Above — day by day, a floor a week — 750 men are busy raising Tower 1.
"We're goin' vertical," Becker says. "Pretty soon you'll be able to start to see it in the skyline. We're actually getting ready to start erecting thirty-three and thirty-four. We just finished thirty-one and thirty-two."
He's a strapping Brooklyn cowboy with a wrangler's mustache. He fills a construction trailer all by himself. It isn't his size. He's still that intense.
"I'm attached to the building. When I hear some of the negativity, I take it personal. But people don't understand. Oh, yeah, I explain it. Absolutely. I tell them they don't know what the hell they're talkin' about. People don't understand the magnitude of the below-grade structure — almost fifty thousand cubic yards of concrete. That's almost equivalent to a thirty-story building. We were building footings around an active railroad track. When people walk below grade — I'm in awe myself when I walk around. The magnitude of the concrete — it's massive. Massive. People don't understand."
The lack of understanding is compounded to this day by pundits fond of pointing out that the Empire State Building took just over a year to build, as if the two projects were in any way comparable.
Never mind that the Empire State site had not been attacked, that its predecessor was not destroyed, that its designers had no need to harden their building against an ongoing jihad. The Empire State's builders also didn't have to dig down seventy feet to hit bedrock strong enough to support their skyscraper, and then build its foundation atop a commuter railroad.
In fact — as opposed to ignorant punditry — the World Trade Center is a mere few hundred feet east of the Hudson River — in July, crews working on the foundation of the vehicle-screening center unearthed a ship's prow dating to the late eighteenth century — and the old Twin Towers towered over Hudson River landfill, which is why the Port was forced to dig so far for bedrock, and why it also had to first build a concrete "bathtub" around the towers' site to keep out the river and to hold fast against its push. The bathtub's walls had to be repaired after 9/11; even as the site was being cleared of millions of tons of debris, workers rushed to shore them up to prevent a potentially catastrophic flood.
Then there was the matter of rebuilding the PATH lines. The tracks, equipment, and utility lines were destroyed on 9/11, and the Ground Zero "Master Plan" that so dazzled Pataki with glorious symbolism and monumental soar — concocted by an architect who'd never had a building built that stood taller than four floors — blithely sited Tower 1 on the worst possible spot on the entire sixteen acres, which is why Becker's crews had to weave column footings around a working commuter railroad.
They did it — all of it — day by day, piece by painstaking piece, while the politicians and pundits prattled on. Same way they're doing it today.
via www.esquire.com
Worth reading in its entirety (thanks, @Remy!)
Thanks for this. It is fascinating. I am one of those people wondering why this was taking so long. Thanks for the explanation.
Posted by: Colleen | November 27, 2010 at 08:13 PM