Windows on the World opened on April 19, 1976, the creation of legendary restaurateur Joe Baum, who understood that dining 1,350 feet above the city required more than competent cooking. Architect Warren Platner designed the space; graphic designer Milton Glaser created everything from the dinnerware to the menus to the lighting fixtures. The restaurant occupied 50,000 square feet across the top two floors of the North Tower, including the main dining room, a smaller venue called Cellar in the Sky, banquet halls, and a celebrated wine school. The bar stretched along the south side of the building, its floor-to-ceiling windows framing the southern tip of Manhattan where the Hudson and East Rivers converge. On clear nights, diners could see the lights of three states.

The restaurant closed after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, which killed employee Wilfredo Mercado in the underground garage and damaged the building's receiving areas. When it reopened in June 1996 after a $25 million renovation, Joe Baum was again at the helm. The intimate Cellar in the Sky was reimagined as Wild Blue, an American steakhouse. Business boomed. By 2000, no restaurant in the country was earning more. On the morning of September 11, 2001, Windows on the World was hosting breakfast patrons and a financial technology conference. American Airlines Flight 11 struck the North Tower between floors 93 and 99 at 8:46 a.m., severing every stairwell and elevator shaft below the restaurant. Everyone above the impact zone was trapped. The last people to leave before the crash - Michael Nestor, Liz Thompson, Geoffrey Wharton, and Richard Tierney - had shared an elevator at 8:44 a.m., two minutes before impact.

Seventy-two restaurant staff were in the building that morning, along with sixteen conference attendees and seventy-six other guests and workers. Among them was Neil Levin, executive director of the Port Authority, who was having breakfast. Assistant general manager Christine Olender made desperate phone calls to Port Authority police, pleading for a way out, for a helicopter, for anything. Her calls were the restaurant's final communications. After approximately 9:40 a.m., no further distress calls came from the 106th and 107th floors. The North Tower collapsed at 10:28 a.m. Everyone who had been in Windows on the World that morning perished - from smoke, from the fall, from the building's collapse. The scale of loss was almost incomprehensible: an entire restaurant full of people going about an ordinary Tuesday morning, gone.

In the aftermath, executive chef Michael Lomonaco and owner-operator David Emil founded the Windows of Hope Family Relief Fund to support families in the food and hospitality industries who lost loved ones on September 11. In 2006, former Windows staff opened Colors, a cooperative restaurant in Manhattan whose menu reflected the diversity of the people who had worked above the clouds. Plans to rebuild Windows on the World atop the new One World Trade Center were announced and then canceled in 2011. The space where the restaurant stood is now empty sky. At the National September 11 Memorial, panel N-70 at the North Pool bears the names of the Windows on the World workers who died. The restaurant that made a career of spectacular views left behind something the view could never provide: a record of the people who gathered there, and what was lost when they could not leave.