The Twin Towers of the World Trade Center were essentially two vertical cities, each rising 110 stories above Lower Manhattan. Together they held almost 10 million square feet of rentable office space, housing roughly 430 companies, a massive underground shopping mall, one of New York’s most famous restaurants, an observation deck, a transit hub, bank vaults storing nearly a thousand tons of precious metals, and art by Picasso, Miró, and Rodin.
Hundreds of Offices Across Every Industry
The towers were dominated by financial firms, insurance companies, and government agencies, but tenants spanned dozens of industries. The North Tower (1 WTC) held Bank of America on floors 9 through 11, Lehman Brothers on floors 38 through 40, and the insurance giant Marsh USA across floors 93 to 100. The investment bank Cantor Fitzgerald occupied floors 101 to 105, high above a mix of government offices including the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and the Government of Thailand’s trade office.
The South Tower (2 WTC) leaned even more heavily toward finance and insurance. Fuji Bank took up floors 79 through 82. Fiduciary Trust Company spread across five floors in the 90s. AON Corporation, one of the world’s largest insurance brokers, occupied floors 92, 99, and 100. The New York Stock Exchange maintained offices on floors 28 through 30, and the investment firm Sandler O’Neill & Partners sat on floor 104. Dozens of smaller brokerages, international banks, and insurance underwriters filled the remaining space.
On any given weekday, roughly 50,000 people worked in the complex, with another 200,000 passing through as visitors, commuters, or shoppers.
Windows on the World and the Observation Deck
The top floors of the North Tower were home to Windows on the World, one of the highest-grossing restaurants in the United States. The complex spanned the 106th and 107th floors, seating 240 diners who looked out over the city from more than a quarter mile up. It included a main dining room, a smaller bar called the Greatest Bar on Earth, and private event spaces that hosted everything from corporate dinners to weddings.
The South Tower offered a different kind of public attraction. The Top of the World observation deck, located on the 107th floor, gave visitors 360-degree views stretching across New Jersey, Brooklyn, Long Island, and beyond on clear days. An outdoor rooftop platform on the 110th floor let visitors step outside at the very top of the building, more than 1,300 feet above the street.
The Underground Mall and Transit Hub
Below street level, a sprawling retail concourse connected the towers to each other and to a major transit station. The mall held dozens of shops and restaurants, serving the massive daily population of workers and commuters. Stores ranged from clothing retailers to pharmacies to quick-service food outlets. The concourse also linked directly to PATH train platforms, connecting Lower Manhattan to New Jersey, and sat above multiple subway lines. For many commuters, the underground mall was the first thing they walked through every morning.
An Express Elevator System
Moving tens of thousands of people through 110-story buildings required an engineering solution no one had tried before. The Twin Towers were the first buildings in the world to use an express elevator system modeled on the New York City subway. Instead of running elevators from the ground floor to every story, the designers created “sky lobbies” on the 44th and 78th floors. High-speed express elevators carried passengers directly to those transfer points at 27 feet per second, roughly 18 miles per hour. From there, riders switched to local elevators serving the surrounding floors. Each express car could hold up to 55 people with a weight capacity of 10,000 pounds. This design saved enormous amounts of interior space that would otherwise have been consumed by elevator shafts.
Gold, Silver, and CIA Files in the Vaults
Deep beneath the towers, several subterranean levels housed bank vaults, storage facilities, and mechanical infrastructure. The most valuable contents sat behind a vault door belonging to the Bank of Nova Scotia. After September 11, recovery crews found the door damaged but intact, protecting nearly a thousand tons of gold and silver. The final count came to 379,036 ounces of gold and 29,942,619 ounces of silver.
The basement levels held far stranger items too. A New York Times report described a subterranean world containing Godiva chocolates, old furniture, bricks of cocaine held as law enforcement evidence, assault weapons, and files belonging to the Central Intelligence Agency. The towers functioned not just as offices but as secure storage for government agencies and financial institutions that needed vault-grade protection in the heart of Manhattan.
Art by Picasso, Miró, and Calder
Both the public lobbies and private offices throughout the complex were filled with works by hundreds of artists. The collection included pieces by Alexander Calder, Louise Nevelson, Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Roy Lichtenstein, Paul Klee, Auguste Rodin, and Le Corbusier. The most prominent single work was a massive Joan Miró tapestry in the South Tower lobby, a 20-by-35-foot piece woven from wool and hemp called “The World Trade Center Tapestry.” All of these works were destroyed on September 11, representing one of the largest losses of art in a single event in modern history.