The Freedom Tower is Now New York’s Tallest Building

Yesterday, over ten years after September 11th, the Freedom Tower at One World Trade Center finally reclaimed the title of "Tallest Building in New York". Sort of.

At 3:30 in the afternoon, workers installed columns for the 100th floor, and brought the height to 1,271 feet. That's 21 feet higher than the observation deck at the Empire State Building, the tallest building in New York since 9/11.

Here are three more facts:

--The Empire State Building is still taller if you include its antenna. But the actual FLOORS of the Empire State Building stop right where the Freedom Tower is now . . . and there are still four more floors of the Freedom Tower to build.

--The final height will be 1,776 feet, to represent 1776: The year the Declaration of Independence was signed. That's 325 feet taller than the Willis Tower in Chicago (a.k.a. the Sears Tower) making it the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere.

--Here's another symbolic gesture: It'll be 408 feet taller than the Twin Towers were. But that 408 feet will be an antenna. So it's not really trying to 'out-do' the buildings the terrorists destroyed, because that's not the point.

(USA Today / Yahoo)

You can check out a graph comparing the world's tallest buildings here, and a time-lapse video showing the construction so far, here.

Here's a pic of the work so far: