The Twin Towers of the World Trade Center were more than just buildings. They were proof of New York’s belief in itself. Built at a time when New York’s future seemed uncertain, the towers restored confidence and helped bring a halt to the decline of lower Manhattan. Brash, glitzy, and grand, they quickly became symbols of New York.

Rockefeller Brainchild

The World Trade Center was conceived in the early 1960s by the Downtown-Lower Manhattan Development Association to revitalize the seedy radio row dominated by electronic stores. Chase Manhattan Bank chairman David Rockefeller, founder of the development association, and his brother, New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, pushed hard for the project, insisting it would benefit the entire city.

In 1962, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey began plans to build the center .Minora Yamasaki and Associates of Michigan was hired as architect. Eventually, Yamasaki decided on two huge towers. Critics charged that a modern monolith would rob New York of character, ruin the skyline, disrupt television reception, and strain city services. However, the project was approved and construction began.

In order to create the 16-acre World Trade Center site, five streets were closed off and 164 buildings were demolished. Construction required the excavation of more than 1.2 million cubic yards of earth, which was used to create 23.5 acres of land along the Hudson River, now part of Battery Park City in lower Manhattan. During peak construction periods, 3,500 people worked at the site. A total of 10,000 people worked on the towers; 60 died during its construction.

Instant Landmarks

The north tower was opened in Dec. 1970 and the south tower in Jan. 1972; they were dedicated in April 1973. They were the world’s tallest buildings for only a short time, since the Sears Tower in Chicago was completed in May 1973. However, the towers were ranked as the fifth and sixth tallest buildings in the world at the time of their destruction on September 11, 2001.

Four smaller buildings and a hotel, all built nearby around a central landscaped plaza, completed the complex. The mall at the World Trade Center, which was located immediately below the plaza, was the largest shopping mall in lower Manhattan. The six basements housed two subway stations and a stop on the PATH trains to New Jersey.

Some 50,000 people worked in the buildings, while another 200,000 visited or passed through each day. The complex had its own zip code, 10048.

In February 2003, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation chose architect Daniel Libeskind’s design for rebuilding the 16-acre site of the former World Trade Center. The design includes a hanging garden, a memorial, a cultural center, and is topped by a spiral tower reaching 1,776 feet tall, which will make it the tallest building in the world.
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August 5, 1962, Marilyn Monroe, one of Americas most well know celebrities dies at age of 36.
Marilyn Monroe Dies August 5, 1962

(Norma Jeane Mortenson or Baker)
Born: 6/1/26

Birthplace: Los Angeles, CA

Actress who was, and remains, one of the most famous celebrities of the 20th century. Her mixture of vulnerability and sex appeal has haunted Hollywood since her early death. She was married to baseball legend Joe DiMaggio and playwright Auther Miller. Her films include Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) and Some Like It Hot (1959). She died of an overdose of sleeping pills, which many believe was suicide.

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1962 – The Seattle World’s Fair is the first fair in the United States since World War II.

When President Eisenhower pushed the button in 1958 to signal the countdown to the first World’s Fair in the United States since World War II, the national spotlight hit Seattle. Plenty of people wondered why. Why choose a sleepy little city at the remote, northern edge of the Pacific as host, when New York had the cultural edge, Chicago had vitality and Los Angeles was the promised land.

The 1962 Seattle World’s Fair was more than just a fair. For many who visited the fair site, it was a deeply personal, sometimes even life-changing experience.

Strangest souvenir from the World’s Fair

Barbara Klein of Bellingham suburb near Seattle writes:

My first job (helping fairgoers make Space Needle souvenirs in 60 seconds) resulted in me getting a souvenir that “belonged to Elvis.”

One day, Elvis was being transported around the fairgrounds in a flatbed truck to the location of that day’s film shooting of the movie ‘It Happened At The World’s Fair’. As the flatbed truck passed by my workstation, Elvis finished the contents of a Sno-Cone and tossed its paper wrapper into a garbage receptacle. Of the five girls who immediately dove in to retrieve the wrapper, my friend Joan got most of it and gave me a 2-by-3-inch triangular section. I still have the wrapper 40+ years later! It is a great reminder of my first job and all the excitement that surrounded the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair.

The future isn’t what they thought it would be back in 1962

Imagine how hard life must have been back in 1962, when there were no garage door openers, VCRs or ATMs.

All the telephones had rotary thingies that made dialing a single phone number take approximately three minutes. And worse, there was no such thing as e-mail. When people wanted to send messages to other people, they actually had to write on something called “paper” and then wait several days — and sometimes weeks — for the message to get to where it was going.

How people managed to live like this is beyond us. Back in 1962 — the year Seattle played host to the World’s Fair — humans were clearly primitive creatures who knew nothing of the wonders of the Internet or, for that matter, the wonders of the Post-It note (which wasn’t invented until 1974)

Still, these simple people of 1962 had some not-so-simple ideas. In fact, they had some big hopes, dreams and plans for the future of mankind. The Seattle World’s Fair — known as The Century 21 Exposition — was a six-month-long event that offered visitors a peek at the “glittering world of the future” and, more specifically, a peek at what our lives were supposed to be like by now.

Visitors to the Century 21 expo were shown a future in which people flew to work in their personal “gyrocopters” and lived in cities covered by giant domes (to control the climate — not to play baseball in and later blow up). “TV telephones” were supposed to be as popular now as typewriters were then.

The official World’s Fair souvenir program boasted that the predictions were “certain to be realities by 2001.”

So, here we are. It’s 60 years later and it’s officially the 21st century. We’re not sure what crystal ball the people of 1962 were looking in (or what they were smokin’) but it’s safe to say the fortunetellers and futurists of that era were occasionally right but most often (laughably) wrong. In fact, looking back at the World’s Fair it seems as though the people of 1962 expected the year 2002 to look an awful lot like an episode of “The Jetsons.”
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Roosevelt, Eleanor (Anna Eleanor Roosevelt), 1884–1962, American humanitarian, b. New York City. The daughter of Elliott Roosevelt and niece of Theodore Roosevelt, she was an active worker in social causes before she married (1905) Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a distant cousin. She retained these interests after marriage and while rearing her five children.

When Franklin Roosevelt was stricken (1921) with poliomyelitis, she took a more active interest in public issues in order to restore his links with the world of politics. As wife of the governor of New York and then as wife of the U.S. president, she played a leading part in women’s organizations and was active in encouraging youth movements, in promoting consumer welfare, in working for the civil rights of minorities, and in combating poor housing and unemployment. In 1933 she conducted the first press conference ever held by a U.S. president’s wife. An accomplished writer, she initiated (1935) a daily column, “My Day,” syndicated in many newspapers. She also for a time conducted a radio program, and she traveled around the country, lecturing, observing conditions, and furthering causes. In World War II she was (1941–42) assistant director of the Office of Civilian Defense. She also visited Great Britain (1942), the SW Pacific (1943), and the Caribbean (1944).

From 1945 to 1953 (and again in 1961) she was a U.S. delegate to the United Nations, and in 1946 she was made chair of the Commission on Human Rights, a subsidiary of the UN Economic and Social Council. In the 1950s she became a leader of the liberal wing of the Democratic party. With Herbert H. Lehman and Thomas K. Finletter, she headed a movement in New York City to wrest control of Democratic policy from Tammany Hall. Her dedication to the cause of human welfare won her affection and honor throughout the world as well as the respect of many of her critics. Many of her magazine and newspaper articles have been collected. Her other writings include The Moral Basis of Democracy (1940) and You Can Learn by Living (1960).
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