January 4, 2010: The Burj Khalifa Opens

January 4, 2010: The Burj Khalifa opens in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. It shatters the record for the tallest building in the world.

New York had held that title from 1908 to 1974. In particular, the Empire State Building was the tallest from 1931 to 1973. The original World Trade Center then held the title for a year. From 1974 to 1996, it was the Sears Tower, now named the Willis Tower, in Chicago.

In 1999, the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia took the title, and it hasn't returned to America since. This South Asian "Twin Towers" was topped by Taipei 101 in Taipei, Taiwan in 2004: 1,671 feet high.

But Burj Khalifa -- "Burj" meaning "Tower," and "Khalifa" for the ruler of the country, Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan -- absolutely blew the record away, reaching a spire height of 2,722 feet high, making it the 1st structure ever built more than half a mile high. To put that in perspective: The Empire State Building, minus its TV-radio antenna, could fit in the difference between the Sears Tower and the Burj Khalifa.

It also replaced the 2,063-foot-high KVLY-TV (Channel 11, Fargo) mast in Blanchard, North Dakota as the world's tallest freestanding structure. It has 154 official floors, the highest-occupied of which is 1,985 feet high.

(In one of his last designs, in 1959, Frank Lloyd Wright suggested an "Illinois Building" that would stretch a full mile high, 5,280 feet, into the sky above Chicago. No serious attempt at it has ever been undertaken, not even a first step. Burj Khalifa is the first hint that it may well be possible.)

During Sheikh Khalifa's presidency, the United Arab Emirates, already one of the world's richest countries per capita due to its oil, became a powerhouse of non-oil economy. This was assisted by the Sheikh being willing to oppose some other Middle East dictators by building closer ties with not just America and its allies, but Israel.

He turned Dubai, on the Persian Gulf, into a major tourist center, with an emphasis on luxury. With a permanent population of 3.4 million, it has more people than any American city except New York and Los Angeles.

Downtown Dubai rose quickly, with a major shopping mall, and several skyscrapers that would seem excessively tall even without Burj Khalifa, on which construction began in 2004. Indeed, it provides the same effect that the old World Trade Center did with Lower Manhattan, and the CN Tower does with Toronto: It distorts the perspective, making very tall buildings look not so tall.

But the seeds of the city's fall had already been sown before Burj Khalifa could even be topped out. When the worldwide financial crisis of 2008 hit, the Sheikh directed the payment of billions of dollars in emergency bailout funds to Dubai.

As a result of the crisis, much of the tower's office space remains unsold, even now, reminiscent of the early days of the Empire State Building, in the Great Depression, when it was nicknamed the Empty State Building.

Furthermore, also before the tower was finished, reports that its workers were seriously underpaid and overworked, possibly including slave labor, began to reach the outside world. This is a charge that has been leveled elsewhere in the Middle East, including in Qatar for the stadiums and other facilities necessary to host the 2022 World Cup.

It has gotten to the point that one of the criticisms of New York, that only the very rich and the very poor can live there, is true of Dubai. And many of those poor are the South Asian and Southeast Asian immigrants who build these things for the very rich, and can't afford to live or shop in the products of their labor.

Dubai has become a "Potemkin village" for the Middle East: A façade for problems that would otherwise be glaring. One YouTuber called the city "A Parody of the 21st Century." I'm reminded of something a sportswriter once said, looking at the surviving buildings from the 1964-65 New York World's Fair and their contemporary, the Astrodome in Houston, calling them "relics of a future that never happened."

And, of course, the massive American-style suburbs built for the rich in Dubai are in danger from rising sea levels. So much luxury, and it has already begun to go to waste. Eventually, it will be a total waste.

Then there's Jeddah, the commercial center of Saudi Arabia, and a major resort on the Red Sea: In 2013, they began construction on the Jeddah Tower, with an intended height of 3,281 feet, the 1st building to be higher than 1 kilometer, the centerpiece of Jeddah Economic City. But in 2018, an internal crisis within the country stopped construction, about 1/3rd of the way through. This was followed by the COVID shutdown, and construction has not resumed.

I'm reminded of Ozymandias, a poem written by Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1818:

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desart. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
No thing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

UPDATE: Sheikh Khalifa died on May 13, 2022, at the age of 73. He had previously suffered a stroke in 2014, and his brother, Sheikh Mohamed, had been operational ruler since then. Now, Mohamed is the ruler in every sense of the world.

In January 2025, construction on the Jeddah Tower resumed. On November 27, it was reported that 78 of the intended 168 floors had been completed. Construction was then estimated to take another 3 years.)

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January 4, 2010 was a Monday. This was also the day that the Fiesta Bowl was held, at the University of Phoenix Stadium -- now named State Farm Stadium -- in the Phoenix suburb of Glendale, Arizona. This game is not for college football's national championship, but there were those who believed it should have been. Boise State University beat Texas Christian University, 17-10. I have a separate entry for this event.

Baseball was in the off-season. The NFL was in the off-week between the regular season and the Playoffs. 

There were 4 NBA games played that day:

* The Miami Heat beat the Atlanta Hawks, 92-75 at the American Airlines Arena (now the Kaseya Center) in Miami.

* The Oklahoma City Thunder beat the Chicago Bulls, 98-85 at the United Center in Chicago.

* The New Orleans Hornets (as the Pelicans were then known) beat the Utah Jazz, 91-87 at the Delta Center in Salt Lake City (then named the EnergySolutions Arena).

* And the Los Angeles Clippers beat the Portland Trail Blazers, 105-95 at the Staples Center (now the Crypto.com Arena) in Los Angeles.

And there were 2 NHL games. In an "Original Six" matchup, the New York Rangers beat the Boston Bruins, 3-2 at Madison Square Garden. And the Los Angeles Kings beat the San Jose Sharks, 6-2 at the HP Pavilion (now the SAP Center) in San Jose.