The World Trade Center was not an especially popular building during its lifetime amongst New Yorkers, but given its size and its location, it certainly appeared in lots of movies, sometimes as the star (such as the abortive mid-’70s King Kong remake) but more often looming in the background. Something tells me that this popular montage is nowhere near complete:
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The Trade Center actually got more people-friendly in the final decade of its life, as the landfill dug out to allow for the foundations and dumped on the shore of the Hudson was converted into the long-planned Battery Park City. The land slopes down about 25 feet from the east to the west end of the site, so that as built what was ground-level pedestrian access at Church Street was almost two stories in the air by the time the WTC plaza got to West Street. You didn’t walk into the plaza to get into the subway there, you walked into the side of the plaza to enter or leave the station, and if you weren’t going to Tower 1, there was no reason to go to the west end of the plaza as a pedestrian until the offices and apartments across West Street were built, the only access was for the parking garage.
So while the towers became film icons within a few years after their completion, the area wasn’t integrated into the rest of downtown until about 1990 or so. As fouled-up and delayed as the new WTC complex is, the designers aren’t making the same mistake this time, and the site (now expanded from about 16 to 25 acres due to additional land use south of Ground Zero) will be a focal part of the area, instead of trying to keep the neighborhood at arm’s length, as the original plan did.