A zillion years ago my family was visiting New York (only time I've been there). The World Trade Towers were under construction at the time. The basic framing was complete but they were still sheet rocking the interior at the upper stories. At the time, the World Trade Towers were the world's tallest buildings. My brother and I (we were kids at the time) thought it would be cool to see New York from the top of the world's tallest building. So we went into one of the towers (don't know which one) and took the elevator to the building's middle. That's as far as the elevator went because the building was still under construction. Not letting that stop us, my brother and I found one of the star wells and proceeded to climb the stars. We climbed and we climbed and we climbed. At some point there was a no trespassing sign but we ignored it and kept on climbing. One thing we did notice as we puffed up those stairs was the crude grafitti written everywhere by the construction workers. Almost every piece of sheet rock in the building had some lewd drawing that was later painted over. Eventually we were almost at the top of the building where we found there were no more stairs. However there were ladders. Again being stupid kids, we climbed the ladders (many of them) and eventually we were at the top. At the top, I walked up to one of the windows and mentioned to my brother: "Boy, these brand new windows sure are clean!". I reached out and discovered there were no windows. We then carefully stuck our heads out through the open window, looked straight down and got a very bad case of "tight nuts". At that point we agreed it was time to head back. By some miracle we were not arrested for trespassing. Our parents were very releaved that we survive the exercise. When I read about how people died in that building, I think about that long climb up and down those stairs that I did with my brother.

Gary