We All Fall Down (4 page)

“How tall are they?”

“Just over 1360 feet, 110 stories. Of course the North Tower also has an aerial that rises another 300 feet. Come on, let’s go in.”

We walked over to the side of the South Tower and entered through a really unimpressive little door. Instantly we were in what looked more like a shopping mall than the foot of the World Trade Center. There were dozens and dozens of stores, all open and apparently doing big business. They were crowded—the whole mall was crowded.
People were everywhere, rushing around in all directions.

A double set of escalators led up from underneath. They were packed with people, two by two, marching out of the ground like little ants. There were two other empty escalators leading down. Above both were signs indicating that below were trains and buses and a subway station. I wondered why we hadn’t taken that subway to get here, but I didn’t ask.

We joined in a long line of people taking a second set of escalators. We came off at the top and were deposited right into the lobby of the building. This was more like it. High, high ceilings, soaring thirty or forty feet above our heads. Red carpets beneath our feet and large slabs of beautiful, gleaming white marble and gigantic floor-to-ceiling windows letting in the brilliant sunshine. This looked like the entrance to some sort of museum or a fancy palace. Looking around, I realized I was the only person who seemed impressed. All around us people continued to rush by, busy and bustling, carrying briefcases, cellphones held to their ears, completely ignoring their surroundings and each other. I guess for them it was just another day at work.

“I’m going to tell you some of what you’d get from a guided tour,” my father said.

I was sure before he started that he knew everything there was to know about these towers. On
a shelf in our den were a dozen books about the World Trade Center. My father didn’t just work here, he was fascinated by the place. He could probably have told me more facts about his office building than about our own house. Then again, he spent more time here than he did at home.

“These towers have a unique design,” he began. “The outer walls are a rigid series of hollow tubes spaced twenty-two inches apart, linking through floor trusses to a central core to provide the strength and flexibility needed for a building this size. While it soars over thirteen hundred feet up, it also goes down over seventy feet. They excavated until they hit solid bedrock. Each tower has 21,800 windows and 104 passenger elevators, and the total cost of construction was slightly over 1.5
billion
dollars.”

“That’s an awful lot of money,” I said, trying to act interested.

“In today’s dollars that would be well over 2 billion. Come on, let’s go up.”

We walked along into the central core. There were banks and banks of elevators—I guess 104 elevators, although it didn’t look like there could possibly be that many. In front of each elevator was a line of people waiting to go up. Over top of each door was a bank of lights flashing from one floor to another as the elevators raced up or down the tower.

“Each elevator is super-fast and is meant to carry fifty-five people. No elevator goes to every floor. There’s a combination of local and express elevators. From the lobby there are elevators that serve eight-floor sections of the tower, all the way up to the forty-fourth floor. There are some elevators that go express right to the forty-fourth floor, where there is a sky lobby. From there, more local elevators serve the next thirty-four floors right up to floor seventy-eight, where there is another sky lobby for transfer to elevators that go up to the top. There are also some elevators in the lobby that go, express, right to the sky lobby on the seventy-eighth floor.”

“How do you know which elevator goes where?”

“Look above the door and it shows what floors are served by that elevator. It’s simple, really.”

“Wouldn’t it be simpler if they all just stopped at every floor all the way to the top?” I asked.

“That was one of the engineering issues they had to address. To do that, the whole building would be nothing but elevators with no space left for offices. This way they can stagger the elevators and still get everybody to their office. You have to remember that each tower houses a small city of people, around twenty thousand workers in each one. I still find that number amazing. My whole town had only five hundred people.”

My father had grown up in a little hick town in upstate New York.

“Just think, you could fit forty towns as big as mine in this one building!”

“That’s a lot of people … but don’t any of the elevators go all the way to the top?” I asked.

“Just one, and it doesn’t make any stops along the way. It’s the express elevator to the Observation Deck on the 107th floor. That’s the one we’re going to take.”

“We’re going to the Observation Deck?”

“I thought that would be a good place to start the day, looking out on the greatest city in the world!”

I followed my father to the express elevator. It had a much shorter line than the others. The elevator pinged and the door opened to reveal an empty car. We shuffled forward along with the crowd until we were swallowed up by the car. The door closed and almost instantly the car started moving.

I hated heights and I hated small spaces. Elevators were pretty much the worst combination of those two things I could imagine. The ride was so smooth that I hardly had any sense of speed or movement, but I still knew it was happening.

I tried to get my mind off of the elevator. Instead, I looked around at the people sharing the ride. They all avoided eye contact. They were almost all dressed in business suits. None of them looked the least bit like tourists, but they couldn’t all work on the Observation Deck, could they?

The elevator started to slow down while my stomach continued to rise at the same speed. I felt myself rise slightly up out of my shoes before the ride settled to a stop. The door opened and the people raced off, sweeping us along with them.

“Welcome to the Observation Deck,” my father said.

We walked away from the elevator and toward the glass. Stretched out before us was the city, and beyond that the Statue of Liberty sitting on an island, surrounded by glistening green water. Farther over was Staten Island and then the ocean. What an incredible sight!

My father thought the World Trade Center was what represented America, but for me it was the Statue of Liberty. Maybe new people didn’t come to our country by boat any more, but that statue was what we were about. What did it say? “Give me your poor, your tired, your huddled masses …” Looking out over the city it was obvious that while the
huddled
part still fit, there were no
poor
to be seen from where I stood. Everywhere I looked was money, money and more money. Maybe my father was right and the World Trade Center and all the money that passed through here each day really did represent the United States.

I was amazed by how much green I could see interspersed with the buildings and streets. Aside from Central Park there were dozens and dozens
of other little parks, patches of green among the gray and black. I really hadn’t expected that.

“On a clear day, like today, you can see for forty-five miles,” my father said.

“So, technically, we could see our house from here.”

“We could, if we were looking in the right direction. We have to go to the other side.”

I trailed behind him, keeping an eye out through the glass but also keeping a healthy distance away from the window. I’d have enjoyed the view a lot more from lower down—if that made any sense at all.

I noticed that we were practically the only people on the Observation Deck. What had happened to the people we rode up with?

“Where did everybody else go to?” I asked.

“They’re at work on the floors below us. Some people take the express elevator to the top and then walk down the stairs to their offices.”

“Why would they do that?” I asked.

“To save time. Time is money. Depending on the crowds waiting at the bottom it’s often faster to simply take the express elevator to the top and walk down the stairs. Some people do the same at the end of the day, walking up the stairs to take the elevator down.”

“Do you ever do that?” I asked.

He laughed. “My office is on the eighty-fifth floor. That’s twenty-two floors down … or, more
to the point, twenty-two floors
up
that I’d have to climb.”

“That would take a long time.”

“It would. I do take the stairs a lot, though. If I have to go five or even ten floors down or three or four stories up I’ll hit the stairs. I find it saves time. I hate waiting for elevators. Actually, I hate waiting for anything.”

My father stopped walking. “Our house is that way,” he said, pointing into the distance.

I squinted in the bright sunshine, straining to see. My attention was caught by some motion off to the side. There was a small airplane flying along the river and I was looking
down
at it. I was actually watching a plane in flight from above it. That was beyond belief. I was so high up that planes were flying
below
me!

“Do you remember the last time you were up here?” my father asked.

“Not really.”

“You were only four or five at the time. You know, that’s typical of us New Yorkers. Here we are in a city that draws hundreds of millions of people from around the world and we don’t take advantage of the amazing things that are all around us. The Empire State Building, Greenwich Village, the United Nations building, Radio City Music Hall, Times Square, Broadway, the Statue of Liberty—when was the last time you saw the Statue of Liberty?”

“Just now, out the window,” I said, pointing to the other side of the building.

“I meant up close, on the island.”

“I’m not sure, but it was a long time ago.”

“We have to go there some time soon. We should become visitors in our own city. This should just be the start of our sight-seeing tour of New York!”

I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. Did I really want to see any of those sights? But then again, what did it matter? The way my father worked I’d have to wait until he retired before he really did take me anywhere. Lots of talk didn’t mean much. Work would always be more important than anything—or anybody—else.

“Close your eyes,” my father said.

“What?”

“Close your eyes.”

Reluctantly I did what he’d requested, although I sure didn’t know why.

“Can you feel it?” he asked.

“Feel what?”

“The building sway.”

I opened up my eyes. “What?”

“The tower. It moves. On a windy day it can sway three feet away from center. Now stand very still, don’t move, don’t talk, just close your eyes and see if you can feel it.”

I closed my eyes again. I didn’t feel anything. Just my feet on the carpeting and—wait a second—I
could feel something. There was a gentle, ever-so-slight movement.

“Well?” he asked.

I opened my eyes and nodded my head.

“Today the winds are light, but on a very windy day you can
really
feel it. Now imagine a tightrope stretched between this tower and the other.”

I looked over at the North Tower.

“A man actually walked between the two buildings. Can you picture that?”

Enough that it made my knees get all weak and gooey just thinking about it.

“People have also parachuted off the top of the North Tower.”

“They let people parachute from the building?” I asked in amazement.

He shook his head. “Nobody let them. They broke in through the doors at the top to get to the roof. They call them base jumpers, and jumping from the World Trade Center is supposed to be one of the ultimate thrills. You ever wonder if you might want to try skydiving?”

“I don’t think so.” I wouldn’t do that for a million dollars.

“There was also some man who used specially designed suction cups to climb up the side of the building. I was at work at the time but he didn’t pass by my office window. That would have been strange, working at your desk, turning around and there, plastered against the glass, a man silhouetted
against the city.”

“That is just too bizarre. Why would somebody risk his life doing something like that?”

“People are willing to risk their lives for all sorts of reasons, some of which I’ll never understand. Probably the strangest thing I’ve ever seen while working here was when they were filming the remake of the movie
King Kong
. Try to visualize gigantic Styrofoam and inflatable monkey parts clinging to the side of the building.”

“That would be weird. They film lots of movies here, don’t they?”

“Here and around here. These towers are in countless movies.” My father looked at his watch. “We’d better get going. The day is almost half over.”

“Half over? It’s not even eight-thirty yet.”

“Eight-thirty here, but after twelve in London and Paris. We do a great deal of our business in those two cities. That’s why I always try to arrive so early.”

“That makes sense,” I said. I thought for a second. “But then those cities should close early, which means you could come home early, right?”

“Well … then we have to connect with the Los Angeles market, which is three hours later.”

“Good thing you don’t do business in Japan, I guess.”

“Oh, we do!”

“Then maybe you should just sleep here and save yourself the commute home,” I said sarcastically.

“Actually, we have two staff who stay here at night to monitor the Asian market. The sun never sets on the business empire, and money never sleeps. Now we’d better get to the elevators. We have to take the express down to the lobby, catch one there for the seventy-eighth floor and then a local up to the eighty-fifth, where I work.” He looked at his watch. “It’s going to be a long wait at this time of day in the main lobby. And from the seventy-eighth floor we could just walk up seven flights … I do that some of the time.”

“Wouldn’t it be easier to just walk down from here?”

“That’s twenty-two floors.”

“Twenty-two floors
down
. That wouldn’t take nearly as long as going all the way down and back up again, would it?”