In mid-May after nearly eight months of work, the American Express Building in New York City officially reopened for the first time since the north tower (Tower 1) of the World Trade Center collapsed on September 11, causing major damage to its southeast corner. At official ceremonies at New York's World Financial Center (WFC), Amex welcomed back the first of 4,000 employees returning to lower Manhattan. The company has been operating from seven temporary locations throughout the tri-state area.

In addition to damaging windows and façade, the falling Tower 1 tore into the 51-story Amex tower (also known as WFC 3) at about the 26th floor. The collapse also damaged nearby buildings just to the west of Amex, including one (known as WFC 4) housing the headquarters of Merrill Lynch. The five-story Winter Garden greenhouse structure (between WFC 3 and WFC 2 to the south of Amex) with glass and steel telescopic barrel vault roof experienced severe collapse at its eastern end framing. One of the more notable aspects in the post-September 11 assessments is that none of the four WFC buildings, each enclosed with granite-clad precast panels, sustained any fire damage — even in the face of vicious infernos that consumed much of the World Trade Center complex not obliterated by the twin towers' collapse.

Within a week of the terrorist attacks on the Trade Center's tallest buildings, Concord, Ontario-based Artex Precast Ltd was called upon by New York City planners to ship block and panels to the WFC buildings as part of the restoration and repair effort. “We were approached on September 17, and the replacement effort began in early October,” says Phil Dascania, operations manager for Artex, the company that provided granite-faced precast panels for the original construction of WFC 4 in 1985.

Initially, the company was charged with bringing approximately 20 truck loads of stone to replace damaged sections of WFC 3, WFC 4 and the Winter Garden structure; beginning in December, the restoration of Amex's southeast corner began. By March, floors 10 to 26 were completed, and by the end of May, all the floors to the ground level were repaired. Artex supplied about 20 truck loads of 5-ft.-high ∞ 30-ft.-long insulated sandwich, granite-faced panels consisting of 1¼ in. of granite on the surface, ½ in. of air space, followed by 2 in. of insulation, and 6 in. of concrete. According to Dascania, the original panels also had metal backing, a detail precluded from the restoration panels due to time constraints. On certain parts of the building alongside windows, 2-ft.-wide ∞ 6-ft.-high infills were used as well. In total, 268 panels were replaced on the Amex tower. “We were completely redoing one corner of the building,” explains Dascania.

For the granite panels, Artex went back to Quebec's Granicor, the source of the original material used in the transformation of the then-Battery Park City into the World Financial Center in the early and mid-1980s. In fact, Granicor still had some of the original granite blocks cut from the original construction. “They had to cut new blocks also, and its not an exact match in terms of color, but only a trained eye could spot the difference,” Dascania notes.