7 World Trade Center (1987–2001)

7 World Trade Center (7 WTC, WTC-7, or Tower 7), also called Building 7 or the Salomon Brothers Building, was an office building. It was part of the original World Trade Center complex in Lower Manhattan, New York City. The building stood on a city block bounded by West Broadway, Vesey Street, Washington Street, and Barclay Street. Larry Silverstein developed it and held a ground lease for the site from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. The building was designed by Emery Roth & Sons.

The original 7 World Trade Center was 47 stories tall and covered in red granite. Its base was a trapezoidal shape. An elevated walkway over Vesey Street connected it to the World Trade Center plaza. The building sat above a Consolidated Edison power substation, which created unusual design challenges for its structure. It opened in 1987. The next year, Salomon Brothers signed a long-term lease and became the building's anchor tenant.

On September 11, 2001, the building was badly damaged by debris from the nearby North Tower (1 World Trade Center) after it collapsed. The debris cut a large gash in the building's south side and started fires on several lower floors. These fires kept burning throughout the afternoon. The building's fire suppression system did not have enough water pressure to fight them.

7 WTC began to collapse after a key internal column buckled. This caused nearby columns to fail one after another in a cascading failure. The whole building then went through a progressive collapse just after 5:20 pm, according to FEMA and NIST. It became the first steel skyscraper known to have collapsed mainly because of uncontrolled fires. A new building on the site opened in 2006.

Architecture

The original 7 World Trade Center was a 47-story building designed by Emery Roth & Sons. It had a red granite outside and stood 610 feet (190 m) tall, with a trapezoidal base. Tishman Realty & Construction managed its construction. The building was set above a two-story Con Edison substation that had been on the site since 1967. Because the final building was much larger than the substation's foundation was designed to carry, engineers used a system of trusses and girders between floors 5 and 7 to pass the weight to the smaller foundation. Old and new caisson foundations were used together. Above the 7th floor, the building used a tube-frame design. Its steel was coated with gypsum-based Monokote for fire protection. Mechanical equipment, including 12 transformers, was placed on floors four through seven. Several emergency generators powered the building for the New York City Office of Emergency Management, Salomon Smith Barney, and other tenants, with 24,000 gallons of diesel fuel stored below ground.

Each floor had 47,000 square feet of rentable office space, and the building had 1,868,000 square feet of office space in all. Two pedestrian bridges crossed Vesey Street to connect the building to the main World Trade Center complex. The lobby held artworks by artists such as Frank Stella, Roy Lichtenstein, and Ross Bleckner, along with a large mural by Al Held called The Third Circle.

History

The building's groundbreaking ceremony was held on October 2, 1984, and it opened in May 1987. In June 1986, developer Larry Silverstein signed Drexel Burnham Lambert to lease the whole building for $3 billion over 30 years. In December 1986, after the Boesky insider-trading scandal, Drexel Burnham Lambert canceled the lease. Silverstein then struggled to find tenants because Black Monday and other factors hurt the Lower Manhattan property market. By April 1988, he had lowered the rent and made other concessions. In November 1988, Salomon Brothers gave up its plans for a large complex at Columbus Circle in Midtown and agreed to lease the top 19 floors instead. The building was renovated in 1989 for Salomon Brothers, and it became known as the Salomon Brothers building. A district manager of Silverstein Properties described the work as building "a building within a building." After the World Trade Center bombing in February 1993, New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani placed the emergency command center and fuel tanks in the building. This decision was criticized after the events of 9/11, although the fuel is not believed to have contributed to the building's collapse.

At the time of the September 11 attacks, Salomon Smith Barney was the largest tenant. Other tenants included ITT Hartford Insurance Group, American Express Bank International, Standard Chartered Bank, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Internal Revenue Service, and the United States Secret Service. Smaller tenants included the New York City Office of Emergency Management, the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, the Federal Home Loan Bank of New York, Provident Financial Management, and the Immigration and Naturalization Service. The Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency shared a floor with the IRS.

When the North Tower (1 World Trade Center) collapsed on September 11, 2001, heavy debris hit 7 World Trade Center and started fires that burned for much of the afternoon. The building had a sprinkler system, but water pressure was low, and there was little or no water to feed the sprinklers. Firefighters went inside to search the building and tried to put out small fires, but the low water pressure made this very hard. At about 4:00 pm, FDNY Chief of Operations Daniel A. Nigro decided to stop rescue work and clear the area because of safety concerns. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) later reported that the building began to fall at 5:20:33 pm. The fire weakened the building's support beams and columns until the structure fell. There were no casualties from the collapse. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) found no evidence for conspiracy theories that explosives brought the building down.

In May 2002, FEMA issued a preliminary report with the American Society of Civil Engineers and Dr. W. Gene Corley. It suggested that fires caused by debris from the Twin Towers, which had no water to fight them, were the main cause, but it did not reach a final conclusion. NIST was then authorized to investigate the collapse of the World Trade Center Twin Towers and 7 World Trade Center. NIST released a preliminary report on 7 World Trade Center in June 2004 and its final report in November 2008. It concluded that the lack of water was a key reason for the collapse. Fires burned out of control for about seven hours, causing parts of the building to fail. At the time, 7 World Trade Center was the only steel skyscraper to collapse from fire, though others have since done so, including the Edifício Wilton Paes de Almeida, the Plasco Building, and the Windsor Tower.

Files from many federal investigations were kept in the building and were lost when it collapsed. These included records from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Copies of emails tied to the WorldCom scandal, which the SEC had requested from Salomon Brothers, a part of Citigroup that was housed in the building, were also destroyed. NIST also found that the pattern of broken windows and the sounds that would come from explosives were not seen, and it considered the idea that thermite was used to be unlikely. After the collapse, debris damaged the nearby Borough of Manhattan Community College's Fiterman Hall building, and the Barclay–Vesey Building, an Art Deco building, was also damaged and later restored. Construction on the new 7 World Trade Center began in 2002, and it opened in 2006.