Once installed, the 408-foot spire will bring the building to an iconic 1,776 feet tall, making it the tallest building in the western hemisphere and third tallest in the world.
In an emotional ceremony, workers on the One World Trade Center tower hoisted a spire, compete with an American flag to the top of the building Thursday.
The ceremony, at the site of the 2001 terrorist attacks on New York City, was held at ground zero.
“This ... is about putting the candle on the cake,” Steven Plate, director of construction at the World Trade Center, was quoted by the New York Daily News as saying. “People committed to making this happen for the loved ones they lost — but also for the region and the world.”
The New York Post pointed out that the ceremony happened exactly two years after a Navy SEAL team broke into Osama bin Laden’s Pakistan compound, the terrorist mastermind.
Once installed, the 408-foot spire will bring the building to an iconic 1,776 feet tall, making it the tallest building in the western hemisphere and third tallest in the world.
“Everybody put a lot of proud work into this building,” iron worker Michael O’Reilly, 38, told the Post. “This is our city. This is our building. We put it back up.”
USA Today reported that the spire was raised the spire to a temporary work platform, where ironworkers will permanently attach it to the roof in coming weeks.
"It's a 22-ton structure that will house a state of the art lighting facility as well as a beacon that will be seen for miles around," Plate was quoted as saying in USA Today. "It will "give a tremendous indication to people around the entire region and the world that we are back and we are better than ever."
CBS News explained that spire will serve as a world-class broadcast antenna and provide public transmission services for television and radio broadcast channels that were destroyed in 2001.
Without the spire, the building, scheduled to open next year would actually be shorter than the Willis Tower in Chicago, which currently wears the crown of tallest building in the U.S. at 1,451 feet, not including its own antennas, according to Fox News.