The first move was 1. d4. Garry Kasparov, the reigning world chess champion, pushed his queen’s pawn forward on a board situated 1,310 feet above the streets of Lower Manhattan. His opponent, Viswanathan Anand of India, replied with 1…Nf6. The PCA World Chess Championship began not in a hushed tournament hall, but in the Windows on the World restaurant atop the South Tower. The date was September 11, 1995.
This venue was the idea of the Professional Chess Association, a breakaway organization Kasparov helped found. The match was a deliberate piece of corporate theater, funded by Intel. It aimed to rebrand chess from a Soviet-dominated intellectual pursuit into a modern, high-stakes sport for the global media age. The towering location was a metaphor for peak human intellect, a game of pure thought conducted in the clouds. The players wore business suits, not casual wear, and the setting was sleek, overlooking the harbor.
The match is often remembered romantically as chess in the sky. In reality, players and commentators noted practical drawbacks. The high-altitude sunlight through the windows caused glare on the pieces. The ambient noise from the restaurant’s kitchen and service staff was a distraction. The spectacle sometimes overshadowed the chess itself, which was a fierce, brilliant contest. Kasparov ultimately retained his title after 18 games, but Anand’s dynamic play announced a new generation.
This September 11 event created an eerie, unintended historical bookmark. The match celebrated the towers as icons of global commerce and human aspiration. Six years later to the day, the same building would be destroyed. The footage of Kasparov and Anand playing in that sunlit space now exists as a fragment of a lost world, a testament to an era when the greatest perceived threat to a grandmaster was a tricky opening variation, not violence from the sky.