The forgotten twins.

My parents always call them the ‘tubes,’ to this day, even though I’ve known the system as PATH my whole life.

But before there was an Oculus, before there was the new World Trade Center, before there was an original World Trade Center, before those twin towers stood, two other twin towers stood on nearly that same spot, the terminus not of the Port Authority Trans Hudson lines, but the terminus of the Hudson Tubes.

Three underground levels of platforms led to the street level on top of which stood two nearly identical 22-story buildings in close proximity to one another and rock solid with Indiana limestone, brick, and fireproof terra cotta.

Their thick-walled Romanesque Revival architecture added to their air of invincibility.

They would house the offices of the Hudson and Manhattan Railway and any number of other businesses in shipping and finance.

The Hudson Terminal Buildings had nearly 900,000 square feet of rentable floor space accommodating 10,000 tenants. It’s 39 elevators carried 30,000 riders a day. Its 16 million bricks, 13,000 lighting fixtures, 5,400 doors, just as many windows, were something of a miracle for 1907, the year the first office workers arrived.

Ridership on the tubes peaked in 1927 at 113 million, but as the automobile tunnels and bridges began to open to this new mode of traffic, ridership in the tubes decreased substantially to a 1958 low of 26 million.

The terminal buildings center left, blackened by years of coal smoke. Many buildings in this photo still hold their ground, notably, the Woolworth Building, the Municipal Building, the Sinclair Oil Building, the Trinity Building, The old Equitable Building, and dominating the foreground, Cass Gilbert's 11 West Street. The most valuable player missing, the Singer Building, standing center as it did until 1967.

The terminal buildings were deemed obsolete. But obstinate. It took several years in the late sixties to bring them down as land for the first World Trade Center was cleared.

Their memory is shrouded by an interim history.

But they should be remembered too, the first twin towers, monuments to public transportation. And perhaps a fair tribute to them would be to report this happy news: Ridership on the PATH Trains was up over 86 million last year!