WI the World Trade Center isn't built?

We are in the business of discussing plausibilities, likelihoods, their degrees, and what is and what is not plausible and not likely. And we fill in the gaps with narrative license. We can reasonably postulate what would happen for a while after the POD. It gets more complicated later on, because you're opening up all realistic possibilities when you deal with the multiverse; all are valid. My point is simply that you cannot assume history will go roughly or exactly as it did around the change, especially reflecting on the fickleness of certain among those decisions in the OTL. This is really a long runaround to just say that.

Interesting post and one I largely agree with. A good example might be the Kennedy assassination. How many people lived who would have died in car accidents that weekend had they not been home watching television coverage? So much of what happens in life is random and most AH tends to ignore this by holding all other factors equal. This is a legitimate analytical and literary tool, but if one were running actual experiments on changing events, one would probably find some surprising effects from changing big events. We might find, for instance, that a 2-year-old child named Barack Obama was killed in a car accident on November 24, 1963.

And the larger the event, the larger the later effects. Suppose there was no attack on 9/11. It is very possible that the world today would look very different, as the number of lives directly affected was immense, not only from the actual attack, but from the countless disruptions in people's lives afterward as flights were diverted and people's lives were disrupted. Strange as it may seem to think of it this way, but the events of 9/11 not only took lives, but it saved some as well. The degree to which this is true is ultimately unknowable without running controlled time travel experiments, but these possibilities are interesting to think about.
 
"Eh. It's pretty much implausible for it to not occur, from my limited understanding on it's history. The beginnings emerged pre-WWII from what I've read a little on (I think), with the outbreak of the Second World War delaying it. The reason why it was built where it was (on top of the former Radio Row) was to appease New Jersey in the project and because of the Port Authority's recent purchase of the Hudson & Manhattan Railroad (which became PATH). The choice prior to that had been located along the East River near South Street Seaport, and it had been built in Lower Manhattan because of Midtown's booming nature and for the stimulation of urban renewal in Lower Manhattan."

Yeah, I thought about that. I also realize that there was clearly a "thing" during that time for "reviving" faltering business districts by plunking a huge suburban style office complex in the middle of them (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance_Center).

But I don't think something like this has to happen. The usual impediments to building these projects could continue to frustrate the construction of the World Trade Center. The businesses in Radio Row could actually succeed in blocking it. The Port Authority could concentrate on running the port, which is its job. Here are some examples of WTC type projects in the area which didn't get built after all: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Side_Highway#Westway also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_78_in_New_York#Lower_Manhattan_Expressway).

This gets into the interesting meta discussion of alternate history that has broken out here, but I think what we are dealing with in this situation is a solution to a problem that didn't actually exist (other examples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobotomy and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_War). So in these instances the powers that be could just decide not to deal with the non-problem. This happens all the time, including with actual problems.

I'd fundamentally disagree with you on this, considering you would likely be having both New York State and New Jersey backing this project in it's entirety to be built. Not to mention, that the World Trade Center did fit in with what the Port Authority was arguably designed to do at the basic level, bring commerce to the city. Not to mention, once the Hudson & Manhattan finds itself bought in all likelihood for restoration and rehabilitation it would find itself under the Port Authority rather than a new bi-state agency I feel.
 
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