such as the NY Coffee Station, which served staples of every self-respecting New Yorker's diet at the bottom of the north tower.

The World Trade Center was not just the domain of New Yorkers, or even Americans, for that matter. Companies from more than 25 countries had offices in the complex, located as it was at the heart of the world's most influential finance district. Firms such as Japan's Mizuho Holdings, and France's Credit Agricole Indosuez were proud to have branches there.

The staff of multinationals with offices as far away as Sydney suffered shockwaves as news of the fate of their workmates in New York flashed around the globe. On the day of the attack, staff from Morgan Stanley's London office stumbled from their own building stunned by the news. "It's awful," said Lisa Spink. "A lot of people come and go from these offices to New York. It all seems so unreal."

Some of the brightest minds from around the world had gravitated towards the heavyweight firms within the centre. It meant that personal tales of the disaster spread to every continent.

Software engineer Vijay Murthy from New Delhi sent an e-mail to former university friends now living in New Zealand, telling them that he had been in the staircase of the south tower when the second plane struck. "Most of my colleagues are missing," he said of workmates who were trapped in their office on the 39th floor. "God saved me, don't know how but he did."

Ian Narev, a former Auckland Grammar School pupil now working as a management consultant at McKinsey and Co in New York, had spent the six months up to the end of August working with a client in their office two-thirds of the way up the tower.

"There is just this dull sense of shock - the shock of knowing people in there and the shock of these towers collapsing," he said.

To get an idea of the scale of the towers, imagine for a moment that you are standing at the top of the 328m tall Sky Tower in Auckland. Now crane your neck back and look up about 100m - the length of the home stretch of an athletic track.

Designed by architect Minoru Yamasaki and Emery Roth and Sons and completed in 1973, the World Trade Center towers stood more than 410m tall, the fourth-tallest buildings in the world. The foundations stretched 20m into the ground and rested on solid bedrock. Beneath the complex, there were about five floors of carparking, as well as train and subway stations.

Millions of commuters would hop off at the World Trade Center stop and emerge into the underground mall dominated by brandname shops like the Gap and dozens of salad and sandwich bars serving the busy workers above.

The towers could be seen from just about any vantage point in New York.

"The greatest view of the towers was from the harbour as you came back from the Statue of Liberty," said New Zealander Erin Foster.

Anthony Vile, a New Zealand architect living in Brooklyn, used to be able to see the towers from the roof of his apartment. They dominated his view of the New York skyline. "It wasn't the most beautiful building in the world but it definitely had a presence.

"It was part of the New York skyline and it was one of the icons of what New York is," said Vile.

From the viewing platforms, the rest of New York looked shrunk. Other skyscrapers looked like mere models. The Statue of Liberty was reduced to a statuette.

Ian Narev said he never tired of the view during his six months of working in the towers.

"From whatever side you happened to have your office on, you either had a panorama over the northern parts of Manhattan, looking uptown over the Empire State building, or you had a view over the Statue of Liberty and the Hudson, or on the east side you had beautiful views of the bridges," said Narev.

"I never tired from being in it and just looking around. It was really a magical, on-top-of-the-world, place to work."

Narev said he could never resist staring at the towers during his frequent flights into New York. The last one was the night before the attack when he saw the towers bathed in the light of sunset.

"Every time I would see the towers, I would think, 'Wow'. Buildings are things that touch human spirits and human emotions. Now they're gone overnight ... but that pales into comparison with the human tragedy."

Dr Steve Hoadley, an international relations expert at Auckland University, who specialises in the Middle East conflict, says the World Trade Center would have proved just too tempting a target.

"The obvious reason is that it is more visible than almost anything else," said Hoadley. "Fort Knox is where the US gold supply is kept, but it's deep in the heart of Kentucky and hard to reach and we don't see too many pictures of it. Maybe the Empire State building, maybe the Chrysler Building, but the twin towers are even more tempting.

"If one wants a symbol of capitalism, then I'd be hard pressed to find something else ... what sticks up higher and looks more potent than the target that was chosen?"

One of his only theories on why a terrorist such as Osama bin Laden, the prime suspect for the attack, would be so keen to attack the United States would be that he violently objected to earning interest on money, except as a religious tithe.

"Of course interest is very much part of the capitalist system. Maybe there is also some association there with Palestinians and many other groups that were against colonials, against Israel and against western intrusion into their affairs."

Bin Laden is already wanted for an earlier attempt on the World Trade Center in 1993, when a cell of bombers led by Ramzi Yousef detonated explosives at the bottom of the south tower hoping it would topple on the north tower. The toll from that attack was six dead and 1000 injured, but Yousef said he had hoped to take 55,000 lives.

Those planning this attack switched their thoughts from the bottom of the building to nearer the top and used aircraft to set off massive fires inside.

Like all skyscrapers, the centre was vulnerable because of the danger of people being trapped. As the awful images showed, once the exit was blocked, there was no escape by window. In every tall building, the survival of everyone high inside depends on the infrastructure of the building itself. If that fails, the toll will be high.

Once the intense flames from the crashed planes softened the support structures of the towers, the weight of the buildings sent them crashing down. The terrorists got just what they wanted.

That so many people were able to be evacuated was incredible. When the first tower was struck about 8.45 am, meetings were abandoned as people scrambled for the stairs.

A bloody stranger grabbed the hand of Tiffany Keeling, a financial adviser at Morgan Stanley on the 61st floor, and led her down 20 flights of stairs.

Two researchers from investment bank Keefe Bruyette & Woods dived into a lift and rode to within metres of the ground, where firefighters prised the doors open for them.

Electrician Ed Sabino was talking to his wife about the explosion in the other tower when he felt an explosion. He had no idea how he got down from the 39th floor.

In many of the firms, employees switched to emergency plans that had been devised for years.

"For many years, we have had disaster recovery plans and we are moving ahead with our backup systems and procedures," MMC chairman Jeff Greenberg said on the company's website.

At Oppenheimer Funds, 600 staff successfully escaped. "It's not that we were smarter than anyone else, it's just that it had happened to us before," a company spokesman told the New York Times, referring to the 1993 bombing.

As the rubble is removed from lower Manhattan over the coming weeks, those companies will have switched to the second phase of their disaster plans: recovery.

Many have already relocated to other offices either within New York or in neighbouring New Jersey. Quite how long it will take for the companies to recover from the losses of their staff members, or how long it will take for the survivors to come to terms with what has happened, is incalculable.

But if there was ever any doubt about the survival of the capitalist spirit of Americans, it dissipated almost before the dust had settled.

Chunks of rubble and glass from the World Trade Center and postcards of the towers were fetching high prices on the online auction site eBay before the company banned it.

"So far, we have probably removed several hundred items put up by people suggesting they were selling anything from debris to videotapes or calendars and books," said an eBay spokesman.

- Additional reporting by REUTERS

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