Inside the dining room on the 107th floor of the World Trade Center.
Photo: John Roca/NY Daily News Archive/Getty Images
It’s early on a Tuesday morning in September when Michael Whiteman enters the dining room of the Brooklyn townhouse he shares with his wife, Rozanne Gold. Gold has set the table in their high-ceilinged living room. On the mantel sits a Mexican tree of life. On the wall, a 19th-century Buddhist shrine; on the table, a still life–perfect spread. “Here’s some of Michael’s bread,” Gold says. “Some berries, a Genovese cake I kind of made up, some holey Swiss cheese, butter. And, oh, have you had my Venetian Wine Cake? This is a cake with a story.”
Formerly the chef for Mayor Ed Koch, Gold is a poet and four-time James Beard Award–winning cookbook author. Now she works as a death doula and Jungian psychoanalyst. But the story of the Venetian Wine Cake would have to wait. Gold has to run out to see a client, and I am here to speak to Whiteman, who, at 88, is the last surviving member of the original team that opened Windows on the World.
Windows on the World, the restaurant on the 107th floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center, opened in 1976, which would have made it 50 years old today. Founded by Joe Baum and Whiteman, the 350-seat space featured design by Milton Glaser and food by James Beard and Barbara Kafka. In 2000, a year before 9/11, it was the highest-grossing restaurant in the country; on the 25th anniversary of the terrorist attack, renewed interest in the restaurant — and all sorts of memorabilia — is high. A new documentary, from the makers of RBG, called Top of the World, premiered on CNN on September 7.
We tend to think of 9/11 either as one big tragedy or, more devastatingly, 2,977 individual tragedies that circled out in ever-widening rings of suffering. What one doesn’t often think of are the institutions, like Cantor Fitzgerald, which lost half of its employees, or Marsh & McLennan Companies (358), or the more than 20 restaurants housed in the towers, the highest and by far the most famous of which was Windows on the World. Not only did Windows lose more than 70 employees there that day, but the restaurant itself was gone. Many remember its demise. Whiteman, a trim and spry man with long white hair, is the sole witness to the history of its construction.
“There’s a whole new two generations of people in New York who were not around in 1976 and don’t remember the shit that the city was in at the time.” he tells me. “When the Towers were first being constructed, the Bronx was burning and the city was bankrupt. Graffiti had turned ugly. Nobody, especially tourists, went south of 34th Street. Wall Street was not only broke, but it was a wasteland. Tumbleweed city. The Towers were hated, loathed as they were coming up. They were called two packing cases, two file cabinets. Ada Louise Huxtable called them two tombstones. And the Port Authority, the building’s owner, was spending vast amounts of money that everybody knew was going to be reflected in their tolls sooner. So that made the city grumpy.” He gingerly takes a slice of Genovese cake. “We knew that Windows was not going to be just a restaurant, but rather a reflection of the two towers. And I think the people in the city knew if the restaurant was a bust, it was one more heartbreak that they couldn’t take. As luck would have it, it wasn’t a bust. The city embraced it.”
At the time, Whiteman was working with restaurateur Joe Baum, who had become the president of Restaurant Associates. Baum specialized in large, theatrical “mass and class” establishments like Tavern on the Green, The Four Seasons, and La Fonda Del Sol. He was built for a project like Windows, a restaurant meant to lure, endear, and seduce a clientele. But by 1971, he had been pushed out of Restaurant Associates. “His restaurants never made any money,” explains Whiteman, “and they were frightfully expensive.” Whiteman, who had founded Nation’s Restaurant News in 1967, was also looking for a job. “I lost a boardroom battle because I was running it as a renegade editor,” he explains of his departure from the still-extant publication. “I was writing about industry problems, and it was just alien to them that a newspaper for the industry would also say bad things about the industry.”
The two formed Baum + Whiteman and soon thereafter got the contract with the New York Port Authority — “the largest consulting job in the restaurant world,” says Whiteman — to build Windows. The original team included Baum, Dennis Sweeney, Kafka, Glaser, and architect Warren Platner. “Much later, Jacques Pépin was brought on to help develop the commissary because he had done that for Howard Johnson,” Whiteman says. “So he made soups and sauces.”
And James Beard, I point out.
“I’m sorry, I forgot Jim,” Whiteman says, chuckling. “He was an interesting fellow. He could be pissy and he could be withholding. Joe used to say, ‘You have to press the right button. You have to ask the right question. You can ask 12 questions and not get an answer until you ask the right one.’ But if you pressed the right button, then he was a fountain.” Beard, like Kafka, was one of the many voices chiming in on the menu while the chef was an Austrian named Hermann Reiner. “I remember Beard came into one of the meetings and said, ‘Hot food on cold food.’ And I said, ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’ And he said, ‘I’ve just come back from San Francisco and that’s what they’re doing. They’re putting a salad on the plate and they’re putting a protein on it, fabulous vinaigrette and baby herbs and all kinds of things.’ Basically what Beard was describing was a chicken Caesar, if you want to reduce it to that.”
The then-new restaurant was featured on New York’s cover in May 1976.
Though Baum and Whiteman were responsible for the design and the concept of Windows, the restaurant was owned by Hilton International. “They were a hotel company; they had no idea how to run a restaurant,” Whiteman says. What Hilton could do was help bring to life the vision of a restaurant that truly reflected the world’s cooking. “For instance, the yakitori chef was Japanese and wearing a traditional outfit,” Whiteman tells me. “That was one benefit of Hilton — they could fly anyone in.” The restaurant itself was divided into different areas. One was Cellar in the Sky: “It was, as far as I know, the first restaurant to introduce not a tasting dinner, but a real dinner with the wines accompanying the dinner.” That was run by chef Eberhard Müller (he later founded Satur Farms).
The first attack on the World Trade Center, on February 26, 1993, killed six people, including Wilfredo Mercado, a Windows employee, and marked the end of Windows’ first era. “The bombing destroyed our loading dock and all the infrastructure we needed to get our product up to the 106th floor,” Whiteman explains. The restaurant closed, which, incidentally, gave the Port Authority a chance to finally remove all the asbestos — which it had done to the rest of the building already — and renovate. When the Port Authority put out an RFP for a new operator, Whiteman wanted to apply to get the place back but says Baum wasn’t interested: “He had a deep-seated fear of failure.” Eventually, the company applied anyway. “Rozanne designed the menus,” Whiteman says. “Eventually, it was between us, Michael Stillman, and Warner LeRoy. We got the job.”
Though the new restaurant was a success — “The last year it was operational, it did $37 million in sales,” Whiteman points out — it was a far cry from the original iteration. “When it first opened, we were innovative,” says Whiteman. “But the second time around, Windows wasn’t particularly important. A whole world of gastronomy had developed in the 1970s, and the excitement of food was at a much higher level than it was in ’76.”
In 2001, Whiteman, like so many others, watched the attacks unfold on TV. “Rozanne got a call that said, ‘Turn on the television,’” recalls Whiteman. “We did and watched the disaster. Then the city got very quiet.” Seeing the towers come down, Whiteman didn’t yet realize that nobody had survived from the restaurant or, indeed, from above the 99th floor. “Later that day, we were sitting in the backyard and I went, ‘Why the hell is anybody barbecuing?’ And then I realized that nobody was barbecuing. It was the breeze carrying the odor from the Trade Center across Brooklyn.”
All these years later, the memory of the restaurant has stayed with Whiteman. “I’d been working on the Trade Center since 1971, and so a large hunk of my life was entangled with it,” he says, “and so a lot of loss, not just the restaurant and not, I’m speaking personally now, and not just the people who were lost in it, but the restaurant was part of our identity. That left a permanent pit.” Nearby in another Brooklyn garden, the wind carried documents fluttering from Ground Zero. One was a letter to Joe Baum, written years before to praise Windows’ reopening: “I felt as though I died and went to heaven,” it read, ”which I imagine is not too far from the 107th floor!”
Baum is gone, Kafka is gone, Sweeney and Glaser are gone. “Hugh Hardy’s gone. Warren Platner’s gone,” says Whiteman, continuing the Kaddish. And neither Windows nor the World onto which it looked exists. “Whether the second time around it was a grand innovation, which it wasn’t, it certainly still remained a big symbol in New York. And its existence was an act of redemption for those two ugly packing crates. It wasn’t the Statue of Liberty or the Empire State Building, but it was right up there as a symbol. And symbols,” he says, “are important.”
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