[kj] Asbestos Towers That Pain Built

[Darth E. Vader]

The World Trade Centre began in disaster, just as it
ended. A grossly misconceived land development
catastrophe of the late 1950s that was obsolete long
before it was finished, its Twin Towers symbolised
everything wrong with modernism and the Rockefeller
brothers who sponsored it.
   The oversized 16 acre site destroyed swathes of
human scale streetscape: 5 streets were closed off and
164 buildings demolished. The main towers exceeded 100
storeys simply out of greed for office space, and 60
workers died in their construction, not counting
others who have succumbed later to ASBESTOS spray. The
top ten storeys were added to grab a brief highest
building status for PR purposes.
    The building's owners, the New York Port
Authority, did not pay full taxes to the City and the
towers' bad neighbourliness was staggering: they stole
light from buildings all across Manhatten. Their
exterior frame structure cleverly maximised interior
space, while minimising views and making office
workers depressed. Space saving on elevators that
involved two changes up and down made for lengthy
journey times: in the upper areas, unable to lunch out
easily, workers stayed trapped all day. It would take
two hours to evacuate everyone in a fire.
   At the time, critics accurately called the towers
banal, grandiose, boring, dreary, grim, vacuous, gross
abstractions, and objects of extreme hubris. One of
them called the windswept 5 acre plaza at the base a
"cement football field" and said it was never peopled
during the buildings' entire 30 year lifespan.
   The WTC was not in great shape by 2001. Too much of
the towers' 638000 square metres of space languished
empty. The towers were liable for a "mid-life rehab."
However, the latest building regulations would have
dictated stripping out the toxic ASBESTOS that still
lined vast expanses of ceiling, not to mention the
remainder that shielded all the 90,000 tonnes of
steelwork in the North Tower and the lower third of
the South Tower.
    Such a job would have been unrealistically
expensive and physically impractical, with no gain in
revenues. For that reason the place was rather run
down. To a tourist, the WTC looked like a rooftop
photo-op, to an owner it might look more like a dead
end. In summer 2001 the WTC had just changed hands for
the first time.
    SILVERSTEIN PROPERTY CORPORATION already owned 
number seven WTC, the conveniently collapsible high
security tower that housed top secret government
offices, under a mortgage from the BLACKSTONE GROUP.
Now boss Larry Silverstein had signed a new $3.2
billion dollar 99 year lease on the Twin Towers, along
with WTC 4 and 5, plus 37,000 square metres of retail
space. Seven weeks before the towers were destroyed,
Port Authority handed over a giant set of keys to
Silverstein.

Blood On Your Hands?

Cracked Machine irregular cyberzine
http://www.webinfo.co.uk/crackedmachine

Look at grafitti scrawled on the wall:
Dubya can't catch family friend Bin Liner...
But what the HELL?
They talk to God!


		
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