Although it had Wall Street, Lower Manhattan had little else in the way of prosperity during the first decades after WWII. To turn things around, the Port Authority of New York came up with a grand project: a pair of towers reaching up to the sky, with hotels and and an exhibition hall. 110 million square feet of office space total.

On this day, January 18, 1964, plans for the World Trade Center towers were officially made public. The lead designer was Minoru Yamasaki, a well-respected architect, who teamed up for the project with the architectural firm Emory Roth & Sons, builders of such iconic NY structures as the MetLife Building and the GM Building.

The building of the the World Trade Center required cooperation between the Port Authority and the state of New York, as well as New Jersey. That tangled ownership structure proved to be one of the main obstacles to quickly rebuilding on the site after the September 11th attacks.