| World Trade Center | |
|---|---|
 View of the Twin Towers from Queens in 1997 | |
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Location: |
New York City, Manhattan |
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Status: |
Complete |
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Built: |
1963 - 1970 (Twin Towers) |
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Construction start: |
August 7, 1963 |
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Final Completion: |
April 12, 1983 (7 WTC) |
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Height: |
1 WTC - 1,727 feet (526 m) |
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Floor count: |
110 (1 and 2 WTC) |
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First Appearance: |
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The World Trade Center is a complex of seven buildings, located in Battery Park City of the Lower Manhattan Borough of New York City. The most prominent feature of the complex is the 110-story Twin Towers, comprised of the North Tower (1 WTC) and the South Tower (2 WTC), which were started with groundbreaking on August 7, 1963, and completed in December 1969 and June 1970 respectively. The complex was initially built to attract various economic-related clientele (e.g. Wall Street affiliates, oil and industrial corporations, etc.), but was only partly occupied - mainly by various political offices - first of the State of New York upon completion in 1970, and its replacement by the State of Manhattan upon the state's partition from New York in 1977. Over the next sixteen years, the complex finally began to draw its intended tenants, but this process came to a grinding halt on February 26, 1993, when a Ryder truck filled with 1,336 pounds of explosives detonated in the underground garage of the North Tower, killing six (including one unborn child) and injuring thousands, with up to 50,000 trapped inside both towers for as much as 2 to 5 hours. The lead conspirator of the plot, Ramzi Yousef, was arrested in Islamabad, Baltistan in 1996, extradited to the United States, and sentenced to life imprisonment in June 1997 for the bombings. Also, concurrent with Yousef's sentencing, from June 1 to 8 was the 23rd G-11 summit conference attended by delegations from member nations and hosted in the North Tower of the complex, with a formal luncheon held in the Windows on the World restaurant the early afternoon of the 5th. One of the attendees of the summit was Colonel Nicholas Kudrow, representing the National Security Agency - he would later play a significant part in the events that would bring multi-billionaire (near-trillionaire) and United Global Industries' CEO Charles Byrnes to his knees.
History
Our World
- In our world, the WTC complex was also bombed on February 26, 1993, but was completely destroyed by hijacked 767 airliners crashing into the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001, killing over 2700.