Gerry Sigal thought he was building something permanent.
The chairman of Washington's Sigal Construction Corp. spent 3 1/2 years in the early 1970s as the construction supervisor for the South Tower of New York's World Trade Center.
Tuesday morning he broke down and wept as the television showed it collapsing a mere45 minutes after being hit by a hijacked jetliner.
"The thing I loved, being a New Yorker, was the pride everybody took. They knew this was a building for life," Sigal said yesterday in his Georgetown office. "To watch that on TV, to look at that, watching the flames -- I saw the second plane hit and I broke down."
Sigal, 58, founded his construction company in Washington in 1977, and he has overseen development of some of the city's landmarks, such as the Bond Building and the MCI Telecommunications Corp. world headquarters.
But he said he has never gotten over the thrill of his job at the World Trade Center, when he was a young supervisor for New York's Tishman Realty and Construction Co. A native of Brighton Beach in Brooklyn, Sigal said he went to work every day with a sense of amazement at what he was helping contribute to the Manhattan skyline.
He often brought his father along to the construction site, hauling him up into the lofty, unfinished floors of the 110-story tower. There, his father, a Jew who emigrated from Palestine in 1917, enjoyed looking out across the rooftops and rivers of his adopted home.
"Sometimes it would be raining from the 65th floor down, and the sun was shining from the 75th floor up," Sigal said. "It was just such a unique building."
In those days, the twin 1,350-foot towers were the tallest buildings in the world. Together they contained 10 million square feet of office space; each floor was an acre in area. The 1.2 million cubic yards of earth and rock excavated during construction of the World Trade Center was piled in the Hudson River to create the 23.5-acre Battery Park City.
The buildings were designed, Sigal pointed out, to withstand the impact of a Boeing 707. That size plane -- or smaller -- was initially what Sigal thought had hit the North Tower on Tuesday when he walked in from a business meeting to find his staff gathered around a conference room television set.
Just as reports were beginning to suggest that the crashed jet was a much bigger 767, Sigal watched the second jet smash into the South Tower that he knew so well.
"I totally broke down," he said yesterday in an interview, his quick brown eyes filling with tears. "I just sat there for hours. I just thought about all those people that were trapped."
As much as Sigal had come to see the buildings as a familiar icon of his hometown -- "my greatest joy, every time I came to the city, was to look up and see the trade center," he said -- they were also something far more tangible to him.
The steel beams he had seen lowered into place and signed by work crews; the miles of wiring that were later covered by acres of wallboard; the bare concrete scuffed by work boots before carpets were laid -- he watched it all blow out and collapse, floor by floor.
He called his son, who lives in Greenwich Village and saw the disaster first-hand. And Sigal called his friend Larry Silverstein, the head of Silverstein Properties, which recently spent $3.5 billion to acquire the lease on the World Trade Center. Sigal had visited with Silverstein only the weekend before the disaster.
"He's devastated," Sigal said. "He knew all his tenants in that building. He lost four of his own people."
Sigal himself has had trouble reining in his emotions since Tuesday, he said, losing sleep and tearing up easily. Yesterday, gesturing out his office window at where he had watched smoke billow up from the Pentagon, Sigal caught sight of a scuffed blue hard hat sitting on a table across the room.
"Look at this," he said, going to pick it up. On the front was an orange "T" -- the Tishman logo -- as well as Sigal's name, and on the side was a small sticker depicting two familiar towers. "The World Trade Center," the sticker reads, "Progress with Safety."
