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CNN Newsnight Aaron Brown

CNN NEWSNIGHT AARON BROWN

Aired December 24, 2001 - 22:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
AARON BROWN, CNN ANCHOR: Good evening again. I'm Aaron Brown. Merry Christmas from all of us at NEWSNIGHT. We're all off tonight. The program is on tape. It's been three-and-a-half long, hard months, but we're all very much aware, especially because we are in New York, how lucky we are. We've had the privilege to cover a story that was filled with almost as much heroism -- almost -- as tragedy. And it's about the only thing that's made the story bearable.

We also know that we're lucky to be able to spend this holiday with our families intact. It's impossible tonight not to think of the thousands who died that day in September, and their loved who are now facing the holidays without them. There are parents struggling to make the holidays fun, make them normal for their children and forced to do it as single parents.

Nothing will ever compare, of course, to the human loss of this disaster. But tonight, on NEWSNIGHT, we are going to take a look at what the city of New York lost as well, the buildings that were part of its skyline, its story. Like New York itself, the World Trade Center has gotten new found respect around the world since September 11. So tonight, we'll pay our respects and we'll begin right after the latest headlines.

(NEWS BREAK)

BROWN: We want to start with a remembrance, an obituary, if you will, from our Beth Nissen. Nissen has brought us so many stories and images from ground zero, even under ground zero, since September 11. She knows what those buildings have become and where they came from better than anyone on our staff. So we begin with their history and legacy, made indelible on that sunny Tuesday morning.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BETH NISSEN, CNN REPORTER (voice-over): Lost on September 11, 2001, the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center of New York. Age: 30. Address: 16 acres in southern Manhattan. Two towering landmarks much missed by a city and a nation.

ANGUS KRESS GILLESPIE, RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR: We didn't realize how much we loved these buildings until now that they're gone.

NISSEN: Rutgers University professor Angus Kress Gillespie is the author of "Twin Towers," a 1999 biography of the World Trade Center.

GILLESPIE: The World Trade Center was built like no other skyscraper. It was a remarkable piece of engineering.

NISSEN: The twins were the offspring of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. They were an unprecedented challenge to raise. Beginning with excavation in 1966 to set the foundation in bedrock 70 feet down.

GILLESPIE: Anytime you dig a hole in lower Manhattan, it's immediately going to fill up with water.

NISSEN: So engineers created the now famous bathtub, a huge concrete-lined whole of unprecedented size.

GILLESPIE: The entire square footage of the Empire State Building could have been put into the two sub-basements of the World Trade Center.

NISSEN: Construction of the distinctive steel walls began in 1968. What held up the Twin Towers was not the usual network of supporting columns inside the buildings, but the outside walls, 200,000 tons of steel lattice work with only narrow window slots.

GILLESPIE: In it's very stiff exterior, it's been compared to as like a stalk of celery and this resulted in it's unusual appearance.

NISSEN: And it's expansive interiors; 10 million square feet of office space, more office space than in the entire city of Miami.

GILLESPIE: Each floor of the World Trade Center was about an acre in size, very vast and unbroken by columns.

NISSEN: Getting tenants up to those floors was another engineering challenge.

GILLESPIE: The more stories you have, the more tenants you have, the more elevators you need and beyond 70 stories, you reached a point of diminishing returns. You had to have so many elevators that the elevators chewed up your rentable space and made the building not economically feasible.

NISSEN: Engineers solved the problem by putting in express elevators to sky lobbies on the 44th and 78th floors, connecting to local elevators going to floors in between.

Once built, the new towers still faced problems.

GILLESPIE: The childhood of the World Trade Center was a very stormy childhood because the kid was not accepted by its neighbors. The architectural critics said that the building was boring and benou (ph). It lacked decorative detail. The environmentalists were particularly upset because there were no light switches. The lights simply burned night and day.

The broadcasters were upset. At that time the signals were being broadcast from the Empire State Building. They were bouncing off the World Trade Center creating all kinds of double talk, snow, interference. Even the bird lovers were upset because the buildings were built in the flyways and the birds were flying down from Canada and crashing into the towers.

NISSEN: The Twin Towers were just so big, 110 stories each, more than 1,360 feet high.

GILLESPIE: The scale, the scope, is just beyond imagining.

NISSEN: The World Trade Center had it's own railroad station, it's own police precinct, it's own zip code: 10048.

GILLESPIE: Truly it was a city within a city.

NISSEN: But the Twin Towers did not become the symbol of the city, says Gillespie, until 1977 when the classic film, "King Kong" was remade.

GILLESPIE: And King Kong switched his allegiance from the Empire State Building to the World Trade Center, to the Twin Towers and I think, in terms of popular culture, this represents a title shift in public identification, name recognition, icon recognition of the Twin Towers.

NISSEN: From that time on, the towers were the image of New York City: in movies, on TV shows and postcards.

GILLESPIE: People from the rest of the country, people from foreign countries visiting New York, if there was one postcard they were going to send back home, it would be of the Twin Towers.

NISSEN: Public pride in the World Trade Center only increased after bombs exploded in the centers parking garage in February of 1993, killing six and injuring more than 1,000.

On September 11, 2001, they were attacked again. This time, the Twin Towers fell. They now rest in pieces.

If you were called on to eulogize the Twin Towers, what would you say?

GILLESPIE: I would say, here was a magnificent contribution, building what was then the tallest building in the world, a symbol of American pride, of American finance, of American capitalism and the lightning rod for our enemies.

NISSEN: Beth Nissen, CNN, New York.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Coming up next on NEWSNIGHT, a massive documentary about New York that needed a new ending after September 11. The man who made it and gave us the epilogue: Ric Burns.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK) BROWN: Shortly after September 11, documentary filmmaker Ric Burns was scheduled to premier the final portion of his film on the city of New York. Problem was the city of New York had become a different place. We talked with Burns in early October about the new ending that he had created. We'll show you that you interview in a moment. But first take a look.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Well, there's so much talk now about globalization, our global economy, about one world, all the peoples of the world coming together as one world, one world at last. Well, it's in New York that we're going to find out if that's really going to happen now.

Because if it's going to happen, New York is going to be the center of it. And because New York has always been the place where all the peoples of the world gather together. It's the melting pot. It's the great cauldron of humanity. It's the place where all the many different religions and creeds and races and ethnic groups of the world come together in one place.

And they're so opposite, of course, some of them that as if their oppositeness and the conflict between them makes this cauldron a very turbulent cauldron, makes it bubble and seethe.

And out of it somehow, over and over again during New York's 400 years, we see that when the parts come together, something comes out of it that's greater than the sum of the parts.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I don't think a country has to have one soul, like we have to have the geographic center of Kansas and say, "Here's our national soul." There are different parts of the national soul. And New York has a part of the national soul.

New York represents something good for all Americans. And it's been a good thing for Americans. It's not a foreign place. It's what we're about. And in a way you know, what William calls, William said about the United States in the '40s, that the world spirit was here.

That nations, people learning to live together, not surrendering their identity, but accepting their identity and then accepting other peoples' identity and learning to live together.

Well, that's what's going in New York. That's what's going on in the United States. And that's what has to go on if the world's going to survive. In that way, New York possesses part of the world soul too.

You know, we're either going to blow the planet up or destroy it in a different way or learn to live together. And that been doesn't mean getting a washed out identity where we're all one people. It means learning to live together with one another with our differences.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Ric Burns is with us tonight. Welcome.

RIC BURNS, FILMMAKER: Thanks for having me.

BROWN: There is, you probably heard everyone react to it actually when it went by. I wish we could freeze it and bring it back, but there's a shot there where you see that sort of lattice- like piece that we have all come to know. We know exactly what it means now, going up those years ago. It means something else.

BURNS: It does indeed.

BROWN: Yes. What did you want, when you sat down to redo the end, which must have been difficult in any case, what was your thought? What were you thinking there?

BURNS: The original ending which is about as long, had about seven or eight on camera moments interwoven with the credits as they rolled. From New Yorkers like Fran Liebowitz or Donald Trump or Spaulding Gray. I mean, it was brash and ebullient and irreverent.

And sort of in a moment on Tuesday, the 11th, New Yorkers didn't feel brash or ebullient or irreverent anymore and couldn't afford the luxury of feeling irreverent anymore.

And really, the entire 4.5 hours of this broadcast earlier this week, the only part that seemed to all of my colleagues and me not to fit anymore, was that kind light-hearted ending. And so we threw it to one side and settled on those two moments that you just saw.

BROWN: Did you think of not using the towers in the shots?

BURNS: You know, we rushed over to get footage actually of the building coming down initially. We were rushing to recraft the ending and discovered that was almost the one thing we couldn't show.

We happened to have in our offices, because we had shown some scenes of the World Trade Center going up in earlier parts of the film. We happened to have the only, I think now the only extant 18- minute version of a film made about the World Trade Center. The Port Authority's archives were on the 65th floor of one of the towers.

BROWN: That's the shot. I mean, you see that now. Whatever it would have meant 3.5 weeks ago, I don't know, but I know what it means now. Stay around for a bit. We'll talk about the city, why it is, what it is. We'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: We're back with filmmaker Ric Burns. I want to talk about New York and the documentary in a minute, but we were talking here that the city feels to me smaller now. Am I nuts, which is possible?

BURNS: I agree absolutely. And as I was coming in on a plane last night, I noticed that the skyline looks smaller. It looks shorter. It doesn't stick up quite so high. And I don't mean just looking downtown at that end of lower Manhattan. The whole skyline seems to have been wounded and shrunk a little bit.

BROWN: What do you think it is that people don't get about New York?

BURNS: I think they don't get that New York is really, really the center of America. It's really the place that's the arc of the principal American impulses of democracy and capitalism. I think they don't get it because so much change takes place here so continuously, and all of us want a little bit of respite from change. We want to sort of settle down a little bit, but New York doesn't let you settle down.

But I think that when we stand back and look at it, we realize it's really -- this place is the capital of our own becoming. It's the place that made us what we have been over the decades and generations and centuries. I think what happened really instantaneously on Tuesday the 11th was Americans really as one understood absolutely that New York was a place that they held dear to their hearts, even if they had never wanted to go there before.

BROWN: In one of the early days, a correspondent of ours, and I understood what he was trying to say, I just didn't like the way he said it particularly -- he was out in Nebraska and he said, "out here in the real America," and I thought no, no. This is America, too. This is a real America here, this town.

BURNS: Oh, no question. I think, you know, we're all New Yorkers now, right across the country. I mean, I have spoken to people in Western Michigan, people everywhere in America -- they feel a kind of solidarity with what happened here, because what was struck here, what was attacked here was something that is quintessential American. And we feel wounded, all of us equally. I don't think you have to be a New Yorker to feel how powerfully this has affected all of us.

BROWN: The -- if you -- I don't know, maybe you have done this -- if you went and took a look at the whole project now again, would it be a different documentary now because of what's happened?

BURNS: I think it would be in certain ways. I think one thing I realized now particularly after the 11th of September is that it's not really a history. It's kind of a meditation on urban values and on why we should care about these dense, crowded, noisy, dirty, expensive places we call cities, and New York is the biggest, and the dirtiest, and the most crowded and the most expensive.

But you know, this is the place where we come together. This is a place where experiment in capitalism and democracy has been going on since long before the formation of the nation, since the time the Dutch got here. And I think that what I understand now is that my colleagues and I inadvertently had stumbled across really I think one of the greatest of all American stories: Where did we come from as a people. If you want to look at one of the greatest case studies in what America has been, where we have come from and I think absolutely even now where we are going, come to New York. Come to New York since the 11th, and see what happens when disaster and trauma takes place. Boy, do we come together in an extraordinary way.

BROWN: It's for a lot of us it's the place where our grandparents or great grandparents found America. I take my daughter from time to time to Ellis Island, and we sit in the great hall, and I say, "This is where your great grandparents found their lives, found freedom here." The city in that sense is so rich, and that is unchanged 200 years later. It remains exactly the same. People still come through and find their lives.

BURNS: No question. I mean, the 2000 census showed that there were 186 languages spoken in New York. I mean, in the last -- immigration in the last 30 years alone makes the immigration of the turn of the 20th century look like an Episcopalian picnic. I mean, it's so complex now and so many more kinds of people from around the world. I mean, that's really -- the future is out there in Queens, with all those people coming from literally every continent. That's the lower East Side of the 21st century.

BROWN: And that's in fact the path they take, in a way. They come to the Lower East Side and they get on the 7 Train at some point in their lives, and when they have got a little money in their pocket and they make their way out to one of the boroughs, generally Queens, and start yet again. And again, it's something that has gone on for well over a century certainly here.

BURNS: Certainly has.

BROWN: Do you think the city will be different in the long-term for what has happened? Clearly, we are all different now.

BURNS: You know, this is literally unprecedented things. Terrible things have happened in New York before, but nothing on this scale. But I think one thing, however, that we can take from it is that New York has a long history of the unprecedented. It has been in the vanguard of creating a new kind of culture really for 400 years, and that being in the vanguard means you're where the possibilities happen, you're where the perils are most likely to hit, too.

And so, I think that though nothing like this has ever happened before, we can take some solace in the fact that New Yorkers have been hit by curve balls again and again and again, and they have always prevailed. They have always found a way first to unify in the aftermath of a disaster, and then find new solutions to problems that seem particularly vexing.

BROWN: Do you have any interest in doing another hour on it, a sequel to it in some way?

BURNS: Absolutely. I mean, we assumed when we finished the seventh episode broadcast on Sunday that we were done, but really almost as soon as the towers had fallen, I realized that we had another episode to do. I mean, it wasn't an accident that New York was targeted. It was targeted for reasons that have everything to do with what New York is. It's the heart of the heart of a global commercial culture. And if you want to strike a global commercial culture and everything it stands for, what better place than the World Trade Center, the heart of the heart of that culture?

BROWN: Thanks for coming in. Nice to meet you. Very nice to talk with you. Ric Burns.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

WOLF BLITZER, CNN ANCHOR: Good evening, I'm Wolf Blitzer in Washington.

We'll go right back to "NEWSNIGHT WITH AARON BROWN" in just a moment. But first, an update on some of the night's top stories.

A federal judge has ordered a man accused of boarding a flight with explosives in his shoes held until his trial. Twenty-eight-year- old Richard Reid appeared in court in Boston. He's facing charges of interfering with the duties of flight crew members.

Reid was subdued by passengers and flight attendants aboard American Airlines flight 63 Saturday, that after he allegedly lit a match trying to light his shoes. The plane, en route from Paris to Miami, was diverted to Boston. Preliminary FBI analysis indicate the shoes contained two improvised explosive devices.

Christmas Eve travelers at a Florida airport were delayed several hours today after a passenger found a bullet at an airport gate leading to a New York flight. The passenger alerted deputies at the Fort Lauderdale International Airport. The concourse was evacuated and searched for weapons. Bags of the passengers on the New York- bound flight were checked as well. No weapons were found, and no arrests were made.

They're thousands of miles from home and families, but U.S. troops in Afghanistan are celebrating the spirit of Christmas. Marines at Camp Rhino near Kandahar observed Christmas mass at a new chapel at their air base. The troops sang carols and a rousing chorus of "God Bless America."

Despite the damage caused by a major fire last week, Christmas services went on as scheduled at New York's Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Last Tuesday's fire did not damage the main part of the building, but the smell of smoke still hung in the air as thousands attended Episcopal services at the cathedral today.

Even though it is Christmas Eve, this is a work night at the site of the World Trade Center. A huge Christmas tree brought in from Maine several weeks ago is lit up. Rescue crews will continue to work on Christmas Day. And as New Year's Eve approaches, city officials are trying to reassure people the traditionally huge celebration will be safe.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BERNARD KERIK, COMMISSIONER, NEW YORK CITY POLICE DEPARTMENT: We've had the millennium celebration. We do Times Square every year, where hundreds of thousands, millions of people come to the city. We're very good at our job. This year we will have a heightened alert in the square, in and around Times Square. But, you know, people should come to New York. They should come to Times Square, especially on New Year's Eve. It's a great night, and it's one of the biggest parties of the year. So they should come and have a great time.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BLITZER: And if you're dreaming of a white Christmas, you might want to think about waking up in New York State. But getting there may not be too much fun. The National Weather Service forecast up to a foot of snow on Christmas Eve for the Buffalo-Niagara region, and another foot on Christmas. Before today, Buffalo had only 1.6 inches of snow, compared to 80 inches by Christmas Eve last year.

Got to love my old home town.

I'm Wolf Blitzer in Washington. "NEWSNIGHT WITH AARON BROWN" continues when we come back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

AARON BROWN, CNN ANCHOR: In our talk with Rick Burns, he mentioned that his researchers had been working with the only existing copy of an almost 30-year-old documentary on the making of the World Trade Center that was produced by the Port Authority. Well, he has since helped us obtain a copy of the film. We believe it's never been shown in its entirety on television. And because of September 11, what once was just an ordinary industrial film has become a riveting, almost haunting window into the past.

So here is the building of the World Trade Center as the story was told in the early 1970s when the towers opened.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

NARRATOR (voice-over): One of the most dramatic events in New York City in the 1960s was the construction of the World Trade Center. Design and construction would take years, and efforts of thousands of people.

A project of this size created enormous challenges, challenges that demanded the use of dramatic new engineering concepts.

A wide variety of designs was considered. Final plans call for a complex of low-level buildings surrounding two 1,350-foot towers, the tallest ever built. Their great height was made possible by the use of load-bearing walls. Extremely tall buildings were traditionally inefficient, since huge amounts of interior space were taken up by structural supports and elevators.

The Trade Center towers would overcome this problem. The exterior walls were designed to bear much of the weight of the towers as well as all of the wind loads. The only internal supports would be in a central core of columns. Elevators would be placed in the shafts formed by the core columns.

To further conserve space, the towers would be organized into three zones served by express elevators. Local elevators would run within each zone.

These engineering considerations determined the towers' basic design -- sheer, symmetrical walls rising without setbacks.

The site selected for the Trade Center was an old section of Manhattan's lower West Side. The area housed a great number of small businesses, but the predominance of electronics stores caused it to be known as Radio Row.

In 1966, demolition began. In all, 164 buildings had to be torn down, and generations of power, telephone, gas, steam, and water lines had to be rerouted.

The site actually consisted of waterlogged landfill, which had accumulated over two centuries out of old wharves and debris. To support the great weight of the towers, foundations would have to be dug down 70 feet to bedrock. But the removal of water from this huge area would have caused a dangerous lowering of the surrounding water level, undermining nearby buildings.

The solution was to construct an underground concrete retaining wall to surround the site. This was built with a slurry trench method, used for the first time in this country. A trench was dug down to bedrock, and a thick bentonite slurry was pumped in. The slurry was denser than the surrounding mud and dirt and thus kept the trench walls from collapsing.

As each section was completed, 25-ton cages of metal reinforcement rods were lowered into the slurry-filled trench.

With the cage in place, concrete was poured in. Since the concrete had a greater density than the slurry, the slurry was forced up out of the trench and could be used for the next section. In this way, an underground wall was built completely sealing the site.

Excavation began.

As each section of the slurry wall was revealed, workers drilled holes through the wall and casing (ph) to push through down to bedrock on the far side. Steel pendants (ph) were then inserted through these holes and socketed into bedrock, bracing the wall against external pressure.

More than a million cubic yards of dirt had to be removed to make way for the Trade Center's foundations. The excavated earth was placed in the Hudson River adjacent to the site to create more than 23 acres of new land, land which was donated to the city of New York.

The site presented another major challenge. The tubes containing the PATH commuter rail lines lay underground within the excavation area. The fragile tubes had to be supported in protective cradles while excavation continued around them. Throughout construction, the PATH trains carried 130,000 commuters daily. At no point was service interrupted.

Seven stories down, bedrock was finally reached. Foundations for the towers could now be prepared. Concrete footings were formed and poured into bedrock. Massive assemblies of steel beams called grillages (ph) were laid on these footings. Each grillage would anchor one of the load-bearing tower columns.

Meanwhile, orders were placed for the 200,000 tons of steel which would be needed for construction. Individual pieces were prefabricated and rarely interchangeable. Moreover, there would be no room to stockpile materials at the construction site. This created a tremendous logistical problem. Steel sections would have to arrive at the site in the exact order and at the exact time needed.

To meet this challenge, Port Authority engineers used the computerized system known as critical path method, or CPM. CPM would coordinate every aspect of construction, track the flow of materials, and minimize any delays.

In August 1968, actual steel construction began. Kangaroo cranes imported from Australia were used for the first time in the United States. The cranes were assembled on top of the core columns. Each could lift 60 tons at a time. They would be the driving force behind the towers' construction. The cranes had the ability to jack themselves up 36 feet at a jump. As the walls grew to the height of a crane, the crane would hoist itself up, a neighboring crane would swing core columns into place beneath it, and construction would continue.

Seventy feet up at street level, steel trees were put into place around the perimeter of the towers. These trees would transfer the load of the exterior wall to the more widely spaced columns now anchored to bedrock.

Construction of the towers could now proceed with great speed. Three basic elements were used -- two- or three-story-high sections for the load-bearing wall, massive steel beams for the core columns, and floor sections to span the 60 feet between core and wall. Through the complex orchestration of these structural elements, three floors could be constructed in 10 days.

For its many engineering innovations, the Trade Center was cited as the outstanding engineering achievement of the 1971.

Shortly after the structural completion of the towers, the surrounding low-level buildings were finished.

A final addition to the North Tower was a 360-foot television antenna erected in 1978.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: Finally from us tonight, the future for skyscrapers. Humans seem to have almost a primal desire to push higher and higher into the sky. Americans turn that desire into these towering icons of capitalism. And if the hijackers thought they could destroy that spirit along with the towers, they thought wrong.

Some thoughts now from CNN's Garrick Utley.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

GARRICK UTLEY, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): And so what will rise from the ashes, the rubble? Another World Trade Center?

PAUL GOLDBERGER, ARCHITECTURE CRITIC, "THE NEW YORKER": We can't put it back the way it was. It's a terrible mistake. It pretends that nothing happened. And these are the first buildings in American history, certainly the first skyscrapers in all of history, that have become martyrs. We're not used to the notion of a building as a martyr.

UTLEY (on camera): But then, perhaps, you'd never really noticed how much these towering buildings, called skyscrapers, here in New York or anywhere, have entered our lives, either because we work in them or look at them or because of that eternal passion to build higher.

(voice-over): It is the passion that pushed the pharaohs to build their monuments to their immortality, the passion that moved Europeans to erect soaring cathedrals that ascended toward heaven, and the passion that tested Gustav Eiffel. Could he build a tower 1,000 feet high, the tallest structure in the world in 1889? Yes, he could.

Manhattan Island, with so many people jammed into so little space, became the natural habitat of the skyscraper. It was the elevator and steel that allowed the new landmarks to go up. It was money that drove them up. By piling more people on top of the same piece of land, real estate developers prospered. The sky was literally the limit.

When New York's Chrysler Building was finished in 1930, it was the tallest in the world. One year later, and 11 blocks away, the Empire State Building, built in only 14 months, took the title.

Skyscrapers became a symbol of American energy and ego, and, as in "King Kong," they entered our mythology as inviolable achievements in steel and stone that would withstand any assault.

(on camera): Now we know differently. So what happens to skyscrapers in the United States? Do they keep going up? Or did they peak at the 110th floor of those twin towers in lower Manhattan?

We're talking about size, security, and, of course, making money. And also about something else.

GOLDBERGER: The skyscraper is the most important indigenous American architectural form. It's one that we made and we exported to the rest of the world. But it really is identified with America, and it's always going to be a symbol of America, which is one of the key reasons we should not be giving up on the skyscraper. UTLEY (voice-over): No doubt Americans will not. Even as the World Trade Centers collapsed into a mountain of tragedy, other skyscrapers were going up, including the new headquarters of AOL-Time Warner, the parent company of CNN. At 80 stories high, it will now be Manhattan's newest and tallest twin towers.

Garrick Utley, CNN, New York.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: And that wraps up this special edition of NEWSNIGHT. We're delighted you were with us.

I'm Aaron Brown in New York. Good night.

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