September 11, 2001 Attacks
The building was severely damaged in the September 11, 2001 attacks when the south tower of the World Trade Center collapsed directly across the street. Scaffolding which had been erected on the facade for renovation work did nothing to stop the fiery debris from raining into the building and tearing a gash deep down its northern face. Two office workers were killed when they were trapped in an elevator. The firestorm raged out of control for several days; the building, which had housed businesses including Hanover Capital, Frost & Sullivan, and IKON Office Solutions, was completely gutted. It is believed that 90 West's heavy building materials and extensive use of terra cotta inside and out helped serve as fireproofing and protected it from further damage and collapse, as opposed to the more modern skyscraper at 7 World Trade Center, which suffered similar damage and collapsed later that day.
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Famous quotes containing the words september and/or attacks:
“This seems a long while ago, and yet it happened since Milton wrote his Paradise Lost. But its antiquity is not the less great for that, for we do not regulate our historical time by the English standard, nor did the English by the Roman, nor the Roman by the Greek.... From this September afternoon, and from between these now cultivated shores, those times seemed more remote than the dark ages.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“We are supposed to be the children of Seth; but Seth is too much of an effete nonentity to deserve ancestral regard. No, we are the sons of Cain, and with violence can be associated the attacks on sound, stone, wood and metal that produced civilisation.”
—Anthony Burgess (b. 1917)