Scholastic Online Talks with Ric Burns

Ric Burns and Scholastic News Reporter Michele Langley. (Photo: Suzanne McCabe)

On September 8, PBS will air The Center of the World, a documentary film by Ric Burns about the rise and fall of the World Trade Center. (Check local listings for time.) Originally considered an architectural failure, the Twin Towers became one of the great symbols of New York.

Scholastic News Online spoke with Burns about his film.

SN: What was the significance of the World Trade Center at the time it was built?

Burns: The tallest buildings in the world always happen at the end of building booms. The Empire State Building came at the end of a decade of frantic building in New York City. The World Trade Center followed the same pattern. There was a huge building boom at the end of the 1950s, and at the tail end up went the World Trade Center.

SN: What about the economic boom in the late 1980s and early 1990s?

Burns: By then we had stopped building tall. The World Trade Center became a morality play, or a cautionary tale. It was so largeÑand, it was thought of at the time, so inappropriately large.

However, it went up and it was condemned [criticized] in every way. Architecturally, critics called it the largest aluminum siding job in the history of the world.

SN: What are some of the most remarkable things that you learned working on this project?

Burns: There are so many things. Buildings, especially big buildings, seem inevitable, and this building was not inevitable. It had everything going against it. It was four, five, six times larger than anything that had ever been built in terms of office space.

The amount of power in every senseÑpolitical, financial, social powerÑeven just the energy it took to lift those buildings up, was so tremendous. In a general way, regardless of whether someone liked the WTC or didn't like the WTC, one has to stand back with a kind of awe and say there's something in human beings that needs to build tall. At one time we decided we were going to put a man on the moon. For many of the same reasons, a group of New Yorkers decided they were going to build not one, but two of the tallest buildings in New York. You need to stand back with respect and awe just at the size and hubris [exaggerated pride] of the two buildings.

SN: About how many people did the actual building of the Twin Towers?

Burns: [About]3,500 to 4,000, and they were incredibly safe. Not one ironworker died in the course of making the WTC. It's part of the brutal arithmetic that someone's going to die in the course of a building going up. I think eight people died, but no steelworkers died, which is just unbelievable. Being a steelworker is one of the most dangerous jobs in the world because people fall and steel falls.

SN: What do you see as the greatest moment in the history of the World Trade Center?

French Aerialist Philippe Petit holds a balancing pole as he crosses a steel cable suspended between the not-yet-completed twin towers of the world Trade Center, 1,350 foot above the ground, on August 7, 1974. (Photo: AP Wide World)

Burns: The greatest moment in the World Trade Center's life came at the darkest part in its history, except for September 11, 2001. In 1974, the buildings were tanking [failing economically], New York City was going down the drain, and the fiscal crisis was right around the corner. A [small] Frenchman, Philippe Petit, had been dreaming about walking between the two towers on a high wire since he was 18 years old. He had been in a dentist's office in 1968. They had not started to build the towers yet, but as he was flipping through a copy of Paris Match he saw a photograph of the models. And he said to himself, "I'm going to walk through those towers."

Just that year he started working as an apprentice tightrope artist. For six years he trained himself. He plotted this extraordinary campaign to sneak up into the World Trade Center and string a wire across. It's one of those riveting [captivating] tales of human obsession of the most beautiful kind. Finally, after coming to America for the first time in January 1974, and after six months of setbacks, he and his [helpers] snuck up into both towers with 2,000 pounds worth of equipment on their backs. The next morning, August 7, 1974, on a very [humid] summer morning, Philippe Petit went out on the wire for 45 minutes. He did eight complete passes, he danced on the wire, he jumped so both feet left the wire, and he laid down and looked at a seagull flying over him. Well, people were on their way to work, and hundreds of thousands gathered on the streets below. Forty policemen were out on the roofs trying to talk him out of it. But he was in his own zone. He knew from the minute he got out there that he was completely safe.

SN: What was the reaction from down below?

Burns: Guy Tozzoli, director of the World Trade Center project, got the report that this guy was on a wire between the two buildings. His first thought was that he hoped he didn't fall. But his second thought was that if he didn't fall then this was going to be the greatest thing to happen to the World Trade Center, and he was completely right. Tozzoli helped make sure Petit was given only a slap on the wrist. Petit had broken 15 laws at least. In fact, all charges were dropped, and he was sentenced to perform his high-wire act for children in Central Park.

That was the first time the World Trade Center had a human touch to it, that people looked at these huge buildings and felt there was a human scale to them. This event was on every front page of every newspaper in the world. It was the lead in every telecast. Suddenly, there was a way people could relate to these buildings. That was the moment the World Trade Center began to come out of the darkness. It took another 15 to 20 years, but sometime over the next quarter century the towers went from being the most [criticized] buildings to being icons of New York.

SN: Those two buildings held a lot of history.

Burns: For people who want to know about New York City, and people who want to know about America and the world, the story of the World Trade Center is one of the great, great epic stories, including its tragic end. It tells us more about America and the world in the post-World War II period because it was a story of power.

SN: And sadness.

Burns: Yes. I fear the world will never look as beautiful as it did at 8:30 a.m. on September 11, 2001. It was famously the most beautiful day in the world, in the year; it was the bluest of a stream of beautiful days. But it also had fragility. It would be nice to turn back the clock, but the truth is that embracing reality is always going to be better than not. So as much as one may wish to turn back the clock, the fact is that we were living in a dream world for an amazingly long time.

SN: What do you want to see come next for the World Trade Center?

Burns: We have to figure out a way to recognize the essential solidarity [bond] that all humans have or we're just going to blow each other up.

What better place in the world than New York City, and what better place in New York City than Ground Zero, to create an architectural expression that says we're all in this together. We have a responsibility to each other that goes beyond all differences, and we can't become island nations.

New York has had more experience as a place where everybody is just trying to get along together than any place in the world. We need to put that idea forward very strongly in whatever is built. So when people look at the tip of Lower Manhattan they see something that holds out hope to everybody in the world. The way the Statue of Liberty held out hope. It became a unique symbol of hope. We have a unique opportunity, in one of the most densely populated cities in the world, to create another symbol that shines out everywhere that says inclusiveness, tolerance, and mutual responsibility is the only way forward. That's been a New York experience for a long time. Instead of rage or sorrow we can have hope, not hope undermined by reality, but real hope. I think it's going to happen.

Interview by Suzanne McCabe and Michele Langley