When Wall St. played on America’s team

Dispatches recommended from Charles Gasparino:

My father, a construction worker, spent a lot of time laying iron rods in the World Trade Center’s concrete foundation back in the late 1960s. Dad was never big on the architecture of the day: He said skyscrapers like the Trade Center — built with far less steel and concrete than earlier towers — were ripe for disaster. “You can light that place with a match,” he once told me.

It was, of course, something much larger than a match that took the Towers down.

I was lucky that day: Though I worked downtown at The Wall Journal Journal, covering the big Wall Street firms and banks, I had a doctor’s appointment in the Village. We could all see the smoldering towers, but the closest I came to the chaos was seeing people fleeing uptown near the Astor Place subway station.

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