WTC creator says terrorists destroyed symbol of peace

Harry Bhaskara, Staff Writer, The Jakarta Post, New York

"I have no name cards. They were buried under the World Trade Center (WTC)," Guy Tozzoli said when introducing himself here recently. Tozzoli is the man who oversaw the construction of the twin towers that were destroyed on Sept. 11.

A traffic jam outside the Holland tunnel connecting New York and New Jersey that morning had spared his life.

"I was driving to the WTC from my home in New Jersey. It usually takes me about an hour but the traffic jam delayed me for another 45 minutes," said Tozzoli whose office was on the 77th floor of the WTC's tower one.

Just like other motorists in the gridlock, Tozzoli, 79, got out of his car when he saw that one of the twin towers was on fire, and soon afterwards he saw a plane heading for the other tower. He was a mile away when the towers collapsed.

Things had come full circle. Here was the man who built the buildings from scratch and dedicated them in 1973 only to see them reduced to rubble 28 years later.

"I became very sad and I cried. Then I got angry and decided WTCA would continue its work because we don't have any politics," Tozzoli said, referring to the World Trade Center Association.

The organization is the largest trading association in the world with 306 members in 91 countries.

Tozzoli, a down to earth and small man by American standards, is the president of the organization that has the exclusive worldwide rights to grant the use of the name "World Trade Center".

With a staff of only 16 people, Tozzoli, with doctorate degrees in science and law in his pocket, kicked off construction of the twin tower project in the mid-1960s to realize a vision that was the brainchild of then New York governor Nelson Rockefeller.

The New Jersey native was then director of the world trade department of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

"The idea was to make a city within a city so that traders could conduct their business with the utmost efficiency using state of the art technology," said Tozzoli, who retired from the Port Authority in 1987 and then became full-time president of the WTCA.

Until Sept. 11, the twin towers had been the largest world trade center complex in the world with 12 million square feet of office space, 470,000 square feet of retail space and 590,000 square feet of hotel and conference space.

The association has members from many countries that are not on friendly terms with each other, such as North and South Korea, China and Taiwan, as well as countries like Cuba.

"We staunchly believe that people who do business never make war with each other," Tozzoli said.

It was not an easy job, however. Some of those countries had initially tried to persuade him to exclude 'enemy' representatives from the buildings. But Tozzoli said he had always been steadfast in maintaining his principle that the WTCA did not indulge in politics.

Each member of the WTCA represents a specific city or region, so a country may have more than one member. China, for example, has 16 members, although not all of them have buildings.

In recognition of his work, Tozzoli has been nominated four times since 1997 as a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize.

"I always believe," he said of his achievement, "that there is always a better way to do something."

The terrorists who destroyed the twin towers, he said, had chosen the wrong target because the buildings belonged to many nations and they represented the promotion of peace through trade.

"The association is a private non-profit organization that is non-political. It aims to spread trade throughout all the world," Tozzoli said.

More than 5,000 people from more than 80 countries were killed in the Sept. 11 attacks.

Minoru Yamazaki, the architect of the buildings who died 10 years ago, had calculated the possibility of an accidental crash into the 110-story buildings by a jetliner.

"If a Boeing 707 jet plane traveling at 180 miles per hour hit the towers, only seven floors on one side would be taken out. The rest would stay intact and the buildings would not collapse," Tozzoli said. The 180-mile-per-hour speed was the maximum allowed by air traffic controllers within the New York metropolitan region.

The terrorists' planes, he said, were Boeing 767s traveling at an estimated speed of 400 to 500 miles per hour, with witnesses on the ground saying they heard the planes accelerate before hitting the towers.

"Any building hit by jet planes at that velocity would fall over. The twin towers collapsed. And it took them one hour before they did and 25,000 lives were saved, thanks to Yamazaki's building structure design," Tozzoli said of the American architect with Japanese heritage. A total of 40,000 people worked in the buildings. Not all of them were there at the time of the attacks.

Yamazaki did not adopt the accepted high-rise building structure but invented his own and insisted on using it.

The architect had submitted 50 different models for the WTC, which were the greatest building structures in the U.S. and the largest building project since the Egyptian pyramids, Tozzoli said.

Will Tozzoli rebuild the towers? It is not up to Tozzoli to decide this but the city of New York, New York state, the Port Authority and Larry Silverstein, the developer who signed a 99- year lease for the World Trade Center just last summer.

The mayor of New York, Rudolph Giuliani, wants to rebuild them, he said.

"Others have proposed to erect a memorial peace plaza on the spot as a reminder that we should not live this way. But I'm sure there will be another WTC. A city is not considered a city without a WTC," Tozzoli said.

What could have happened had there not been a traffic jam that morning?

"I would have certainly died. I reckon I wouldn't have wanted to leave the buildings until everybody was out," Tozzoli said.

The traffic jam had prevented him from being buried along with his name cards.

The writer was a participant in the recent Fall 2001 Thomas Jefferson program at the Honolulu-based East-West Center.