I was at home, listening to news on a-m radio, when the planes hit. Turned on TV immediately. By the time the Pentagon was hit, I was really getting scared. I lived in Summit NJ at the time, and was able to go up a hill, where I saw the smoke rising. Just horrible, then and now.

Thinking about 9/11 brought back a flood of memories. I worked in downtown Manhattan from 1958 through 1969. The area occupied by the WTC was one of the oldest in NYC. There were even some apartments on Greenwich Street near Albany Street, and you could see kids playing stickball in the street on Saturday. Volk's, the best German restaurant in the city, was on Liberty and Greenwich. Cortlandt Street was home to Heinz & Bolet (discount department store); "Radio Row" (Arrow Electronics and others), and Kaufman's Army/Navy Store, where you could buy just about anything that was gov't surplus, including decommissioned 20mm and .50 ammo.

David Rockefeller pulled off a real power play. His Chase Manhattan Bank's HQ building was downtown. The area wasn't doing well financially, and he wanted more businesses to bolster his bank. He arranged for the Port Authority to steamroller the locals to get the WTC built; it helped that his brother was Governor at the time.

I watched the buildings going up, including the famous "climbing cranes" that racheted themselves up the buildings' exterior frames. The deep excavation exposed the concrete tubes that carried PATH trains to and from lower Manhattan and Jersey City--when a train moved through the tube, you could see it vibrating in the pit that was to be the buildings' underground levels.

If I recall correctly, the WTC put so much commercial realty into Manhattan that commerical rents were depressed for years. I think it took more than a decade for the Twin Towers to be fully or mostly rented.