Dispatch from Manhattan, New York – July 22, 2007
The residents of the largest city in America found themselves consulting their calendars instead of their watches last night as New York’s harbor was lit with a fireworks display equal to any US Independence Day Celebration in recent memory.
The fireworks were not the result of a 4th of July time warp but a celebration of the 100th Anniversary of the Building Owners and Managers Association International.
The kick off for the celebrations was held at the site of the former World Trade Center where the world’s tallest buildings from 1973 – 1978 once stood at 1,368 feet and 1,352 feet respectively. Chicago’s Sears Tower took over the title at that point.
The fact that this event was held at the site of largest disaster to befall a tall building was not a coincidence. 3,000 owners and managers of high rise building (over 10 stories) around the world were there to witness the birth of a new monument to the determination to recreate, in these troubled times, a new building on the site for future generations to see and remember this era.
The new Freedom Tower is rising from its foundations on the World Trade Center site as a statement of the indominatable need of a culture to be remembered.
This need to be remembered is very old. Witness the ancient Stonehenge and the biblical Tower of Babble (a Ziggurat in ancient Babylonia).
The Great Pyramid of Giza was built around 2500 B.C. and held the title with its 481 feet until the Eiffel Tower in Paris was built in 1889 at a height of 985 feet, or 1,023 feet including the flag pole. In 1931 New York's Empire State Building held the title at 1,250 feet – over a quarter of a mile high. Chicago's Sears Tower is 1,451 feet tall. The CN Tower in Toronto is 1,815 feet tall and like the Eiffel tower is unoccupied – I dedicated the CN Tower in 1976 as one of my first duties as the Chief Staff Officer of BOMA International. Malaysia's Petronas Towers is 1,483 feet tall.
The Middle East will regain the title for the world’s tallest building for the first time since the Great Pyramid with the Burj, a 1,680-foot skyscraper still under construction in oil-rich Dubai that claimed the title only a few days ago and has become the world's tallest building, surpassing Taiwan's Taipei 101 which has dominated the global skyline at 1,667 feet since 2004.
The Burj in Dubai is expected to be finished by the end of 2008 and its planned final height has been kept secret. The state-owned development company Emaar Properties, one of the main builders in rapidly developing Dubai, said only that the tower would stop somewhere above 2,275 feet (nearly double the height of the Empire State Building, eclipsing the CN Tower and close to a half mile high) setting a new high mark for the incomplete Freedom Tower to shoot for.
