@napoleon, I want to put this so you know where I am at. I never engaged with 9/11 when it happened. I never watched any of the footage or read any of the articles. I think because for me, I imagined it to be a day like when my friend and I went. We had breakfast at the hotel, walked to the subway, probably changed lines, got off at the Trade Centre stop. I have no direct memory of the outward journey, only of leaving and walking down under an impressive open walkway and stopping at a drinking fountain.
I'd forgotten about this until I saw the picture, and yes it rang a bell. I do remember seeing the aerial from inside, through the windows. They were poky, i remember thinking, 'this is a bit shit compared to the Empire State Building'.
I think where I am a cross purposes to you, the WTC towers for me aren't the things on the screen, they are the thing I travelled up. It was a real place that was demolished, and it must have been set to fall at exactly the same time as whatever happened on screen. On a holiday I got talking to an American at a bar in Prague, I heard him ordering and figured he'd know conversions so asked him what I should order if I wanted half a pint glass in metric. My friend and I ended up sitting with him and his friend, and when he told me he was from New York, I started telling him about our holiday. I'd actually totally forgotten about 9/11 as my friend was cringing as I spoke. I was telling him where we went, it's only when I said 'World Trade....oh shit, I am so sorry." This was like, it must have been 15 months after the fall. I didn't ask him about anything to do with the day, I just let him tell us what he wanted to tell us. 'It was horrendous there for months, the clear up, the noise, the smell, he couldn't cope, he had to leave', he ended up choosing to study in Prague, mainly because of its low skyline.
So when I think about 9/11, I have all the above baggage to do with it. And that's why I always ask, yes but how does what happen on the screen tie into what happen in the actual location. I don't believe they cordoned it off before the first stunt took place, but maybe that was just a large bang and some smoke. That would give them time to evacuate the area before they ran the show proper.
I've said before, it wouldn't surprise me if the actual structure of the towers was more like the Blackpool and Eiffel Towers, only boxed. So there would only be four areas up the tower where there were floors. That would explain why they made the bottom section so wide open and big.
- wtc-lobby.jpg (33.4 KiB) Viewed 4151 times
It might be down that escalator I remember going, which ended up at the subway.
I do remember when it came to going to the top, standing in a queue for a while, when we got the lift, I remember the lift guy telling us about how the lifts worked, and that this was a special express lift just for tourists to get to the top. It was in two sections, because the tower was too long for one. He also told us about the other lifts not going to all floors, and he gave us speed, height, etc. Thinking about it, it was a distraction to convince us tourists it was a working building.