By GERSH KUNTZMAN

They were ugly. They were inhuman. They were simply omnipresent, whether
 from five blocks or 50 miles.

And now they're gone.

The Twin Towers of the World Trade Center -- conceived in the late 1940s,
 begun on Aug. 5, 1966, embraced by its first tenants on Dec. 16, 1970,
 christened with an official ribbon-cutting on April 4, 1973, hardened by
 the bombing of Feb. 23, 1993 and, finally, pulverized on Sept. 11, 2001
 -- are being mourned as a beloved friend cut down in his prime.

Although many have called them a symbol of our nation's economic might,
 the 110-story buildings were beyond symbolism and certainly greater than
 the sum of the 200,000 tons of steel, 43,000 windows, 425,000 tons of
 cement (enough to pave a five-foot-wide curb from NYC to DC) that went
 into building them.

They were the physical embodiment of our city.

They didn't start out that way.

When first proposed just after World War II, dreamers envisioned a center
 for world trade, as the name grandiosely implied, but more important, a
 complex that would revive New York's declining status as an
 international port.

It was, as Eric Darton points out in "Divided We Stand: A Biography of
 New York's World Trade Center," one of the great real estate scams in a
 city practically built on them.

With downtown's real estate market floundering in the 1950s, master
 banker David Rockefeller -- who controlled a significant amount of
 downtown real estate -- conceived of a massive, publicly financed
 project that would inflate land values and spur development.

From the start, critics questioned the need for more office space in a
 city lousy with it. In one protest, men carried around a coffin to
 symbolize the death of the neighborhood. Another group of opponents took
 out full-page ads in local newspapers that are horrifying in retrospect:
 they depicted an airplane crashing into the supposedly "too tall"
 towers.

Opponents within city government did stall the project -- first by
 refusing to demap certain streets and later, believe it or not, by not
 granting permits to lay telephone lines -- because they felt the city
 was being shortchanged by the Port Authority (what else is new?), which
 wanted to pay the city only $4 million for the land instead of the
 requested $16 million.

But with governors of both New York and New Jersey on board, the project
 moved forward. Although originally slated as a 50- to 70-story tower and
 a six-story exhibition center with a budget of $250 million, Port
 Authority director Austin Tobin shared Rockefeller's conviction --
 handed down from Moses (Robert, not the Hebrew lawgiver) -- that bigger
 indeed meant better.

Tobin expanded the World Trade Center into a 12-million-square-foot
 complex (the equivalent of 75 city blocks) that would cost $500 million.

The excavation alone yielded 1.2 million cubic yards of debris -- 75,000
 standard dumptrucks -- which was dumped into river to create the 23.5
 acres on which Battery Park City now stands.

Architect Minoru Yamasaki, chosen from more than a dozen American
 designers, envisioned a "modest" building in the 80- to 90-story range
 -- until Tobin, a wannabe "master builder" himself, argued that the
 center must include the tallest building in the world (a title it only
 held until Chicago's Sears Tower opened in 1974).

Yamasaki studied 100 schemes before settling on the double-skyscraper
 concept. It would have been impossible, he said, to contain
 three-quarters of the Center's rentable office space in one tower, yet
 spreading out so much space over four or five buildings would have
 "looked like a housing project," he said.

Much has been written of Yamasaki's innovative design -- the load-bearing
 outer "skin," the column-free floorspace, the express elevators, and the
 building's ability to buffet not only hurricane-force winds, but,
 eerily, the force of a fully loaded Boeing 707 (the biggest thing flying
 at the time) -- but little has been recalled about Yamasaki's vision.

The Detroit-based architect, who put himself through school by working at
 fish canneries, believed that even colossal structures should have a
 human scale.

"The World Trade Center should be a living representation of man's belief
 in humanity, his need for individual dignity, his belief in the
 cooperation of men, and through this cooperation, his ability to find
 greatness," he said in words that are now haunting.

The buildings are being fondly remembered now -- like the platitudes
 spoken even at the funerals of hateful people -- but they met almost
 universal scorn as they were rising over Manhattan.

"The towers themselves," critic Paul Goldberger wrote in 1981, "offered
 little except pure height; their flat tops and huge masses had a
 deadening effect on the vista...so boring, so utterly banal, as to be
 unworthy of a bank headquarters in Omaha."

Some argued that the building's monolithic quality was the entire point;
 what better way to demonstrate in one stroke the brashness of New York
 than erecting two outsized, egotistical plinths, unadorned by any
 architectural flourishes, and then fill them with tens of thousands of
 office drones denied even the pleasure of a 50-mile view because of the
 building's narrow windows?

Yet despite its aesthetic failings, the buildings' sheer size guaranteed
 that they would become pop icons, totems of New York's continued
 assertion of itself as "capital of the world."

Indeed, less than a year after the ribbon-cutting, the "humanizing" of
 the buildings began, first in 1974 when tight-rope-walker Philippe Petit
 strung a wire between the towers and danced across, the very act giving
 the illusion that buildings could have a sense of humor.

That sense continued seven years later when toy maker George Willig,
 using homemade tools, climbed up a window-washer track on Tower 2 -- in
 part, he said later, because the buildings' sheer ugliness taunted him
 all the way from his native Queens.

And when Hollywood did its 1976 remake of "King Kong," the filmmakers
 knew that the Empire State Building could no longer serve as the great
 ape's grail; it had to be the just-completed Twin Towers.

Now, their image is everywhere -- on "Race for the Cure" t-shirts, on
 corporate icon with skyline silhouettes, in the Channel 11 logo -- more
 noticeable now, perhaps, than when they were still standing.

Even Goldberger was once forced to admit to feeling "some small pleasure
 in the way the two huge forms, when appeared from a distance, play off
 against each other like minimalist sculpture," he wrote.

"But the buildings remain an occasion to mourn."

Mourn indeed.

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