Sailors on the deck of the USS John F. Kennedy
man the starboard rail as it passes the
World Trade Center towers in 1996.

Despite tragedy, World Trade Center name is thriving globally

[The Boston Globe]

Despite tragedy, World Trade Center name is thriving globally Developers see it as a brand that symbolizes international business

By Robert Johnson, Globe Correspondent

April 18, 2004

The twin towers of New York fell during the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, but the number of buildings named World Trade Center is rising dramatically around the world -- even in the Middle East.

From Boston to Basra, Iraq, of all places, the World Trade Center brand is proving more prestigious than poignant, denoting cachet instead of catastrophe, and surging as a symbol of economic achievement, not terrorism's triumph.

There are even three in the planning stage for Saudi Arabia, homeland to most of the terrorists who hijacked planes that crashed into the New York towers. The developer of new Middle East trade centers -- in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Libya -- has requested anonymity, but is expected to make plans public as soon as the end of the month.

Since the Sept. 11 attacks, 24 new or existing office complexes dotting the globe have adopted the World Trade Center moniker.

The New York-based World Trade Center Association licenses the name for an initial fee of $200,000 plus $10,000 annually, not unlike hotel chains that sell the use of their brand and provide buyers with advertising and marketing help. To date, 288 locations bear the World Trade Center name, with nearly 750,000 tenants occupying space somewhere on the globe.

The range of building types, sizes, and political backdrops spans the globe -- from a 33-floor tower in New Orleans to a cramped ground-floor office in Kabul, Afghanistan; from a modern eight-building complex in Dresden, Germany, to a humble suite in an aging section of Havana, Cuba -- a nation still under trade sanctions by Washington today. Cities boasting World Trade Centers include such likely metropolises as London and the much less obvious Lexington, Ky. There's a big one in Jakarta, Indonesia, and even one budding in Jackson, Miss.

"Being designated as a World Trade Center gets premium tenants and rents for office space, and also translates into higher room rates for hotels that are part of the facility," said Guy Tozzoli, the 82-year-old president of the World Trade Center Association and former New York Port Authority executive who helped plan the original two Manhattan towers.

His 21-employee enterprise runs on a $5 million annual budget. It's in the business of licensing a famous name, but it also gets tax-exempt status in part because its mission is recognized as a boon to international relations and economic advancement. Tozzoli has cultivated this image by campaigning for the Nobel Peace Prize and soliciting nomination letters from the likes of Reverend Desmond Tutu, the South African bishop. The association's revenue is derived entirely from licensing the WTC name, which can't be used without its permission.

Despite the targeting of New York's towers, many real estate developers are still eager. A big building by any other name just wouldn't carry the same panache as a World Trade Center, said John Drew, president and codeveloper of Boston's World Trade Center, which has helped reinvigorate the city's waterfront area.

"Would it have been the same if we called it the Drew Complex, or something like that?" Drew asked. "We could have made that work, but the World Trade Center name brought a special kind of visibility." Drew, who opened the center on the South Boston Waterfront in 1986, has since expanded it to nearly 2 million square feet. He acknowledged that Sept. 11 gave him pause about using the WTC moniker.

"At first it made us stop and think, but later, when we looked at it with less emotion, we realized that not every World Trade Center is a target," he said. ''The towers in New York were icons."

The World Trade Center brand continues to be successful even after tragedy struck at one location, said Lawrence Halpern, a professor of operations and strategic management at Boston College, because "the brand wasn't at fault."

Halpern said security was the issue and that the "World Trade Center name conveys importance on a global scale."

Still, the Sept. 11 attack raised fears that other World Trade Centers could be targets for terrorists. Tozzoli said that certain tenants in two World Trade Center buildings he declines to name -- one on the West Coast and one in the Northeast -- asked their landlords to change the names of their office buildings. But they soon relented when the FBI didn't list other World Trade Centers among the most likely potential goals of terrorists.

Although 15 former locations have changed their names since Sept. 11, Tozzoli said that none did so because of terrorism fears. The owners of commercial buildings occasionally change their names for marketing or other reasons, just as do hotels that go from being a Motel 6 to a Budget Inn, for example.

Further, he said the ratio of 24 new trade centers and 15 leaving the association in two years is typical of the organization's growth before the attacks.

"Being called a World Trade Center doesn't by itself make you more likely to be attacked," said an FBI spokesman in Washington. "Every week we send intelligence reports to local law enforcement authorities and we have never listed another World Trade Center."

Tozzoli, who earned a master's degree in physics from Fordham University in New York City, began his career with the Port Authority of New York in 1946 as an engineer. Among the early construction projects he helped supervise was Newark Airport.

In 1962, he was named director of New York's World Trade Department and given responsibility for planning what would become the massive twin towers at the tip of Manhattan.

The original concept, an office complex to spur growth in the port area, grew under Tozzoli, who conceived the idea that dirt excavated from the site of the building site would become landfill on which to construct another huge project, Battery Park City.

It was Tozzoli who pushed to build the towers higher than the architects' original 90-story plan. He recalled telling them, "President Kennedy is going to put a man on the moon, and you're going to figure out a way to build me the tallest buildings on Earth."

Soon after that, lead architect Minoru Yamasaki offered up a design for the 110-story twin towers, at the time the tallest in the world.

Tozzoli formed the licensing group in 1970, before construction of the first World Trade Center was finished. The reason? "Because some people from other cities and countries kept asking me, 'If a World Trade Center is good for New York, wouldn't it be good for us, too?' "

Today, Tozzoli is taking his brand and his business philosophy to new frontiers in the heart of Muslim fundamentalism. "I still believe it's harder to blow up people you're selling things to and buying things from," he said. "Sure there are people in the world who want to stop capitalist activity, but commerce is a powerful tool for bringing together distant societies. It's a common language, a culture all its own."

With that in mind, Tozzoli's group is pressing on. Soon after US forces defeated the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2002, a small World Trade Center office was established by an investor in Kabul. "That may seem overly optimistic: They haven't done any trading yet, but we're introducing them to some connections in Europe and other places that have potential," he said.

Sometimes the World Trade Center Association skirts the edge of US trade sanctions in its zeal to secure naming rights. Take Cuba, which is officially embargoed by the United States yet a member in good standing of Tozzoli's group. In fact, the Havana World Trade Center, essentially part of that city's government-run Chamber of Commerce, gained membership back in 1980 when the initiation fee was just $500.

In return, the group has helped Cuba make trade connections in several European countries. That assistance is allowed under US law, partly because the association is registered with the federal government as a nonprofit entity. Tozzoli even visited North Korea in 1997, at that communist nation's invitation. He soon helped establish a modest government-run World Trade Center on one floor of an office building in Pyongyang. "It's just a start. They don't really have much to trade with their global neighbors because they're very poor," he said.

Meantime, the association has "granted a delay" to North Korea on payment of its $200,000 initiation fee.

State Department officials say the association's work has its unofficial support, although Tozzoli's group doesn't speak for the US government and must mind its policies. ''We recognize their role as important," said Brenda Greenberg, a department spokeswoman in Washington.

Tozzoli said his main job is to expand the World Trade Center concept in developing nations, "even the ones that don't like us." And while that happens, he yearns to see the New York World Trade Center rebuilt. His office, which was on the 72d flower of the North Tower, is now in temporary quarters elsewhere in Manhattan. He said, "I dream of the day when we move into the newest World Trade Center."

This story ran on page C1 of the Boston Globe on 4/18/2004.
© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.