Aerial from MapQuest. And a recent aerial, from CNN.

Where Was the World Trade Center? The World Trade Center was known for its pair of unusually tall buildings, located in the southern part of Manhattan. The map on this page points out their approximate location. The towers were destroyed on 11 September 2001 in a monstrous terrorist attack. The four pronged attack involved hijacking four commercial airplanes and driving three of them into buildings in New York and Washington D.C. (the Pentagon building). The fourth hijacking did not fully succeed: it crashed in a field. The twin towers collapsed within two hours of the first crash. Other buildings around them were damaged, or even collapsed in the many hours after. The death toll is surely in the thousands. Workers and tourists in the towers alone are normally numbered at about 50,000: from maintenance crews to corporate presidents. The workers in the towers and local buildings, the people on the street, the delivery people and cabbies, and the airplane passengers and workers: how many were able to escape? I, like all Americans, am shocked and hopeful that the number in harms way was the minimum possible, but I am bracing for the worst. For images and more information: msnbc. For more links (Since there is information about New York City on this site, I thought I'd add this page. However, there is no other connection to the book, The Catcher in the Rye. The World Trade Center did not exist during the time of the story. Construction was finished in 1973. In addition, the World Trade Center was farther south than Holden's travels in the book.)