Remembering an icon.

Though it's too soon to tell what will become of the World Trade Center site once the debris are cleaned out, Guy F. Tozzoli, president of the World Trade Centers Association and one of the people who helped put the original towers up, hopes desperately the complex will be rebuilt.

"I am delighted that President Bush said that the World Trade Center should be rebuilt," he says with vehemence. "In the bylaws of our organization (a nonprofit that promotes and supports World Trade Centers around the globe) it says that we must create World Trade Centers in order for them to promote stability and peace through trade in the whole world. Whether we should build the tallest towers -- I don't know. But in order for the project to succeed again, it has be on the same scale as what we did in the early 60s."

A week after the attack Tozzoli is still in shock -- he wakes up in the mornings planning to go to work, putting the keys to the men's room of his 47th floor office into his pocket. His outlook is as positive as could be expected under the circumstances -- he looks forward to working with the City of New York to rebuild Lower Manhattan and thanks God for being alive. But to him the towers meant even more than they did to most New Yorkers -- almost 25 years of hard work and planning and effort.

"They were like my life, the last 40 years of my life!" he repeats quietly. "It was the greatest construction project in the world."

When the City of New York approved David Rockefeller's plans for the restoration of downtown Manhattan in the early 1960's, Tozzoli, who at the time worked as a civil engineer for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, was appointed director of the World Trade Center department.

Trained in analytic mechanics and physics, with experience in aviation projects and construction of marine terminals, he was deemed by the Port Authority to be "ideally positioned" to complete a development of such scale.

"My responsibility was to do the planning, the construction, the operation, and the leasing of this project," Tozzoli recalls. "It was supposed to include 10-12 million SF of office space, a hotel, a shopping center, and a parking lot. And it was also located in a very good spot -- it was built together with a new station for Path railroad, so it became a transportation center as well."

After choosing Minoru Yamasaki as the architect, he was presented with a number of different models for the complex. But the one both he and Yamasaki liked the most was somewhat suspect -- it would not create as much usable space as Tozzoli needed to justify the expanse to the City.

"Mr. Yamasaki liked a twin tower scheme and when I asked him if it met my program he said it was 2 million SF short," Tozzoli still laughs with delight as he remembers creating two magnificent buildings. "He said that you cannot build a building taller than 80 floors because you don't get enough usable space. And I said to him 'If they can put a man on the moon, you can build me the tallest towers in the world."'

Today, Tozzoli maintains that only the towers' innovative design kept them from falling over immediately after the planes hit. The exterior walls were strong enough to withstand the impact of a plane crash. But when the Port Authority tested the buildings in the 1970's it was counting on accidents -- not madmen.

"The structural steel engineers simulated what would happen if an airplane lost its way in a fog and hit one of the towers," Tozzoli explains. "But what toppled the towers eventually was that the planes were driven by those fanatics at least at double the speed of what's permitted in this area and the planes were loaded with fuel. I know that a regular airplane would not be able to penetrate those towers. I am sure they studied what they did."

Incidentally, Sept. 11 marked the second time that Tozzoli was able to escape a terrorist attack. Back in February of 1993, he left the parking garage underneath the World Trade Center complex only seconds before a bomb went off and killed six other people.

"I live in New Jersey, about an hour and fifteen minutes away," he explains. "For some inexplicable reason, last Tuesday, instead of going the way I normally drive, I decided to go down the Holland Tunnel. There was some kind of an accident, which delayed all of us by about 45 minutes.

When I got out and saw the wall the way it was I said to myself 'a plane must have slammed into it.' But on a clear day like this, it couldn't possibly have happened! Then I saw the second plane flying at very great speed. And I knew the people above had no chance."

As the days pass Tozzoli's grief is turning into anger and a greater desire to restore his life's work. "I feel immense sadness and anger, but I am doubly determined to get back and rebuild," he says. "We've got to show the rest of the world that they cannot make us stop."

As to the possibility of future attacks, he tries not to think about it. "What can you do?" he asks. "Right now, the Empire State Building is still standing. You cannot design a thing that's absolutely foolproof. There is probably nothing in the world that you can design that can stop an airplane flying at that speed. But I don't believe that people should stop designing high buildings."