World Trade Center and me: From Camelot to Bin Laden, The

Real Estate Issues,  Summer 2002  by Cottone, Philip

Tags: World Trade Center

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It was June, 1961, when my involvement with the Twin Towers began, and I had just graduated from Columbia College in New York City and started work as an administrative trainee at the Port of New York Authority (as it was then known) headquartered in Chelsea, 15th Street and Eighth Avenue, Manhattan. John Kennedy was in the White House, and Camelot was on the horizon. The postwar Eisenhower years had just ended and the civil rights struggle, assassinations, Vietnam, Watergate, and Bin Laden were yet to come. The world was simpler then.

While in college, I married my grade school sweetheart and we had three kids. I thought I wanted to be a teacher, and planned to work a year or two to get out of debt, and then to go on to get a Master's degree in English literature, my college major. But I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do, and the Authority had a wonderful reputation as a first-class training ground for business and public service. Moreover, importantly, it was a bi-state agency of New York and New Jersey and operated in the Port District, a 25-mile radius around the Statue of Liberty. I wouldn't have to travel too far from home, which in those days was an apartment in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, on the second floor of a two-family house.

The Authority hired only eight to ten trainees as future managers after recruiting at 55 colleges and graduate schools around the country. Incidentally, our starting salary in 1961 was $5,600 a year and that compared very favorably with starting salaries at the very best companies nationwide. When we started we went through a six-month program of seven-week work assignments in different departments (mine were in the Director's Office of the Aviation Department-the Authority ran JFK, Newark, LaGuardia, and Teterboro Airports then, and now-the Real Estate Department, and the Lincoln Tunnel). Work was interspersed with formal classroom training in public administration, transportation economics, sensitivity training, management, and decision making. The Authority operated about 25 facilities in the Port District, which included, in addition to the airports, port facilities, bridges, tunnels, truck and bus terminals, and one of the largest office buildings in the city by cubic content at 111 Eighth Avenue. At the end of the six months we chose where we wanted to go and the different department heads selected people for permanent assignments. I eventually ended up in Real Estate because the seven-week assignment had been interesting, and the head of the Department was Bob Curtiss, CRE, and Columbia Class of `27, who liked the idea of taking another Columbia man to work for him.

The Port Authority had very ambitious plans for helping the Port District grow and prosper, and one of them was to construct a central facility in New York City for doing international trade, a world trade center. We heard about the plans very early in our career. At that time the facilities for doing international trade were spread all over the city, from the consulates on the east side in Midtown, to the freight forwarding firms and port facilities themselves scattered throughout the district, to the Customs House downtown in the battery. Authority research concluded that one out of four jobs in the port district depended upon international trade for its existence, and that improving the process by getting the players under one roof would increase the prosperity of the entire region. Therefore it conceived of a $350-million World Trade Center to be located on the east side of Manhattan, a site that included the Sugar Building at 120 Wall Street and extended into the East River, not far from the Customs House. The cost of the project was not inconsiderable, and the officials of New Jersey objected to the Authority spending all that money in New York City without any direct benefit to them. The governors of New York and New Jersey have to approve Port Authority actions and each appoints half of the 12-person Board of Commissioners, which functions as the board of directors of a corporation. Controversy surrounded the birth of the Trade Center, and it was to last years after the project was built, for a number of different reasons. Little did we know then how all that early controversy and publicity would pale compared to that which accompanied the demise of the Twin Towers about 35 years later.

The Authority encouraged the trainees to get involved in its Speakers Bureau, which sent employees to local Kiwanis, Lions, and other groups around the district to talk about current plans and programs. At that time the most frequent request was for speakers about the World Trade Center because that was in the news with the Governor of New Jersey saying, "Never," and the executive director of the Authority and New York State officials lobbying in favor. That was when the Twin Towers got personal for me. About once a month in those early years I would give a talk at lunch or dinner with my slide projector and pretty pictures of a World Trade Center, a project that was to become a significant part of my life in the following ten years, and after.