Welcome · Restored 2001 homepage · The Experience · Original panorama · Bobby Short
This independent historical restoration uses the original website’s August 2, 2001 pages as its reference. Original layouts, colors, copy, image maps, photographs, GIFs, MP3s and surviving video fragments are retained wherever the archive preserved them. Later parked-domain pages were rejected even when the Wayback availability API labeled them as successful image captures.
| Lost file | Restored treatment | Result |
|---|---|---|
images/photos/map_mid.gif | The original top and bottom panels survive. Their street, color, marker and legend continuity was used to rebuild the missing 463×175 center strip. | Reconstructed center panel |
images/floorplan.gif | The lost 520×516 visitor image was replaced by a historical reconstruction based on the observation-deck plan published in Interiors, July 1976. | 107th-floor plan |
The Bobby Short page now contains one HTML5 audio player and one complete 1998 television commercial, both playable directly on the page. Bobby Short’s New York suggestions now link to current official destination pages instead of archived copies.
Lost site-specific photographs cannot honestly be recreated as originals. Their blank placeholders were replaced with clearly attributed, freely licensed period photographs of the actual Top of the World observation deck and views. Photobook and special-event popups have also been restored, so those links now show media instead of an unavailable-page message.
| Local asset | Creator / date | License and source |
|---|---|---|
interior-2001.jpg | Duncan Rawlinson, January 1, 2001 | CC BY 2.0 · Wikimedia Commons |
deck-1998.jpg | David Holt, March 1998 | CC BY-SA 2.0 · Wikimedia Commons |
deck-1999.jpg | Tom Harpel, 1999 | CC BY 2.0 · Wikimedia Commons |
platform-1998.jpg | Gunnar Klack, December 1998 | CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons |
view-1-1998.jpg through view-4-1998.jpg | Gunnar Klack, December 1998 | CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons collection |
north-tower-1998.jpg | Gunnar Klack, December 1998 | CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons |
ticket-1997.png | Thenardier / Giant Baba, 1997 tickets | CC BY-SA 3.0 · Wikimedia Commons |
The archive did not preserve images/photos/dining2.jpg or images/photos/shopper.jpg. To keep the restored pages faithful to their descriptions, the Dining and Shopping pages use clearly labeled historical reconstructions: a circa-2001 Central Park food-court scene and a period observatory gift-shop scene. They are not presented as recovered originals.
Browser-specific image lookup and eval code were replaced with modern equivalents. Missing preload functions were supplied, broken internal paths were repaired, archived forms are non-submitting exhibits, and the original 611-pixel canvas now scales to fill the available screen. Fit, plus, minus and 100% controls adjust its size without disturbing the historical layout. The fragmented Views compass was replaced by one complete graphic with animated, keyboard-accessible North, West, East, and South links. Footer email controls now open a message to adamalatorre@wtc-top.com. A Memorial navigation tab links directly to the official 9/11 Memorial names page.
Detailed machine-readable provenance remains in recovery/restoration-report.json in the source repository. Newly supplied period photographs are substitutes, not claims that the exact lost website files were recovered.
