Former Austin J. Tobin Plaza (aka World Trade Center Plaza) / The Mall at the World Trade Center (below) (New York City, New York)

USA / New Jersey / Hoboken / New York City, New York
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On this site was the Austin J. Tobin Plaza which served as a park, performance venue, and crowd-funneling area when lines to visit the World Trade Center towers were especially long. On the morning of the attack, temporary seating was in place for a concert.

Windy and bleak at first, redesigns in the 1990's provided benches and trees; the plaza became a reassuring breath of human-scale horizontal flatness before the potentially-intimidating soaring verticality of the gigantic towers. A focal point of the former Tobin Plaza was the 1971 orb-shaped metal sculpture, The Sphere, by Fritz Koening which was recovered in damaged-but-serviceable condition after nearby the World Trade Center towers collapsed on 9-11-01.

As a memorial, the plaza's Sphere sculpture was temporarily relocated to Battery Park a few blocks south of here.

In its early days, the Plaza was just called World Trade Center Plaza. After the 1978 death of Austin J. Tobin, the area was renamed in his honor. Tobin was the former long-time leader of the Port of New York Authority --the agency which was later reorganized into the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey (which owned the WTC site and instigated the towers' construction).

The Mall at the World Trade Center, a 70 store shopping concourse, was below.
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Coordinates:   40°42'41"N   74°0'45"W

Comments

  • Article created, along with article about the Sphere sculpture revised and extended, with special thanks to user Mr_Geo_Taggert who started the article-thread on this once-neglected topic.
This article was last modified 13 years ago