On Sept. 10, I purchased a birthday card for my grandmother and a bottle of Herbal Essence shampoo in the Duane Reade in the WTC mall. I sat in the plaza and wrote the card and mailed it. Then I crossed over to the corner deli, purchased a tuna and veggie sandwich with provolone on a roll and a coffee. I drank the coffee as I walked home and ate the sandwich.
There was a sign from the Warner bros store that said “that’s all folks” that’s now at the museum. But I remember going to that mall all the times when my dad worked in the towers. The Warner brothers store had huge detailed displays in the front where the looney tunes characters were in work settings.
I remember that. The characters were all dressed like stock brokers out of the 1920's with candlestick phones and ticker tape. It's was a great design.
@@pacmancdii remember hearing they're kept in a warehouse somewhere now with some other scattered intact bits of the towers, or they may have simply been returned to Warner Bros. themselves.
9/11 museum has all of them in storage same museum that has the "thats all folks" sign on display. You can find images of them cleaned up online @pacmancdi
When I used to work at Banana Republic on Long Island, one of my managers worked at the Banana Republic in the mall of the WTC on 9/11. He told me he saw and elevator explode with body’s fly out and shit flew everywhere. He hid under a table for a minute and he thought it was a bomb like 93. He then walked outside and saw the 2nd plane hit. He was so traumatized he had to leave the city and transfer to another store in queens.
It is interesting that you selected this subject for your video. From 1978 to 1983 I worked at 22 Cortlandt Street in NYC. I walked through the mall every day to access the PATH trains to New Jersey where I lived. Many evenings I stopped at the restaurant in the mall to get something to eat before catching the train. They had the best chili. And seeing those long escalators gave me a laugh. Sometimes none of them were working and I had to climb out of the bowels of the WTC to get to the mall level. I have often wondered what I would have done on 9/11/2001 had I been working there. No doubt I would have not realized the danger after the first plane hit the north tower. I probably would have been an interested onlooker. And suppose I tried to catch a PATH train to get out of there? It is crazy to think about. Maybe I was just lucky that my job moved out of NYC in 1983.
If you tried catching a path train and the towers collapsed while you were walking through the mall to get there you could've died. Or do you think you wouldve went to the path above ground after the 2nd plane hit?
@@RichieD_21 I just don't know. It would have been crazy for me. The city shut down all the mass transit systems after the second plane. The bridges and tunnels were closed. I would have had to walk uptown and get a hotel room somewhere or sleep in a lobby. Tens of thousands of people were walking that day. Glad I missed it.
@georgesealy4706 you're right I remember that now. Seeing videos of the bridges into queens and Brooklyn full of thousands of people walking across was surreal
Did NYC and surrounding areas change, not in a security level but how hoodlums and street gangs united for a moment? In this time most people united and fear for safety. Just interesting to me how NYC was then, compare to now.
I visited the WTC in the mid 1970s. It was an exsperience I will never forget. I went up to the very top floor where the restaurant was . People walking on the sidewalk outside looked like ants. The building swayed with the wind. Very scary.
It’s always weird to me that I was born into this world with the twin towers and all of this standing but only 9 months later it was all gone and I was unaware of it’s existence and 9/11 until I was older. Every time I see these kinds of videos, I desperately wish I could’ve been to the original WTC.
i was in kindergarten when it happened and all i remember was getting to go home early and hearing about the attack on the radio with my dad in a store parking lot. im not even american so thinking back i have no idea why my country reacted the way it did
@@koolerpure that's interesting. yeah, i didn't think people in other countries were immediately reacting like that. was it a westernized country? i was in first grade and a lot of kids started to get picked up early by their parents, the teachers were in and out of the rooms and whispering to each other. i had no clue what was going on but i was hoping my parents would come get me too but they didn't, and we were only a 2.5hr drive from NYC 😂
Ginger, you really need to consult with me on anymore WTC videos. I actually worked there and can provide you with way more info than you can find on Google.
What's all so eerie for me is that the last time I was there was as a little boy in 2000 or I think it may have been early 2001. I remember it was very cold. But I stayed in the Marriott 3WTC. The hotel room is what I remember the most, but I think I'm starting to recollect memories of the mall. But the eerie part is that my last memory of New York City is still stuck in time when the Towers were still there. So in my mind, it feels strange that none of this is there anymore. That's the best way I can explain it, it's kind of hard to explain the feeling I get. Anyways, interesting video. I never knew that the mall was actually still there during the collapse although it was still damaged. I thought everything was completely destroyed.
Yeah, I was there as a little boy too but much earlier. Probably around 1994 so I would have been 7 or 8. Main thing I remember is the vaulted ceilings, and the huge bookstore. Pretty sure it was a Barne's and Noble. It was the only time I ever visited the WTC. I'm from PA but my parents are from NYC and I had to go to Manhattan with them to get a copy of their marriage license for a house they were buying. When we were done we went to the WTC mall. I've always wondered about it's fate and it's very interesting to me that it helped a lot of people escape.
I went an interview on my 21st bday on 07/18/01 at Everything Yogurt by the escalator for the PATH train. My interviewers name was Rashida and I will never for get that. The mall was beautiful and unlike anything I've seen living in the Hudson Valley. I was supposed to move with my best friend and my son to the Bronx and live with her husband (at the time) and mother in law in a beautiful house in The Bronx. My Mother told me that something was going to happen there and I told my mom she was worrying to much and nothing was going to happen. I was supposed to get a callback sometime during the week of September 10. Part of my job was to deliver orders to the offices
Calatrava is such a controversial person, he's designed great things but also other ones made with poor materials or absolutely ugly and devoid of significance.
Honestly I’m glad the Mall was one of the things that managed to get rebuilt at The World Trade Center, a sacred and special place that’ll make memories for generations to come.
It somberly reminded me of the pictures inside reactor 4 of chernobyl where the upper biological shield lays on its side. Or well also the city of Pripyat.
I started working in 2 WTC in 1989. The mall was really just the underground concourse that connected the buildings of the complex with the subway & PATH stations as well as the local streets. During rush hour the concourse was a blizzard of people heading to/from work in the neighborhood. The retail element was pretty dull (several major bank branches, Woolworths, and a not so good food place, The Big Kitchen.) The mall vibe with a broad mix of national stores came several years later.
I remember making my final purchase at that mall on Friday, December 17, 1999 at a JCrew store located there. It was my final day working at the WTC where I was contracted to help a financial institure with their Y2K problem. While nothing happened when it came to Y2K, somehow I felt a sadness not knowing that this would be my final visit to this mall.
I remember the Shops at WTC well. I worked at the then Vista International Hotel when it opened in the early 80s and would walk through the mall nearly daily. Those stores did good business. In fact, a friend of mine who worked for The Limited (corporate) told me they did a huge trade in pantyhose from all the female workers at the WTC!
Westfield destroys everything it touches. They acquired 4 different malls in my area in the 90's. They made plans to renovate, asked for TIF money to do so, jacked up rent causing great stores like Disney and top clothing stores to close. Those spaces were never leased again. They basically killed off 3 different malls BEFORE on line shopping became so popular. The original WTC mall was doomed either way. It doesn't sound like it's doing much better today.
I wasn’t around during the time of the OG WTC, however seeing stores like the WB studio store and Lechters actually seemed like nice stores. Sadly both those stores are no longer there :C
Did they ever mention if anybody was killed in the mall from debris or anything else? I often wondered if people were trapped down there or if they were able to get out at all. Over the years. I’d think about that tragic day, hoping that people down on the street when the towers came down and that smoke and debris dust that they were breathing in, didn’t give them all respiratory problems and cancer. What an awful time.😔
There's i think a mention on a documentary about the aftermath and rescue, one of the members of the rescue team , tells about a story on a girl that supposedly received a message from her father saying he was safe in the mall , they expected find survivors there , they didn't, turns out that during the day of the attacks , the cellphone lines were so overwhelmed, that the message the girl received was real , but just reached her hours later after the towers collapsed , meaning probably the man died in the mall .
I was familiar with the original mall since the late 1970's to shortly before 9/11/01 as access to the subways. I often used the 'new' mall to access the subway and PATH too. The old mall had a range of stores from discounters (Alexanders had a branch there) to luxury brands. It had a wide variety of food vendors, including a large central 'The Kitchen' by the PATH escalators. The new mall is mostly higher end stores and food services, not much as to the 'lower' end. Sadly there are, like most malls, high turnover of retail tenants, a lot of empty storefronts. The Pandemic and shift to Work From Home has badly hurt the success of the new mall. It also gets a lot of visitors, has public rest rooms, something difficult to find in the city.
You should look into the part of the subway entrance coming from the new mall that retains the same floors, signage, stairs, doors etc from the old WTC.. very cool that they saved that
Yes, that is interesting to see that there. When I visited Oculus and the WTC site in 2018, I think, I saw that bit from the old structure with the door that still had the markings from when they were doing the search and rescue. For some reason it felt comforting to see that there was something that remained from before - that corridor, the sphere, the tree, and not much else.
@@laurafrakinroslin Isn’t it correct since a liminal space is a place which is usually populated, and creates a sense of unease from being empty/deserted? Like going to school at night or, as in this case, an empty mall?
The "flooding" wasn't bad and was mostly over the escalators going down to the PATH trains. It was like a few broken pipes spraying, not a torrential amount of water. I would say overhead sprinkler pipes. I did not get wet going from Tower II to the northwest corner of Borders books exit. Nice video but basically zero information new to me. (Survivor Tower II Fiduciary Trust, 97th Floor).
The thing is, there are tens of thousands of people going through there everyday as part of their daily commute. This is in the financial district. People buy stuff on their way home. I know, I used to do that in the old mall. So, it is not going to die.
@@georgesealy4706 I'm not saying this mall will but in general the mall industry just isn't quite what it used to be since many opt to do all their shopping online these days.
Mall near me is full of people but there’s another mall that is empty near me and I walked through it and no stores open only things in there is a employment office and some city offices
You're severely under-estimating the abilities of cameras in 2001. If your camera shot on film, your footage would have been even higher quality than 4k nowadays. The footage would just have to be rescanned with today's technology. That's why we have so many 80s and 90s shows in HD nowadays. Because they were shot and stored on film. And scanning technology made a huge leap in the last 20 years. So they took the old film and just rescanned it. There might be even some unreleased HD-footage of the attacks out there, but most video cameras used tape, which works differently than film. But still, tons of cameras from 2001 used film.
Yup. I betcha there are tons of old handy cam, 8mm film, footage of this, that people haven't up converted yet. Ones that are on a dusty shelf waiting to be seen, because grandma passed last year and who knows what's in those old boxes?.....right?....
My trip up to the observation deck and restaurant was in Feb 1979. It was wild that the elevator that took my friends and I up had a speedometer on it! The guy that operated the elevator had disheveled hair and tie constantly.
4 месяца назад
I worked in the Twin Towers in 83. I trained there for Manufacturers Hanover Trust as a bank teller. Left NYC months later for the USAF. Worked on the 45 th floor. Would take the express elevator to 44 and up the escalator for one flight. The sounds of the wind shifting the building took a few days to get used to. Was quite an experience working there.
I teach middle school English and History, and one of my assignments was to look at photographs and tell me what was going on in them and what time period they were in. They looked at photos from the 1920s and said, "It's in black and white, so this was in the 1980s." [SMH] These kids also didn't know when the Declaration of Independence was signed.
@@Icequeen89x I sometimes wonder what the young people would make of the brilliant color and special effects of the 1939 movie Gone With The Wind! We can't seem to duplicate today the cinematic beauty of that film.
Bro I really like your videos👍Please bro tell me in the next video about the technical floors in the WTC twin towers. I was always interested to know what they were for and why they didn’t have windows. Please like so the author can see) Thank you)
you basically answered your own question. The mechanical floors were for supporting the infrastructure of the building, plumbing HVAC and local elevator systems . The building was basically 3 skyscrapers on top of each other separated by mechanical floors and local elevator scheme repeated 3 times. Mechanical floors 41-42 74-75 and 108-110. These floors were non office floors so there were vents instead of windows. The highest office occupied floor in both towers was 105
@@JP-uu2rwit would still be interesting to hear about the mechanical floors on 9/11. How the mechanical systems held up after the planes hit, such as the sprinkler systems, electric, elevators, the fire systems such as the venting system the towers had for fires that were suppose to suck out the smoke. Especially the mechanical floors that were directly impacted by the planes. Alot of these systems obviously failed after the plane collisions but some did stay functioning and firefighters were even able to get one elevator in the south tower running that they used to get from the lobby to dozens of floor up. You wouldn't be interested in a video about these mechanical floors and how they fared on 9/11?
There is a lot of footage of an air flow evaluation which much of it happens on these infrastructure floors. Many large blower fans and the elevator equipment rooms. I am most interested myself in the transmitter room floors where WPIX among others had their high powered television transmission equipment for the big tower. In another OTIS related video you could see the hard coaxial lines going to the roof for the antenna, but that was only a video covering the elevator machinery modernization in the north tower WTC1...
I kind of like how the interior of the new mall looks like the facades of the old WTC lobby. One thing I would say is that in spite of how much NYC is on the decline, the WTC mall won’t ever die because it’s guarded more heavily than the other properties around the city because it’s the WTC. That’s why shoplifting is never seen there like it is all over the city
I take the PATH from NJ everyday through the new concourse. I’m an early Gen Z, meaning 9/11 was around the time I was “gaining consciousness” and becoming self aware. My memories of this place is more of the temporary PATH station and maze of construction walls before the permanent station and Oculus mall opened. It still gives me the creeps how the physical place can change but the idea of a train station and mall being here was always around since the 70s.
I was wondering what that lower building was in the World Trade Center site with the Freedom Tower. I didn’t know it was a mall, that’s a fun fact. I was in New York with my family during my Senior Trip. I had NO IDEA that THAT building was a mall.
So I never knew until today, there was an underground mall at the WTC! I saw the plaza in person in June of 2001. I think we went inside for a minute too. I knew there was a WB store right there that got destroyed, but I never knew it was at that mall.
You'd think an underground shopping mall would be fairly safe. But Malls in general aren't that safe. About 10 miles from where I am right now we had a sniper at a mall. Killed 5 or 6 people. I always avoid them because I don't like crowds. Last time I went was to a mall near downtown Portland to watch Tonya Harding practice skating. I'd met her at a club that my friends draged me to. She was a lot nicer and smarter than the media puts out. That was 20 years ago.
part of it is still there, but badly damaged so isn't open and most of it was demolished for the memorial. Part of the current occulus is also where part of the mall used to be
The WTC mall made my childhood memories. Every weekend I would head down to the Store of Knowledge which I remember fondly. They had Thomas the Tank Engine train sets that my mother bought for me, and I still have to this day.
I remember watching a scene from a 2006 movie that shows the police officers in the shopping mall and they were standing near the entrance to the South Tower when the tower collapsed. Three of them managed to run into the elevator shaft before the building collapsed on them.
Interestingly the WTC Path station was reopened some time after the cleanup was mostly finished and you could ride the line from Jersey City to ground zero. When you arrived at the platform, the back wall of the platform was just a fence between you and the footprint of the WTC so you could look down and watch debris cleanup. From there, I went with my parents and little sister to the makeshift memorial museum that used to be across the street; a few buildings down from the corner Burger King (the one that served as a command center during the attack). It was a surreal experience that really put into perspective how big of a hole was left prior to reconstruction.
First time I visited WTC in person was 2018. I was able to take in the breathtaking architecture of this mall. I didn’t have context to it being destroyed 9/11, but the newness and modern design clearly suggested a rebuild. The structure is probably one of the most amazing structures that I have ever been in.
Thanks for this video, it was a bittersweet trip down memory lane. I spent many weekends traveling through here and always stopped at the mall. If just to window shop and dream or sometimes to pick up a slice of pizza before getting on the PATH train over to Jersey to visit relatives. It wasn't until I was much older and back in NYC as a sort of native tourists that I actually went UP in the towers and not DOWN as all the many times before.
"They didn't have 4k back then." Honey - film is much, much higher resolution than 4k. All film is. The low-quality stuff you see from the era is the much, much cheaper VHS. Absolutely crappy images were the only thing it was ever capable of. As for digital, it's still catching up with the quality of the most finely crafted, well-lit, film productions like Lawrence of Arabia. Digital stills also have yet to match the fidelity of glass plate negatives. (From before 1930!)
Having the largest shopping mall in New York City was like having the the largest chemical waste dump in New Jersey - it was nothing to brag about. One thing I remember about the subterranean concourse at the World Trade Center was the bank of long, long, long escalators - shown at 1:32 - that went up from the PATH station. The last time I used the PATH station at the World Trade Center was to bring my bicycle into the city from Hoboken on Sunday, September 2, 2001. It was Labor Day weekend. (I returned to Manhattan to go cycling in the city on Labor Day itself, September 3, and one distinct memory I have of that day was seeing a Volkswagen Sharan minivan parked on Park Avenue. The Sharan was never officially offered for sale in the U.S.)
imo the older mall looked a lot better to me. the new one is just way too white imo. it needs more color and I don't like it exposed like that because if a 9/11 tragedy happened again and the tower collapsed debris will go right inside the mall because its not underground like it used to be.
The old mall was never particularly liked, what with its low ceiling and rather dark lighting. People mostly went there only because it was convenient.
It sucks & it’s sad that the World Trade Center never got to open the McDonald’s & you’re right the mall would still be there today idk if the McDonald’s would still be there now though I’m thinking it likely would not have as many stores now
Thank you for the 9/11/WTC videos. Santiago Calatrava is the architect for the oculus mall. He has interesting designs around the world. The structure had problems with leaks previously but now the floor marble type seems to be too fragile for the heating system underneath or something like that.
We definitely did have video cameras in 2001. Lmao. No they weren’t 4k but I still have decent footage from, back then that recorded….wait for it…..on film! Looks better than 4k in a nostalgic way.❤
Were there people in the mall when the towers collapsed? I would guess so. Must have been an insane rumble like a freight train followed by a dust cloud.
There actually were people in there. There is a story about a group of people who had to climb through loads of rubble after the collapse of the towers caused the mall and subway stations to partially collapse as well.
There probably weren't too many retail shops open that time of day but the food court would have been open because of commuters coming in from the subway and PATH into WTC. That said, I'm sure they were all evacuated pretty quickly and they definitely stopped the subway traffic from continuing to come in before the buildings collapsed. But, because the police and fire were guiding people to evacuate through the mall area there were definitely a lot of people in there still when they came down.
I still have and wear my jacket from the Structure store there. I was just thinking about how that jacket wouldn’t mean much to me if I hadn’t gotten it there. Hopefully, it’ll last me the rest of my life as a reminder of the towers.
I was in that part of the Mall when the plane hit Tower 2. I was working on the 34th floor when the first plane hit. After that announcement to get back to offices/seats, my colleagues still ignored and we walked down those flights of stairs to the lobby and a couple of us re-routed to the Mall below…. We was exiting when the second plane hit and had to run back and find a new exit… 🙏🏽🙏🏽
I remember when the oculus opened because my sister was a manager for H&M at the time and they sent her with a few other people down there to help open the store up and train people, and she would tell us that security was so tight getting inside. It was honestly insane at how much identification you had to go through but nonetheless completely understandable considering why
I remember going into Manhattan to tool around the city out of boredom one Saturday in July 2001, and this was one of my stops that day. On 9/11, as I watched in horror, my mind immediately shot back to how someplace that I had been recently was now destroyed in the worst terrorist attack on the US.
What I find interesting is that of all the footage, I've never heard anyone giving accounts from the underground mall as the day unfolded. I haven't seen anyone interviewed about how they were evacuated, kept working, heard the explosion from inside the stores. I have heard some passengers recollect about how their experience from the subway station connected to WTC but nothing otherwise. . . bizarre?
