With Eric Lipton, author of City in the Sky: The Rise and Fall of the World Trade Center and a New York Times reporter.
As the World Trade Center site finally comes into shape—with another tower rising to regain the status as the tallest building in the United States—we look back at the cycles of catastrophe and rebuilding that has taken place on this same plot of land. All the way back to the days of the Dutch settlement of New York, the World Trade Center site has served as a grand stage for unspeakable calamities (the 1643 massacre of American Indians), devastating fires (in 1776, during the Revolutionary War) and grand achievements (the 1807 launching of America’s first commercial steamship ferry by Robert Fulton). We walk though this cycle of history—stopping as well at the wasteland that was Ground Zero in the weeks after the 2001 attack as the ironworkers and firefighters cleared the site—and examine the extraordinary push by different generations of New Yorkers to rebuild each time. It is a story of New York, with a bonus, as you will leave with a bit of trivia: where the street names come from at the World Trade Center site, as they are markers of this storied past.
New York City, NY; NYC