When Dick Corbett began imagining a shopping center near Tampa International Airport in the 1980s, the idea sounded less like a sure bet than a dare. Tampa had an international airport, a growing population and plenty of ambition, but it was not yet a luxury-retail destination, and it lacked the high-end department stores that could make a mall a regional draw.
“How can a smaller city like Tampa bring in Neiman Marcus and Tiffany?” Corbett recalled people asking.
Corbett, whose family’s net worth is estimated at just under $1 billion, was undeterred. He organized a planning exercise with architecture students at Harvard Graduate School of Design and asked them to imagine what could be built near the airport. One student proposed the name International Plaza, which appealed to airport officials who wanted Tampa to be more connected to international business.
But the project stalled before it could get off the ground. Macy’s, expected to be one of the mall’s anchors, went bankrupt.
“If you’re in this business, you need to have an elephant,” Corbett said. “You really needed to have a Macy’s. When Macy’s went away, you had to wait for Nordstrom and others to come in.”
The wait lasted years. Eventually, Nordstrom, Neiman Marcus, Saks Fifth Avenue and Tiffany signed on. By September 2001, the 1.26-million-square-foot mall was ready to open, and Nordstrom held its opening party Monday night, Sept. 10, three days before International Plaza was scheduled to welcome the public.
Corbett and his equal partner, veteran mall developer Bobby Taubman, had planned food, drinks, a band and a celebration for Friday. Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf—the retired U.S. Central Command chief, Tampa resident and friend of Corbett’s—was expected to attend.
“The day before, Nordstrom had their big party, and everything was optimistic and elevated,” Corbett said.
The next morning, television coverage showed the World Trade Center under attack, and when a second airplane struck the South Tower, Corbett watched in what he remembered as “total disbelief.”
He was at his house near Tampa International Airport, with MacDill Air Force Base only a few miles away. The base was home to U.S. Central Command, which oversaw American military operations across the Middle East and Central Asia, putting one of the military’s combatant commands beside the airport and the mall.
“Our military was there, and they very well could have had another attack. MacDill Air Force Base was very close to the runways at Tampa International. The whole thing—we were, you might say, right in the center of the storm.” Corbett said, comparing the feeling to boxing. “I used to box, and that reminds me of struggling, rolling with the punches, and suddenly getting a left coming up,” Corbett said. “You have to absorb it, right?”
At MacDill, Timothy Fitzpatrick was in a meeting at the U.S. Army Special Operations Command’s Battle Lab. A working group was discussing how special operations forces might be used in future conflicts when someone entered the room and said a plane had hit a building in New York. Fitzpatrick assumed it was a small aircraft accident. The group went to a television, and by the time they arrived, the second plane had struck the South Tower.
“There wasn’t a sound or a movement in the room and I think everyone instantly recognized that we were being attacked,” Fitzpatrick recalled in a 20th-anniversary remembrance published by Fenwick High School’s Friar Files.
MacDill quickly became one of the nerve centers of the American response. U.S. Central Command began assembling the international coalition that would support the military campaign.
By the end of September, senior representatives from about 15 nations were working from the base; the coalition eventually grew to 46 countries.
The base’s 310th Airlift Squadron had only recently arrived and was still completing its initial training, according to a 2019 account by Senior Airman Rito Smith published through the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service.
Retired Air Force Maj. Sidney Eskridge, one of the squadron’s first pilots, said members had been preparing for a training flight when they saw the first plane hit the World Trade Center. “The most memorable day was on September 11, 2001,” Eskridge said. “We were getting ready to fly a training sortie since we were still in our initial spin up phase; we walked into the lounge and watched the first airplane hit. At this point we weren’t operational yet but we went immediately into alert status and launched an aircraft on September 12 in order to help transport advisory council members to the president.”
International Plaza was still scheduled to open Friday, Sept. 14, and Apple had announced that its first Florida store would open there at 9:15 that morning. Corbett wanted to cancel, while Taubman wanted to keep the date they had promised.
“My instinct was to cancel the whole thing,” Corbett said. “He followed the same principles that he’s done and said, ‘We have to open, and on the date that we said we were going to open it,’ so I finally agreed with my partner to open it on the day that it was planned.”
The celebration was abandoned. Schwarzkopf would no longer appear, the band would not play and the food and drinks were canceled. Commercial air travel had also stopped, creating another problem inside the mall as shipments expected before Friday could not reach Tampa. About 15 retailers were expected to miss opening day because their merchandise had not arrived.
“It was really a marvelous day for Tampa, and suddenly, instead of having a celebration, you had snipers on the roof and you had all sorts of military trying to protect against something else that could happen,” Corbett said. “When we opened it, it was somber, and the first thing we said was that the safety of the people in the country and the safety of everyone was more important than a celebration.”
Twenty-five years later, when Corbett was asked what else he remembered about the days between Nordstrom’s Monday-night party and International Plaza’s Friday opening, he paused before answering.
“Well, I don’t—and I really don’t want to remember; it was a disaster, is all I remember, and all I remember was that we had to be highly protective of everything because nobody knew whether there was going to be another attack,” Corbett said.