Synopsis
The definitive biography of the iconic skyscrapers and the ambitions that shaped them-from their dizzying rise to their unforgettable fall
More than a year after the nation began mourning the lives lost in the attacks on the World Trade Center, it became clear that something else was being mourned: the towers themselves. They were the biggest and brashest icons that New York, and possibly America, has ever produced-magnificent giants that became intimately familiar around the globe. Their builders were possessed of a singular determination to create wonders of capitalism as well as engineering, refusing to admit defeat before natural forces, economics, or politics.
No one knows the history of the towers better than New York Times reporters James Glanz and Eric Lipton. In a vivid, brilliantly researched narrative, the authors re-create David Rockefeller's ambition to rebuild lower Manhattan, the spirited opposition of local storeowners and powerful politicians, the bold structural innovations that later determined who lived and died, master builder Guy Tozzoli's last desperate view of the towers on September 11, and the charged and chaotic recovery that could have unraveled the secrets of the buildings' collapse but instead has left some enduring mysteries.
Like David McCullough's The Great Bridge, City in the Sky is a riveting story of New York City itself, of architectural daring, human frailty, and a lost American icon.
More than a year after the nation began mourning the lives lost in the attacks on the World Trade Center, it became clear that something else was being mourned: the towers themselves. They were the biggest and brashest icons that New York, and possibly America, has ever produced-magnificent giants that became intimately familiar around the globe. Their builders were possessed of a singular determination to create wonders of capitalism as well as engineering, refusing to admit defeat before natural forces, economics, or politics.
No one knows the history of the towers better than New York Times reporters James Glanz and Eric Lipton. In a vivid, brilliantly researched narrative, the authors re-create David Rockefeller's ambition to rebuild lower Manhattan, the spirited opposition of local storeowners and powerful politicians, the bold structural innovations that later determined who lived and died, master builder Guy Tozzoli's last desperate view of the towers on September 11, and the charged and chaotic recovery that could have unraveled the secrets of the buildings' collapse but instead has left some enduring mysteries.
Like David McCullough's The Great Bridge, City in the Sky is a riveting story of New York City itself, of architectural daring, human frailty, and a lost American icon.
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About the Author
James Glanz is a science reporter for The New York Times with a doctorate in physics. Eric Lipton is a metropolitan reporter for the Times. Since September 11, 2001, they have investigated the attack on the World Trade Center and the aftermath. They live in New York.
Reviews
This is not a book only about September 11; the towers' collapse begins on number 236 of 337 pages of narrative text. New York Times reporters Glanz (science) and Lipton (metropolitan news) instead deliver a thoroughly absorbing account of how the World Trade Center developed from an embryonic 1939 World's Fair building to "a city in the sky, the likes of which the planet had never seen." In this lively page-turner, intensively researched and meticulously documented, a world of international trade, business history, litigation, architecture, engineering and forensics comes clear-a political and financial melodrama with more wheeling and dealing than Dallas, touched lightly with the comedic and haunted by tragedy. The authors move a Robert Altman-sized cast (engineers, architects, iron workers, builders, demolitionists, lawyers, mobsters, mayors, mathematicians, critics, activists, real estate dealers, biochemists, union organizers, an aerialist, an arsonist) through the design, construction, destruction and memorializing. Faceless entities like the Port Authority acquire names, personal histories and diverse agendas. Bureaucratic reports and public hearings, reduced with clarity and balance, become comprehensible, even readable. The authors are remarkably skilled at telling all without telling too much: a "deadening" 44-page speech by Port Authority official Austin Tobin gets short shrift but a fair account. Their descriptions of new technologies (e.g., "artificial creakiness"), fresh experiments (particularly in wind engineering), complicated financial maneuverings and secret studies become clear to the non-specialist reader. While some superlatives might have been avoided ("the biggest and brashest icons that New York ever produced," etc.), Glanz and Lipton tell this compelling story without becoming overwrought, and with graphs and charts (and 16 pages of b&w photos not seen by PW) that contribute immensely to understanding the logistical and technical aspects of the project. This book may be the definitive popular account of the towers.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
*Starred Review* New York Times reporters Glanz (science) and Lipton (metropolitan news) briskly and lucidly tell the entire wrenching story of the genesis and destruction of the World Trade Center, once a testament to capitalistic ambition and technical innovation, now a monument to hubris, apocalyptic hate, and the suffering of innocents. The authors begin with engrossing profiles of the men who dreamed up the World Trade Center 40 years ago, most notably David Rockefeller, the Port Authority's feisty Guy Tozzoli, and Japanese American architect Minoru Yamasaki, who was afraid of heights and had never built a skyscraper before. Drawing on fresh and extensive research, Glanz and Lipton chart the contentious and irresponsible design process in which untested structural technologies were deemed safe over the objections of a prescient few who worried about fire and airplane collisions. The authors' highly detailed yet always human and dramatic chronicling of the towers' unprecedented construction, as well as unique insights into how the controversial twin towers finally won the affection of skeptical New Yorkers only to come under siege--first by an arsonist-janitor, then by terrorist bombers in 1993, and, finally, by those who brought them down on that unforgettable September 11--is both fascinating and tragic, encompassing, as it does, the best and worst of human ingenuity. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
From City in the Sky:
The phone rang at 7 a.m. in the four-story, red-brick townhouse on East 65th Street where David Rockefeller was just finishing up his breakfast before his commute to work. Rockefeller, the youngest grandson of America's first billionaire, took a certain patrician pride in riding the Lexington Avenue subway downtown to his office at Chase National Bank, his newspaper folded lengthwise so that he could read it in the morning crush, just like everyone else. But on this day in February 1955 Rockefeller would make his commute in the back of a gray Cadillac limousine whose license plates read, very simply, WZ. Those were the initials of William Zeckendorf, the eccentric but brilliant real estate mogul and family friend who had phoned to say he had an idea that just couldn't wait. "I'll pick you up," Zeckendorf blurted to Rockefeller.
Rockefeller, who had just been appointed executive vice president for planning and development at the bank, was used to such outbursts from Zeckendorf, a bald, moon-faced man some people liked to call the P. T. Barnum of real estate. Now Zeckendorf was working out a sure-fire deal for building a giant new headquarters for Chase National Bank. His plan was so complicated that he did not want to describe it on the phone. He wanted Rockefeller to himself during the limousine ride downtown. This was going to be one hell of a deal.
The phone rang at 7 a.m. in the four-story, red-brick townhouse on East 65th Street where David Rockefeller was just finishing up his breakfast before his commute to work. Rockefeller, the youngest grandson of America's first billionaire, took a certain patrician pride in riding the Lexington Avenue subway downtown to his office at Chase National Bank, his newspaper folded lengthwise so that he could read it in the morning crush, just like everyone else. But on this day in February 1955 Rockefeller would make his commute in the back of a gray Cadillac limousine whose license plates read, very simply, WZ. Those were the initials of William Zeckendorf, the eccentric but brilliant real estate mogul and family friend who had phoned to say he had an idea that just couldn't wait. "I'll pick you up," Zeckendorf blurted to Rockefeller.
Rockefeller, who had just been appointed executive vice president for planning and development at the bank, was used to such outbursts from Zeckendorf, a bald, moon-faced man some people liked to call the P. T. Barnum of real estate. Now Zeckendorf was working out a sure-fire deal for building a giant new headquarters for Chase National Bank. His plan was so complicated that he did not want to describe it on the phone. He wanted Rockefeller to himself during the limousine ride downtown. This was going to be one hell of a deal.
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