The Bathtub
underground foundation area at the site of the World Trade Center in NYC
The Bathtub refers to the underground foundation area at the site of the World Trade Center and accompanying buildings in New York City. The term bathtub is something of a misnomer, as the area does not hold any water; rather the purpose of its design is to keep water out. The name is more so used to describe its shape of a deep basin with high walls, like a bathtub.
Description
The Bathtub, built in 1967–1968, encompasses a large, roughly rectangular excavation down to bedrock surrounded by reinforced concrete walls, intended to serve as dams to prevent water intrusion from the nearby Hudson River (North River). It enclosed nearly the entire original World Trade Center. The World Trade Center site was located on man-made water-clogged landfill that had accumulated over centuries, providing an extension of land out onto the Hudson River from the original Manhattan shoreline, with bedrock located 65 feet (20 m) below. Manually removing water from this area would have severely altered the water levels surrounding the World Trade Center site and thus would have jeopardized the foundations of nearby buildings, causing them to sink. This is why the Bathtub method was used.
The Bathtub contains a 16-acre (65,000 m2) site, including seven basement levels, the downtown terminal of the PATH rapid transit line, and the preexisting New York City Subway's IRT Broadway–Seventh Avenue Line (1 train). The South Tower of the World Trade Center was actually built around the PATH tubes that passed through the foundation area, thus service was uninterrupted throughout the whole of the construction period.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “The Bathtub” as underground foundation area at the site of the World Trade Center in NYC. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as underground foundation area at the site of the World Trade Center in NYC. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7715806. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1967 and 1968.
Overview language is designed for orientation and should not be treated as a substitute for the evidence cited beneath it. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Bathtub” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.