From the moment the World Trade Center was destroyed, filmmaker Ric Burns knew he had to get back to work.
Although he’d wrapped up his public TV series “New York: A Documentary Film,” long before the terrorist attacks, Burns felt the gleaming twin towers deserved their own tribute.
The result is “The Center of the World,” a three-hour history of the megastructures, which airs Monday night on PBS.
“This was the iconic structure in the world in the last half of the 20th century,” Burns told the New York Daily News.
Like other segments of his New York series, Burns’ look at the World Trade Center provides a detailed history of the towers’ 30-year existence, starting with decades of plotting by politicians and engineers.
Rare archival footage of construction is used, as well as graphic images of the catastrophe in 2001.
In addition, there are shots of French tight-rope walker Philippe Petit, who stunned the world in 1974 when he crossed between the buildings on a high wire.
Historians and notable New Yorkers, from former Gov. Mario Cuomo to Daily News columnist Pete Hamill, offer their takes on the towers’ legacy.
Originally conceived as a global finance center that would bring business back to lower Manhattan, the World Trade Center became the largest skyscraper ever attempted in North America.
“I recommended to the board, you could only do one thing,” construction manager Guy Tozzoli said in the documentary. “You had to build what the Reader’s Digest called the largest building project since the Egyptian pyramids.”
Burns shows how New Yorkers’ opinion of the project gradually changed over three decades from disapproval to acceptance of the shining leviathans.
Their destruction left a morbid memory that Burns said will endure for decades.
The site “will live and reverberate in our memory for as long as there are cities,” Burns said. “I’m convinced that 200 years from now, what happened on 9/11 will live in the public mind more vividly than the sinking of the Titanic.”
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(c) 2003, New York Daily News.
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AP-NY-09-04-03 0914EDT
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