The 1990s

No construction changes this decade: the towers had looked the same since 1979 and would keep looking that way until the end. What changes is how often they show up: this is the biggest decade in the archive by a wide margin, appearing in everything from disaster blockbusters to Christmas comedies to a video-game movie, almost always as pure background, the skyline doing its job without the film paying it any particular attention.

That ubiquity is the story. By the 1990s the towers were the kind of landmark a film crew didn't have to think about: point a camera at lower Manhattan and they were just there, the way they'd already been there for two decades.