Did anyone here ever get to visit the World Trade Center?

I grew up in Jersey City, NJ, and visited the World Trade Center a handful of times growing up. I have been up on the observation deck, but never to the restaurant. The deck itself is smaller than the actual full area of the rooftop (unlike the Empire State Building). You can easily see the other tower from the deck, but it was only in the movie did I realize it was 200 long feet between the two.

I can imagine using the adjective "breathtaking" when looking down into the caverns of the Grand Canyon, but I've never done that. I can assure you, however, that the view from the towers is breathtaking. You're on top of the greatest city in the world, close enough that you can sense its energy, but high enough that you can see beyond its borders.

Every year, during 9/11, I mourn the loss of these iconic buildings. They were easily my favorite place to take visitors who've never been to NYC. The last time I took someone there was after college, and the person I took is now my wife. We were able to go out on the deck, and I remember her trembling as she held my hand. "They're moving a little!", she said. I have a kid who'll never have that experience and when I think hard about it, it makes me sad as hell.

The movie is mesmerizing. Go and see it.

Rick (http://www.rickumali.com/) Umali

I went to the very top in 1992. They had a glassed in area where most people went, but you could walk up a short flight of stairs, and there you were, on top of the world, with nothing but sky above you.

You could see the curve of the earth - I think that's what I remember most. And it was so quiet - a big contrast from the hustle and bustle of the New York City streets.

You couldn't go to the very edge - they had a platform in the middle, and below it was a 10-20 foot ledge with lots of barbed wire. Only one of the towers had an observation platform.

You could look down and see how important the natural harbor was in the growth of New York City.

On the ground, I had some other interesting experiences. As I waited in line to go up to the top, some young women in front of me from some Scandinavian country were raving about New York.

And on the ferry boat back from the Statue of Liberty, the towers rose up magnificently as the boat approached Battery Park. I remember saying something about that to a perfect stranger who was standing beside me.

Just before I left the World Trade Center area, and headed up the lower east side for further adventures, I turned around and took a photo of what is now known as Ground Zero. I've looked at that photo many times since 9/11/01.

As I watched Man on Wire, it overwhelmed me how much work went into building those structures, and how lucky I was to have had the chance to stand on top of one of them.

Surprisingly many did not really visit the WTC towers it seems.

The first time I visited NYC was in June 2000. Having somehow heard of WTC, I took the underground there. I walked out to the plaza and then wondered ok so where are those towers? Then I looked up: I was just at the very base of the South Tower! Man, that is HUGE!!!

So I went in and all the way through security and up to the rooftop. It was a beautiful if not perfect warm summer day, blue skies everywhere. Yes, up there you really felt like being at the top of the world...

I happened to see the whole 911 thing live in tv while in Chicago. One of those things you don't forget. Years later I finally visited the memorial site...

I just saw Man On Wire. I may have heard about this incident as a kid, but it is a different thing when you saw where it all happened. Remembering how it was, just seeing those still pictures already made me feel uneasy thinking if I had been there... Philippe (and his crew) did something incredible, I have seen a lot by now but nothing quite like this. Probably never will.

I was only ever in NYC one time in my life about 17 years ago. I think I remember seeing them, but didnt get a chance to go in.

By the way, are we allowed,once again, to acknowledge that they ever existed? I just thought it was a little hilarious the extent to which we went immediately after 9/11 to expunge the fact that the towers ever existed from anything and everything that they might appear in or on. We re-routed movie filming that might have started prior to the event to remove the towers. We removed the towers from movie posters. We even removed them from video games. That just seems excessive to me.

I was there in the fall of 2000. I spent a lot of time in one of the towers, standing in line to buy half-price theater tickets on one of the higher floors.

I have a T-shirt with the WTC on it.

I was, literally and figuratively, raised in the shadows of those towers. I clearly recall being a fascinated 9 year old, watching the local live news coverage of Petit's walk between the two buildings in 1974. At night, I would occasionally climb up on the roof of my house in Brooklyn, and looking north towards Manhattan, could catch a glimpse of the tops of the towers on the horizon.

My dad was a towerman for the Port Authority Trans-Hudson(PATH), and was stationed at WTC for many years before he retired in 1996. As such, I had many opportunities to spend time with him both underground(where the PATH station was located before it was destroyed) and high above ground at the Center(both in the Port Authority offices, as well as on the Observation Deck). On September 12th 2001, 3000 miles away in California, my dad had a massive heart attack and almost died. I attribute this to the stress of knowing that many of the people he had worked with for over 3 decades were probably vaporized.

As a young man fresh out of school in the mid eighties, I worked for almost a full year both in and around the towers, on Vesey and Church streets, as a temp for various companies that I cant't really remember( I believe one of them may have been Cantor Fitzgerald). I recall many times looking up at those steel giants and thinking, 'it would be really bad if a helicopter or a plane crashed into one of these'.

In September of 2000, I took my wife back to New York for our first anniversary, and one of the first things we did was go to the WTC and head up to the observation deck. In the lobby, they had a photo kiosk where you could take a souvenier pic standing in front of a large background of the Trade Center towers. I jokingly posed as though I was holding the towers up, one hand on each, as if I was preventing them from falling. If I had only known then....

Shortly out of high school, as a backwards kid from Montana I rode along with some friends for what was supposed to be a quick road trip to New Jersey to drop off a wood stove. Never expected to see anything more than a lot of scenery and some truck stops, but as it turned out, we got stranded in New Jersey (long story) for almost a month. For lack of anything else to do, I decided to go see The City, and boarded the Tube, which ran from Hoboken NJ under the Hudson River into Manhattan: specifically, right into the 'basement' of the WTC! I knew I'd be deboarding near the twin towers, but assumed they'd be down the street somewhere. After getting off the PATH train, I remember this huge bank of escalators twice as wide as the highway that bypasses my hometown of Miles City; the platform must have been three or four levels down, as the ride up seemed to last a long time, giving me my first sense of where I actually was. As I recall, the escalators eventually dumped us out at the street level, but there was no street, just a huge, huge plaza (did I mention it was huge?? ...this was prior to towers 3-7 being added) and I began to realize that I was at the base of the two towers! I was so giddy, and it took enormous effort to restrain myself from looking up! It was like holding a wrapped package that you wanted to open, yet savor the expectation of what you were about to see, and I forced myself to keep walking another hundred feet or so before I just had to spin around and look up! Breath taking!! It was indescribably awesome, surreal, and tantalizing, like waking up to find your first love, stark naked, standing over you! It was a clear day, and each of the silvery spires seemed to disappear into a fine point in the blue sky. But their bases (which were actually the same size, top to bottom) were so enormous that you had to look right to left to take in their full size at plaza level.

One of the most memorable things about the interior were the slender windows that ran from floor to ceiling. You could stand toes to the window and have nothing but an inch of glass separating you from the plaza 110 floors below. Yet, turning around, you felt as secure and solid as if standing on solid ground. A while back I came across a small poster I bought there, a fisheye-lens view of the towers from the air. At one time I had a full sized poster which eventually fell apart over the years, which I regret not taking better care of.

My visit to New York City and the WTC was in January of 1975, a few months after Philippe Petit made his famous high wire walk. If that wasn't enough excitement for a country kid in the city, a short distance from the towers, I stumbled across the bombing of Fraunces Tavern, which had occurred about an hour before, by FALN, a Puerto Rican nationalist group. Oddly enough the 240 year old tavern is still standing, and the WTC didn't even see it's 30th anniversary.
It took months to finally comprehend that both towers were gone. The morning of September 11th, I remember thinking what a daunting project it would be to repair all the damage done to them. It never occurred to me that either one could totally collapse. The human toll of 9/11 was such a horrific event that words can never begin to describe it. Shamefully, this carnage should never have happened and I believe could have been prevented, had it not been for the embarrassing fool in the White House and his band of phony 'christian' patriots who have gone on to spawn the destruction of the country's reputation, and now it's economy on a similar scale. But I digress.

In addition to the human toll, the destruction of the physical towers, and what they had come to represent is just as tragic. The decision not to defiantly rebuild them was disappointing, as were some of the efforts to pull images of the towers from movie posters, video games, and opening credits of numerous TV shows, as if not seeing them would ease the shame of our country's leaders being caught with there pants around their ankles. It was OK for the networks to endlessly replay the the towers falling, but it was disrespectful to show the twin towers in all their former glory?? How Republican.

To have "Man on Wire" released some three decades later is a special event. It's like finding a roll of undeveloped film from your youth, and it's one DVD I'll be in line to buy.

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