7 World Trade Center

[ZippyTheChimp]

Oct 08, 2004
Top office-floor complete. Only the roof structure remains.
http://www.pbase.com/image/34816439.jpg

[Stern]

The problem with the old 7WTC was its dimmensions, it was too long, it was fat. The New 7WTC, while not perfect, has a far better height to width ratio, the extraneous factor is its all glass fascade.

[gonzea]

Glad to see 7 wtc is near completion. However at 750 it should of been at least 100 feet taller. From queensboro plaza train station in LIC you can barley see 7 wtc now. I was upset with this.

Could anyone tell me how to post pictures here?
gonzea@yahoo.com
thanx-[/img][/url]

[yyy]

Could anyone tell me how to post pictures here?
gonzea@yahoo.com
thanx-[/img][/url]

In order to post pictures you have to use the Img button which you can find in the posting page. You should type the link to the photo. If that photo isn't on the web you'll have to upload it from your computer into a special website like: http://photobucket.com. Then link them to there :D[/quote]

[Stern]

Thanks.

[gonzea]

No problem, I should be putting up more pics as soon as I take them.

[gonzea]

Just got back from a lengthy session.
All taken oct 9th ,04 2:45-3:45pm
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v488/gonzea/DSCF0080.jpg
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IMG]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v488/gonzea/DSCF0049.jpg[/IMG]
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http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v488/gonzea/DSCF0034.jpg

[yyy]

Wow, thanks for the photos. I see they are about to finish it :D BTW, one of your photos wasn't linked well.

[Johnnyboy]

it was fun watching it rise. hope the freedom tower and the other huge skyscrapers being build will be as fun to watch rise.

[gonzea]

If you look on the second to last pic. You see bore beems rising. This should be the extra push that is really gunna make it stand out.

[gonzea]

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v488/gonzea/DSCF0049.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v488/gonzea/DSCF0050.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v488/gonzea/DSCF0047.jpg
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v488/gonzea/DSCF0079.jpg

[NyC MaNiAc]

*Orgasms*

[yepole]

Setting up one window (http://www.unwiredny.com/pictures.unwiredny.com/Constr_7WTC/00671a.gif) 8)

[Pilaro]

I see, so that is how they get those buggers up there. Cool little video.

[Towerman8]

It actually looks pretty good now

[NYguy]

OCT 10
Reflection of the clouds...

http://www.pbase.com/nyguy/image/34970852/medium.jpg


http://www.pbase.com/nyguy/image/34970856/medium.jpg


Old meets new...

http://www.pbase.com/nyguy/image/34970861/medium.jpg

[TonyO]

NY1

7 World Trade Center Set To Be "Topped Out"

Seven World Trade Center was the last building to collapse September 11th, but it is the first to be rebuilt.

On Thursday, the 52-story skyscraper will be "topped out" – one month ahead of schedule and just 10 months after the first steel beam for the tenant floors went into place.

"It will be the first building rebuilt to show we are back stronger than ever in Lower Manhattan," said Governor George Pataki last December.

All of the major rebuilding players are expected to be in attendance to see the final steel beam ceremoniously raised into position. The new building is the vision of architect David Childs and is 5 stories taller than its predecessor.

The first ten floors are occupied by a Con Edison substation that provides power for the site and parts of Lower Manhattan. The tenant floors begin on the 11th floor.

Although the building is expected to be complete by next year, an anchor tenant has not signed on the dotted line. Developer Larry Silverstein says he is not worried.

"We are talking now to a number of tenants," said Silverstein. "Now that the building is clearly happening and people begin to realize that this is going to be a fete accompli, and that it's a major and a significant building, the level of activity has increased significantly, which is very gratifying."

The new "7" is across the street from where the Freedom Tower will eventually rise. According to the developer, the two office towers will share sophisticated design features that will make the buildings safer.

"The life safety enhancements that we are building into Seven will be included in the Freedom Tower and in every one of the buildings to be built at the Trade Center," said Silverstein. "That's crucially important and considering what we learned on 9/11 that is the only way we would rebuild the Trade Center."

Some of those safety features include a two-foot concrete core that surrounds the elevator shafts and fire stairs. And those stairs are five and a half feet wide, with landings deep enough to fit a person in a wheelchair while keeping the flow of foot traffic moving.

It's a sign that some of the lessons learned will hopefully make the site a safer place.

– John Schiumo

[ryan]

I saw 7 in person today, and I have to say that it is really beautiful - the acute angle is more dramatic than in photos, and the glass is perfect. Much better than the renderings...

[Edward]

7 WTC (http://www.wirednewyork.com/wtc/7wtc/default.htm), Woolworth Building, "Brooklyn Service" tugboat, and the Brooklyn Bridge. 16 October 2004.

http://www.wirednewyork.com/wtc/7wtc/7wtc_woolworth_16oct04.jpg (http://www.wirednewyork.com/wtc/7wtc/default.htm)

[BigMac]

New York Times
October 21, 2004

PUBLIC LIVES

A Skyscraper That Had to Be Built Twice

By ROBIN FINN

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2004/10/20/nyregion/21profile.184.jpg
"The first time I built 7 World Trade, I thought it would last a lifetime and a day." Elio Cettina

Clearly the star-in-residence at the Tishman Construction Corporation trailer hunkered alongside the steel skeleton of 7 World Trade Center, the first skyscraper to redefine the horizon at ground zero, Elio Cettina, the boss of this and other major Tishman projects, trades his blue hard hat for a blue dress shirt at day's end. The hat goes on a shelf with others, some blue, some white. His pen and eyeglasses are shoved into a shirt pocket.

"Goodbye to you, Babalu," he says, paternally, to a departing colleague, and then, just as paternally, offers a visitor a sample of the trailer's amenities: a functional office chair, the portable toilet down the hall, some stale coffee?

If he's tired, it doesn't show. He's 63, but his energy level skews young. After a day building skyscrapers, he's likely to spend the evening at home in his basement shop, building furniture. He once restored a 1959 Morgan convertible he found junked in the backyard of a home he and his wife had bought in Bergen County; built a garage for it, too. Mr. Cettina doesn't merely tinker, he constructs.

This season, he's a builder on a momentous roll. Now that 7 World Trade Center has reached its full height, an occasion to be celebrated today with a topping-out ceremony, he can concentrate on the excavation for the Freedom Tower's foundation. Like 7 W.T.C., it will have an indestructible - he hopes - cement core.

"I love skyscrapers," he says, "because they challenge your ability to think big." When he builds them on time and on budget, he likes them even more. He keeps his mouth shut about aesthetics: "I have been called insensitive to color and design. Whether I like it, I don't like it, I build it just the same."

Mr. Cettina doesn't wear a white hard hat, despite his status as a Tishman vice president of field operations and general superintendent. Asked to decode his job titles, he hands over a business card and instead decodes the hard-hat hierarchy. "White is for V.I.P.'s," he explains with a dismissive wave of his sizable fist, his English granted extra gusto by an Italian accent that has stuck by him since he left Bologna for Hoboken, N.J., at age 14.

"I've worn a blue hat here 37 years,'' he says. "I associate with my people. I can be a little boisterous. I need to operate in a different environment than the executives. Here in the trailer, I'm the boss. You do it my way or the right way." That they are the same is implicit.
Sure, he loves his long-term boss, the Tishman family, but not enough to install himself at corporate headquarters, at 666 Fifth Avenue. Mr. Cettina, the son of a union carpenter and a garment district seamstress, attended the Newark College of Engineering and boasts of having veins that pulse with brick, concrete, steel and mortar. And a little salt water: he is a sea captain's grandson, hence his captain's license and the fishing boat moored on the Manasquan River near his home in Brielle, N.J. He cuts his own bait and cleans his own fish. Construction sites, not conference rooms, are his natural habitat.

"Every building needs to be built" is his basic philosophy, though if he has to choose, his favorite is the one he renovated, the New Amsterdam Theater, a Times Square landmark. The gargoyles were a hoot, the moldings a challenge.

But 7 World Trade Center is the only skyscraper he's built twice. Not the mushy type, he admits he cried when, in a coda to a horrific day, the building, evacuated and devastated by fire, shuddered and crumpled, hours after the twin towers fell on Sept. 11, 2001. He was on the roof at a Tishman job in Midtown and could scarcely comprehend the desecration he saw unfolding downtown. "The first time I built 7 World Trade, I thought it would last a lifetime and a day," he says.

Mr. Cettina's "people" number 600 on the site of the new 7 World Trade Center, and because they are a competent crew and he is a demanding taskmaster, the topping out of the skyscraper - the positioning of the final steel beam on the 52nd story - is taking place as originally, and optimistically, scheduled.

"Politics dictated that certain things had to happen at certain times, and we set out to make sure they did," he says. "I had wanted to come back down here in the worst way, and when Tishman got the contract, nobody was happier than me." No qualms about building something he'd already built? Mr. Cettina, whose two sons work for the Tishmans after receiving college tuition assistance from them, is not bothered by déjà vu. "I do this for a living," he says. "Wanting to rebuild was automatic."

First came the groundbreaking in November 2003, then the activation of the Con Ed substation in the skyscraper's base, and now, 15,000 tons of steel later, the target date for the topping out ceremony has been met. "We set ourselves a schedule that was difficult but doable," he says. "There was a lot of resolve and resolution from the trades. Nobody gave up. Nobody begged off. This building is a symbol."

Mr. Cettina is positive that the new 7 World Trade Center is the safest skyscraper ever to poke its nose up into the cityscape: "It's a building within a building," he says of its reinforced concrete core and steel frame. "There is no stronger or better way to build a building. This one will last two lifetimes and a day." A heady prediction, but he can't help himself.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[NYguy]

NEWSDAY


http://www.nynewsday.com/media/photo/2004-10/14754280.jpg

The last I beam is hoisted to the top of 7 World Trade Center Thursday, October 21, 2004, during the topping off ceremony in lower Manhattan.


http://www.nynewsday.com/media/photo/2004-10/14754281.jpg

Construction workers applaud as the last I beam is hoisted to the top of 7 World Trade Center Thursday, October 21, 2004, at the topping off ceremony in lower Manhattan.


http://www.nynewsday.com/media/photo/2004-10/14754216.jpg

http://www.nynewsday.com/media/photo/2004-10/14753693.jpg

Construction workers lean against the final steel beam before it is lifted into place at a topping out ceremony to mark completion of steel erection for 7 World Trade Center October 21, 2004 in New York City. The 52-story building is five stories taller than the original 7 World Trade Center which was destroyed in the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.


http://www.nynewsday.com/media/photo/2004-10/14753696.jpg

Mayor Michael Bloomberg (L) and New York Governor George Pataki look on with construction workers at a topping out ceremony to mark completion of steel erection for 7 World Trade Center October 21, 2004 in New York City. The 52-story building is five stories taller than the original 7 World Trade Center


http://www.nynewsday.com/media/photo/2004-10/14753688.jpg

L-R) Silverstein Properties President Larry Silverstein, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Silverstein Properties Vice President John Klein watch as the final steel beam is lifted into place at a topping out ceremony to mark completion of steel erection for 7 World Trade Center October 21, 2004 in New York City.


http://www.nynewsday.com/media/photo/2004-10/14753690.jpg

Mayor Michael Bloomberg watches with construction workers as the final steel beam is lifted into place at a topping out ceremony to mark completion of steel erection for 7 World Trade Center October 21, 2004 in New York City.


http://www.nynewsday.com/media/photo/2004-10/14753657.jpg

A makeshift memorial to a deceased firefighter is seen after the topping out ceremony to mark completion of steel erection for 7 World Trade Center (R) October 21, 2004 in New York City.


http://www.nynewsday.com/media/photo/2004-10/14753647.jpg

Mayor Michael Bloomberg with construction workers as the final steel beam is lifted into place at a topping out ceremony to mark completion of steel erection for 7 World Trade Center

[BigMac]

NY1
October 21, 2004

Seven World Trade Center "Topped Out" Ahead Of Schedule

http://www.ny1.com/Content/images/live/70/139276.jpg

Seven World Trade Center was the last building to collapse September 11, 2001, but it is the first to be rebuilt.

In a ceremony on Thursday, the 52-story skyscraper was "topped out" one month ahead of schedule and just 10 months after the first steel beam for the tenant floors went into place.

All of the major rebuilding players, including Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Governor George Pataki, and hundreds of construction workers were in attendance to see the final steel beam ceremoniously raised into position.

“This is an important day - it is more than a symbolic day,” said Pataki. “It is New York coming together to keep our word and to keep our pledge to those we lost on September 11, and to those who wondered on and after September 11, could New York come back? Were we going to rise from the ashes? Could we get beyond the sorrow and the pain? The answer is, exuberantly, yes."

“We lost the first one and now we’re all proud to rebuild the second one," said one of the workers.

“It’s been nice to be part of it,” said another worker. “I’ve been down here since the event happened, and to see that we're beginning life again and we're going on is nice."

The new building, which was designed by architect David Childs, is five stories taller than its predecessor but is skinnier. The first ten floors will be occupied by a Con Edison substation that provides power for the trade center site and parts of Lower Manhattan. The tenant floors begin on the 11th.

Although the building is expected to be complete by next year, an anchor tenant has not signed on the dotted line. Developer Larry Silverstein says he is not worried.

"We are talking now to a number of tenants," said Silverstein. "Now that the building is clearly happening and people begin to realize that this is going to be a fete accompli, and that it's a major and a significant building, the level of activity has increased significantly, which is very gratifying."

The new skyscraper is across the street from where the Freedom Tower will eventually rise. According to the developer, the two office towers will share sophisticated design features that will make the buildings safer.

"The life safety enhancements that we are building into Seven will be included in the Freedom Tower and in every one of the buildings to be built at the Trade Center," said Silverstein. "That's crucially important and considering what we learned on 9/11 that is the only way we would rebuild the Trade Center."

Some of those safety features include a two-foot concrete core that surrounds the elevator shafts and fire stairs. Those stairs are five and a half feet wide, with landings deep enough to fit a person in a wheelchair, while at the same time keeping the flow of foot traffic moving.

It's a sign that some of the lessons learned will hopefully make the site a safer place.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
World Trade Center developer Larry Silverstein will sit down for an interview with NY1’s John Schiumo on “New York Tonight” at 8 p.m. Thursday

Copyright © 2004 NY1 News

[ZippyTheChimp]

I wish they could hoist up some tenants.

So far, it's turned out better than I expected. It gets your attention, but doesn't shout. A big improvement over its predecessor.

[NYCResident]

Agreed.. I pass by 7 WTC everyday and it looks better and better..

[DougGold]

Have there been any plans released for the little triangular park that's going next to it?

[NYatKNIGHT]

I haven't seen anything about that park. I always assumed it would be among the last things to be completed because it will come in handy as a staging area.

[ZippyTheChimp]

Have there been any plans released for the little triangular park that's going next to it?
Page 19 (http://forums.wirednewyork.com/viewtopic.php?t=779&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start =270) of this thread.

[NYguy]

DOWNTOWN EXPRESS

Silverstein shows off 7 W.T.C.’s mettle to Silver

http://downtownexpress.com/de_77/7.gif

Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, foreground, looked out from the 23rd floor of 7 World Trade Center site with developer Larry Silverstein, who is also building the Freedom Tower at the W.T.C. site. Silverstein remains confident he will have the money rebuild offices at ground zero. “A billion here, a billion there — it isn’t what it used to be,” he quipped.


By Josh Rogers

World Trade Center developer Larry Silverstein showed Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver around 7 W.T.C. Wednesday assuring the speaker that the building, expected to be completed early next year, will not only be one of the safest office buildings around, but that it will also help bring back the Downtown economy.

Silver saw the open-air 40th-floor and the 23rd-floor, where the windows are installed and many of the new safety features are in place.

The 52-story building is across the street from the W.T.C. site and collapsed the afternoon of Sept. 11, 2001 after a fire started from burning debris that hit the building.

Silverstein pointed to the 10,000-pound concrete core that will protect the elevators, stairwells, sprinklers and the communication system. Each floor also has 70 tons of steel reinforcement, Silverstein said.

“This building will be built to last,” he said.

Silverstein said he accepted a federal report concluding that the building collapsed because the debris ignited the diesel fuel lines running in 7 W.T.C. Much of the diesel was stored in 7 W.T.C. for the city’s Office of Emergency Management command center. Silverstein said the diesel will be stored under an adjacent plaza to be built off the building’s footprint. The stairwells are 20 percent wider than building codes require in order to allow rescue workers more room to climb up while employees can evacuate. The stairwells also have airplane-type emergency lighting that Silverstein said has never been used in office buildings before.

Safety is also an issue during construction, which will soon involve over 1,000 workers. A construction worker fell to his death on Sept. 29 and on the day of the tour, another worker was taken to the hospital with a bloody foot. A Silverstein spokesperson said later that the worker stepped on a nail, was given a tetanus shot and later released.

Silverstein, who did not cross paths with the injured worker during the tour, said at the start that both 7 W.T.C. and the W.T.C. site would soon be buzzing with thousands of construction workers on different projects in a relatively confined space.

“At ground zero, there will be 10,000 people working there every day and that’s without the memorial, without the museum, without the cultural center, without the PATH,” he said.

Silverstein has the leasing rights to the site, owned by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and his workers began demolition work to prepare for construction of the Freedom Tower this summer. Extensive work below street level must be completed before construction on the new PATH commuter-subway station, the W.T.C. memorial and the proposed cultural buildings can begin.

The demolition of the parking lot by the Freedom Tower site is still not finished. Silverstein said it is a slow process because the protective slurry wall has to be stabilized as the lot is dismantled, and remnants of the lot are being preserved as historical artifacts of the Sept. 11 attack.

Both the lot and the Freedom Tower’s symbolic cornerstone, which was laid in the ground July 4, 2004 are visible from 7 W.T.C., as is the Statue of Liberty. To the north are views of the Empire State Building, to the East are landmark buildings such as the Municipal Building, and just to the west the Hudson River and the World Financial Center are also visible.

Silver said he was impressed how good the views are even from the 23rd floor. “The views are breathtaking,” he said. “They will come flocking here. It will sell itself.”

He said the return of office workers will help stimulate what many residents want — more and better places to eat, shop and have fun. Rebuilding will insure that “Downtown is better than ever,” Silver added. “It’s going to come back stronger than ever.”

Silverstein reiterated his confidence that he will have the money to complete the Freedom Tower and the four other offices planned for the trade center complex. Even if he wins his last major insurance lawsuit, he will only have about half the money he’ll need to complete the $7 billion project. In previous lawsuits, Silverstein has lost his claims that the two plane attacks constituted two separate occurrences entitling him to $7 billion, over double the estimated value of the W.T.C.

“A billion here, a billion there, it isn’t what it used to be,” he quipped. Later, he said he thought he’d be able to make up any shortfall with tax-free Liberty Bonds, a federal, post-9/11 program passed to stimulate development.

[TLOZ Link5]

The best new glass box in decades.

[Johnnyboy]

100% True.

[yepole]

Few more pictures of 7WTC as it is topping out:
http://www.unwiredny.com/pictures.unwiredny.com/Catalog/Constr_7WTC/00989s.jpg (http://www.unwiredny.com/pictures.unwiredny.com/Catalog/Constr_7WTC/00989.jpg) http://www.unwiredny.com/pictures.unwiredny.com/Catalog/Constr_7WTC/00999s.jpg (http://www.unwiredny.com/pictures.unwiredny.com/Catalog/Constr_7WTC/00999.jpg) http://www.unwiredny.com/pictures.unwiredny.com/Catalog/Constr_7WTC/01001s.jpg (http://www.unwiredny.com/pictures.unwiredny.com/Catalog/Constr_7WTC/01001.jpg) http://www.unwiredny.com/pictures.unwiredny.com/Catalog/Constr_7WTC/01003s.jpg (http://www.unwiredny.com/pictures.unwiredny.com/Catalog/Constr_7WTC/01003l.jpg)

[sirhcman]

yepole...1st pic is excellent!

[NYguy]

Nov 3, 2004


http://www.pbase.com/nyguy/image/35940565.jpg


http://www.pbase.com/nyguy/image/35940574/medium.jpghttp://www.pbase.com/nyguy/image/35940567/medium.jpghttp://www.pbase.com/nyguy/image/35940573/medium.jpg

[gonzea]

thanx ! and keep posting new pictures whenever you get a chance! I am really making good use of them!

Looking at these pictures a say could it of hurt to make it just 100 ft. taller. When I am in LIC queens I can hardly see it From the elevated n,w train queens boro plaza.
It just doesn't stand out like it should.

[STT757]

Looking at these pictures a say could it of hurt to make it just 100 ft. taller

I was thinking that if they did the top of the building like 30 Hudson Street they would make the building look much taller.

http://www.jcedc.org/photos/gsnight450.JPG

[gonzea]

That's a good point. The only thing going for us right now is the "roof structure" that seems to add a few more "floors" to the bldg. There is nothing we can do now. I hope they put a large antannea on top !

[TonyO]

Silverstein Seeks $50/Sq. Foot Rents on 7WTC

November 8 2004 at 2:30 AM

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

LARRY SILVERSTEIN, the Manhattan property developer who, aged 73, plans to devote the rest of his life to a $12 billion (£6.5 billion) project to redevelop the World Trade Center site, hopes to set a record rent for Lower Manhattan with the first of six proposed skyscrapers planned for the Ground Zero area.
Mr Silverstein is quoting rents of more than $50 per sq ft for 7 World Trade Centre, which replaces an original building of the same name that was destroyed shortly after the twin towers in the September 11 terrorist attacks. The price-tag is more than $10 per sq ft higher than current top rents in Lower Manhattan and the previous highest rents in the former World Trade Centre complex.



Adam Foster, senior vice-president of CB Richard Ellis, the property consultant that has been appointed to let the building, said the rent was justified because 7 World Trade Centre is the best building ever to be constructed in New York City.

Mr Foster said the building had already attracted strong interest from a host of financial, legal and public sector companies, adding that he was confident that CB Richard Ellis would secure several lettings during 2005.

Companies that move into the building stand to benefit from a package of incentives granted by the US Government and the Port Authority on whose land it stands. Companies will receive a 25-30 per cent discount on their power bills and tax breaks on money spent fitting out their office in the building.

Mr Silverstein claims that the building will be the first building to be certified officially as “green” and environmentally friendly in New York.

The glass on the building is specially designed to allow the maximum penetration of natural light, which will reduce heating and lighting costs.

The company also describes 7 World Trade Centre as the “safest office building in America”.

The original World Trade Centre buildings had just plasterboard inside the core, but the new building has a 2 ft thick wall of concrete core running the full length of the building. Mr Silverstein said that the concrete can withstand the equivalent pressure of that withstood by a military bunker. The building, which at 52 storeys, is two higher than Canary Wharf in London’s docklands, is due to be completed by early 2006.

Two weeks ago Mr Silverstein “topped out” the scheme by placing the final steel beam, adorned with the American flag, on top of the 750-ft structure, which he says stands as a gleaming testament to New York’s ambitious rebuilding effort.

STILL ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT


The 7 World Trade Centre site will be completed in early 2006, when the Lower Manhattan commercial property market is expected to be back in full swing.

3.66 million sq ft of space has been leased this year, up from 3.29 million sq ft last year.

Vacancy levels remain high at 14.7%. Average asking rents have fallen $0.83 to $30.49 a sq ft. “The market is starting to turn the corner,” said Adam Foster, at CB Richard Ellis.

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,8209-1343122,00.html

[gonzea]

If he can get what he is asking then that might be a good thing.
Because money that was taken away directly by terrorists is now coming back to the spot where it was stopped.
Then the money would go out and pay for the other towers to go up around the site.
Can't wait to see what happens?

[BrooklynRider]

With the dump that Fitterman Hall has become across the street and extensive construction sites soon to begin work very close by to the south, north, east and west. It is not going to be a "pleasant" area to work in.

[Kris]

http://www.theslatinreport.com/top_story.jsp?StoryName=1116curtains.txt

[Stern]

Page 19 of this thread.

Thanks Zippy. I revisited that page where I predicted on Feb 17, 2004:

At this rate 7WTC should top out at about the third week of October.

7 WTC topped out on October 21, 2004........not too shabby.

[Russell]

Some images from last weekend
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v214/sax0vtr/New%20York/100_1980.jpg

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v214/sax0vtr/New%20York/100_1873.jpg

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v214/sax0vtr/New%20York/100_1867.jpg

[gonzea]

the first pic in the set of three is probably the best one I have seen thus far.
Keep posting it makes for good wallpaper.
Thanks -

[James Kovata]

Love the first pic. From where did you take the shot?

[hella good]

Its taken from the Esb observatory.

[NYguy]

Nov 23, 2004


http://www.pbase.com/nyguy/image/36714697/medium.jpg


http://www.pbase.com/nyguy/image/36714744/medium.jpg


http://www.pbase.com/nyguy/image/36714753/medium.jpg


http://www.pbase.com/nyguy/image/36714781/medium.jpg_http://www.pbase.com/nyguy/image/36714794/medium.jpg


More towers to come...

http://www.pbase.com/nyguy/image/36714804/medium.jpg

[gonzea]

Great pics, thank you-
sad to see it's only 750 not 850.
Anway keep posting pics people.

[Stern]

To be perfectly honest Im not overly impressed.

[PHLguy]

^same, It really doesnt seem like a 740 footer when youre under it, I was there yesterday and it felt more like 600

[Stern]

With me its not so much the height, although a taller building would afford it better proportions, but its design is sorely lacking, it is in dire need of some sort of visual interest. Use for reference the most recent of simple modernist, composed, and visually interesting buildings in London.

[gonzea]

Do you think they will put a big antennea on top?

[Stern]

Do you think they will put a big antennea on top?

No. That'll go a block to the south.

[Derek2k3]

To be perfectly honest Im not overly impressed.

I thought I was the only one.

[NewYorkYankee]

I like it. :D

[JMGarcia]

This building may have a good number of internal safety features and other amenities and improvements to make it more marketable to potential renters but as architecture it is nothing to write home about.

Its best feautre is its facade but even that can't be attributed to the architects but rather then firm that came up with and provided that facade system and glass.

Perhaps they crown, if it comes out and is lit up anything like what is shown in the renderings, will add some interest.

To not coin a phrase, a project of the bland leading the bland. ;)

Ah, to have had a truely visionary client for the site.....

[NYguy]

To not coin a phrase, a project of the bland leading the bland.
Ah, to have had a truely visionary client for the site.....


Enough of the visionary bs.

The true vision was to get this site back up and running so soon after the terrorists attacks. And I would say we are doing far better than could be expected at this point. Is it the world's greatest building? No. But it doesn't need to be.


http://www.pbase.com/nyguy/image/36714781/medium.jpg_http://www.pbase.com/nyguy/image/36714794/medium.jpg

[ZippyTheChimp]

Without tenants? :P

The only things that needed to be complete as soon as possible are the substations and the PATH.

To be perfectly honest Im not overly impressed.

I thought I was the only one.
Were you two disappointed by the outcome, or did you always think it would turn out this way?

Overall, I am pleased with the final result, because I didn't expect much from the renderings. The facade turned out much better than I expected. Since the FT will be a busy building, maybe something quiet is needed here.

I think the parallelogram shape both helps and hinders the design - depending on your vantage point. From the SE or NW, the sharp corner gives the appearance of greater height and less bulk. The effect is just the opposite from the SW or NE. As you walk north on West St from Liberty to Vesey, the building starts to look fat. From West Broadway, it looms like a big slab.

[Derek2k3]

Were you two disappointed by the outcome, or did you always think it would turn out this way?

Disappointed from the beginning, however, I must admit that it came out better than I expected. If it came out like those white translucent models I would have been impressed.

[Johnnyboy]

all of you talk like its already finished. It will pobably and hopefully look better when its finished

[kz1000ps]

I think the parallelogram shape both helps and hinders the design - depending on your vantage point. From the SE or NW, the sharp corner gives the appearance of greater height and less bulk. The effect is just the opposite from the SW or NE.

This is also the exact same for Time Warner Center. Except that's much worse than this one, whose pleasant glass facade does not fall back into an early 80's frame of mind. However I agree with Stern in that the design relies too heavily on its shape (successful half of the time only). I don't expect much of the crown, but hopefully it will have enough character to it to complete the composition. Having said that, I very much liked it in person when I visited a month ago...so I guess it's up to time to tell.

[Towerman8]

why are there 2 slots going up the building?

[Gulcrapek]

Probably for ventilation until the HVAC is installed.

[James Kovata]

To be perfectly honest Im not overly impressed.

I thought I was the only one.

The truth comes out. It's a bland glass box.

[gonzea]

Hey it's better than nothing!

[NewYorkYankee]

Hey it's better than nothing!

I have to agree.

[yepole]

It will take some time to complete the upper portion of the building
http://www.unwiredny.com/pictures.unwiredny.com/Catalog/Constr_7WTC/01612s.jpg (http://www.unwiredny.com/pictures.unwiredny.com/Catalog/Constr_7WTC/01612l.jpg)

[gonzea]

what are they doing to the upper portion? and why will it take a long time?

[NYguy]

Sunday, Nov 12, 2004


Going up, coming down...the first of the new WTC towers (7 WTC) rises in the background. The 40-story Deutche Bank building will come down for the last of the WTC towers.

http://www.pbase.com/nyguy/image/37598490/large.jpg


http://www.pbase.com/nyguy/image/37598493/large.jpg


Symbol of the new WTC rises behind symbol of the old...

http://www.pbase.com/nyguy/image/37598495/large.jpg


http://www.pbase.com/nyguy/image/37598497/large.jpg


http://www.pbase.com/nyguy/image/37598500/large.jpg


In the end, the new WTC buildings will tower over these Church St towers...

http://www.pbase.com/nyguy/image/37598501/large.jpg


http://www.pbase.com/nyguy/image/37598504/large.jpg

[gonzea]

thanx for the pics, keep posting when you can.
Why is there 2 lines down the bldg of spaces without windows?

[Stern]

http://n.1asphost.com/anstern/7WTC.jpg

[BPC]

Is it a masterpiece? Obviously not. But living in the BPC for the last three years with this giant hole in the sky, I have loved watching the building go up. Kudos to Larry Silverstein for putting his wallet on the line rather than timidly waiting for market demand to catch up to his ambitions.

[Jimbo Holland]

http://skyscraperpage.com/gallery/data/532/49787wtc010205.jpg

[Hof]

At this point,I would have to concur with those who think #7 is rather bland,just another PM glass box.
I was disappointed that,given the site's history and the attention that the area will attract,the building lacks the imagination to become a set piece in the WTC rebuilding effort.
Oh,well,maybe the Deutschebank replacement will have some architectural significance.One out of 2 wouldn't be bad.
Last June,I walked all around 7's construction site and tried,but failed to notice any obvious difference from dozens of similar structures scattered around Manhattan.
Silverman had promised a "glittering jewelbox":he's delivered another skyline yawn.
Hopefully,as mentioned above,there is going to be an interesting cap to the tower,or maybe the ground floors will have some special attribute.
At least there's a token Greenwich St.

[Jimbo Holland]

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v227/jimboholland/The%20Pinnacle/dscf00087wtcucdec04tothenortht.jpg

is the steel skelet already finished? and has the building reached his top?

[TonyO]

Yes it is topped off. That ceremony was months ago.

[Kris]

January 12, 2005

More Borrowing Clout for Ground Zero Developer

By DAVID W. DUNLAP

The developer Larry A. Silverstein was authorized yesterday by the New York City Industrial Development Agency to borrow an extra $75 million through tax-exempt Liberty Bonds for his $1.355 billion 7 World Trade Center project.

Mr. Silverstein won preliminary approval two years ago for $400 million in Liberty Bonds but returned to the agency facing higher interest costs and having received less of an insurance payout than he expected. Seven World Trade Center, a silvery 52-story parallelogram across Vesey Street from the main trade center site, is to open early next year. It is already clad almost completely in glass but does not yet have any prospective tenants except Silverstein Properties.

That 7 World Trade Center is rising at all is "thanks in large part to the Liberty Bond program," said Andrew M. Alper, who is chairman of the agency, which unanimously approved the financing. He is also president of the city Economic Development Corporation.

The agency expects Mr. Silverstein, who holds the commercial lease on the main trade center site, to return soon to seek $3.5 billion in Liberty Bonds for the other office towers planned on the site. If granted, that would represent nearly 90 percent of all remaining Liberty Bond financing for commercial projects in New York City.

The advantage of Liberty Bonds to borrowers is that lenders accept lower interest rates because the proceeds are exempt from federal, state and city taxes.

Since Mr. Silverstein first applied for financing, the estimated total project cost has risen to $1.355 billion from $1.196 billion. The largest single item is $516 million to pay off the mortgage on the previous 7 World Trade Center, which Mr. Silverstein developed and owned. It burned and collapsed on Sept. 11, 2001, hours after the attack.

The rest of the budget includes so-called hard construction costs of $378.3 million; soft costs like architectural fees and insurance, $119.5 million; the building of tenant space, $131.8 million; interest, $179 million; and operating expenses, $30.5 million.

Much of the financing - $819 million - is to come from insurance proceeds. This is $42 million less than the face value of the policy, which reflects a settlement between Mr. Silverstein and the building's insurer, according to the agency.

The rest of the financing will come from $475 million in Liberty Bonds, $3.94 million in interest income from the insurance proceeds and a $57.23 million investment by 7 World Trade Company, which is owned by Mr. Silverstein and his wife, Klara.

Because of delays in retiring the mortgage, Mr. Silverstein faced a $113 million increase in interest expense. According to an analysis by the development corporation, a delay in arranging bond financing and the need to keep insurance proceeds available for construction on an interim basis "has postponed the use of those insurance funds to pay off the existing mortgage."

Under federal law, Liberty Bonds cannot be used to satisfy an existing mortgage. Instead, the bond financing will pay both for current construction costs and to reimburse Mr. Silverstein for construction costs that he has already paid with insurance proceeds.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

[Edward]

7 WTC (http://www.wirednewyork.com/wtc/7wtc/default.htm), Woolworth Building and the Brooklyn Bridge. 17 January 2005.

http://www.wirednewyork.com/wtc/7wtc/7wtc_brooklyn_bridge.jpg (http://www.wirednewyork.com/wtc/7wtc/default.htm)

[FRED]

http://skyscraperpage.com/gallery/data/532/1856img_1364c.jpg

[gonzea]

what are those 2 lines coming down the bldg?
Doesn't even really wow me!

[Stern]

http://specialsections.nypost.com/news/nypost/commercialre/20050120/img/e_2_p52.jpg

[NewYorkYankee]

Will the scrolling text be there 24/7? If so, I like it! Interesting feature for D'town!

[NYguy]

March 1, 2005


http://www.pbase.com/nyguy/image/40395462/large.jpg


http://www.pbase.com/nyguy/image/40395480/large.jpg

[TonyO]

posted on SSP:

February 8, 2005
by ANDY MARTIN

“THE REAL WORLD TRADE CENTER MEMORIAL”


(NEW YORK)(February 8) Since September 11, 2001 politicians have fallen over themselves to milk every ounce of personal profit from that horrible tragedy. One of the most obscene spectacles has been the continuing carnival over a suitable World Trade Center (WTC) “memorial.” Former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Governor George Pataki have drained the surviving families of any and every conceivable emotional energy by making extravagant promises that the World Trade Center is “hallowed ground” and must be preserved vacant for posterity. What nonsense.

Pataki and Giuliani have done everything to sabotage reconstruction of the original Twin Towers, or a reasonable commercial facsimile. Instead, they have--after much emotional hand wringing and propaganda--settled on a “Freedom Tower,” a vapid edifice that may never be built, and may collapse of its own inertia if it ever is built.

Adding to the tragicomedy is the flatulent self-promoting “architect” Daniel Liebeskind, brought in by Pataki to supervise the reconstruction, until the landlord’s architect, David Childs, dumped him. It has been a serial comedy with continuing installments.

I have a very special relationship to the WTC because thanks to the Port Authority of NY/NJ I was one of the earliest tenants in Two WTC, moving in January 1, 1974. I watched the attacks on 9/11 and spent time that evening near the cauldron. I have observed the Giuliani-Pataki political charade with disgust.

But, silently, almost stealthily, a real memorial to the World Trade Center tragedy and the people of New York has been under construction and is nearing completion: Seven World Trade Center (7WTC).

The original 7WTC was Mayor Giuliani’s emergency fuhrer-bunker and collapsed because of poor design.

Unlike a pending insurance dispute over the Twin Towers themselves, the insurance for Seven WTC was in order. Mr. Silverstein got his money promptly. After some negotiation with city officials, reconstruction began on a new and vastly improved 7WTC.

The building is taller than the original, leaner, and infinitely more elegant, almost sensuous. It “towers” over the empty Twin Towers site, looking down contemptuously at vacant land that has remained fallow because of craven political manipulation and incompetence. Seven WTC is a proud building, a striking building, and a real building.

7WTC is not some architecture-student’s class project, like the Liebeskind-Childs monstrosity “Freedom Tower.” The new 7WTC will be a silent but powerful testament to both the victims whose lives were extinguished, and to the ability of Americans to reconstruct in a reasonable commercial manner. The Giuliani-Pataki political grandstand operation has cheapened the sacrifice of the police and firefighters who died and the innocent people who perished on 9/11.

I looked at Seven WTC this evening and was stunned by its beauty. I like tall buildings, shining boldly in the dark. And it’s only half built. It won’t open to tenants until 2006. But the landlord, Larry Silverstein, has scored a knockout: he has built a better building, a commercially viable (i.e. profitable) structure, and he has created in his silent tower a memorial that speaks to the empty caverns below and solemnly reflects the cries of those whom eternity has called to be remembered for their sacrifice on 9/11.

Will people move in to 7WTC? Of course they will. All of the post 9/11 fears about high floors in tall buildings is so much rubbish. Donald Trump would die to market condos on the top 20 floors of a 120-story structure. People would line up to move in. It’s only human nature. We paper over the past and move on, and up.

I believe Seven WTC will be a successful building. It will make money and that, after all, is the reason for erecting an office building. Reconstruction was meant to reconstruct, not to provide a grandstand for Giuliani and Pataki to preen and flaunt their national political ambitions.

It is surprising that a landlord, Larry Silverstein, who never had any pretensions of building an eleemosynary mausoleum when he began the new Seven WTC, inadvertently created the ultimate memorial to the victims that New Yorkers will honor and prefer. People will ultimately reject the maudlin memorial planned for the vacant space that was once the vibrant commercial community of the WTC.

Am I against/have I ever been against a small, dignified memorial, tucked quietly in some corner of the site, reminding visitors of the great horror that took place? Not at all. But dedicating the entire WTC site to a perpetually vacant “memorial,” or making “memory” the centerpiece of the reconstructed WTC site, or chopping up the super-site to create “mini” cuts and jabs in the original layout, insult New York and insult the American people.

Americans are vibrant and, yes, powerful precisely because we pick ourselves up from tragedy and move along. Promptly. We do not mourn endlessly or excessively. Breast beaters and professional mourners do not enjoy acceptance in our great nation. We are alive, and we want to remain alive. We rebuild, bigger and better than before. We do not cower in the face of tyrants; never have, never will. That is why the ludicrous, ridiculous “memorials” skillfully orchestrated by craven politicians will never gain public acceptance at the World Trade Center.

Let’s rebuild office buildings and real commercial structures, with at least as much space as before, and even more if we can squeeze it in. That is in the spirit of New York, and it is the spirit of America.

Truly, the real memorial to the victims is rising. It is Seven WTC. Well done, Larry.

politicalgateway.com

[BrooklynRider]

...It is surprising that a landlord, Larry Silverstein, who never had any pretensions of building an eleemosynary mausoleum when he began the new Seven WTC, inadvertently created the ultimate memorial to the victims that New Yorkers will honor and prefer. People will ultimately reject the maudlin memorial planned for the vacant space that was once the vibrant commercial community of the WTC.

Am I against/have I ever been against a small, dignified memorial, tucked quietly in some corner of the site, reminding visitors of the great horror that took place? Not at all. But dedicating the entire WTC site to a perpetually vacant “memorial,” or making “memory” the centerpiece of the reconstructed WTC site, or chopping up the super-site to create “mini” cuts and jabs in the original layout, insult New York and insult the American people...


7 WTC is a memorial of sorts as the first building out of the ground, a replacement better than the original, learning from engineering and design mistakes ofthe past, and understanding that urban life is derived and dependent upon pedestrian traffic, street level ammenities, and community integration.

The absence of Giuliani and Pataki on the commission to raise funds for the memorial speaks for itself. As far as the community evolving to prefer a tasteful little memorial amidst a rebuilt city-grid, the idea with no real sense of what we had in the original WTC. At street level the WTC was horrendous. Nothing about it was inviting, aesthetically pleasing, or relevant to its surroundings. What people miss is the icon of the twin towers on the skyline, not anything about the rest of the place. And if anyone does, start listing the charms of the WTC you miss.

What is desired is a total revisting of the 16 acres in a way that takes into consideration that the antiquated idea of geographically isolated "Business Districts" don't work in New York - and arguably in any other city. Midtown thrives because it is integrated commercial / residential / retail with excellent mass transit. The old WTC was a contributor to the decline of downtown. It isolated BPC from lower Manhattan, was empty on weekends, provided no street level interaction, and focused retail space solely on the building occupants and passing community (creating a separate but completely transient customer base). And finally, it was treated as a "site" exclusive of any surroundings in which to keep it in context.

I don't agree for a minute that anyone, including the "rebuild the towers" crowd want what we had at street level. They want the height - that's it. But, "Reflecting Absence" was a perfect name for the WTC plaza prior to its demise. The idea of a grand memorial is reasonable in the immediate aftermath, but in securing the large parcel of space for it, the community is guaranteed a large swath of greenery in the years after 9/11 drops as a hot-button politcal phrase.

The "master plan" in its building placement seems to work for now. But, it without any residential component - perhaps by introducing mixed use towers instead of purely commercial ones, the area is still destined for a certain alienation from the rest of downtown and deserted streets after dark.

The plan is evolving in the right direction. The first rebuilt building is better than the last. Pedestrian access has been improved. We will get improved mass transit and a reimplementation of the street grid. Now we need to have residents fillout the plan, rather than creating a series of buildings standing like cold defiant sentinals. Integration was missing before and it is missing now. Any type of major mall proposed should be vigorously rejected and the continued plan to create vast commercial towers should evolve to bring residential life - not transient visitors and workers - to the site.

[Bob]

Anybody know if the new 7 WTC has more than 3 exit stairwells? I don't suppose the new building would even come close to New York City's 1938 fire code, but anything over the 1960s-era fire code would be an improvement.

[PHLguy]

Looks like 7WTC might be getting some more tenants...

------------------
Demand for Downtown Office Space Continues to Grow
Friday, March 4: Lower Manhattan's vacancy rate for class A office space continued to fall in February, registering at 13.2 percent and signaling continued economic growth downtown, Dow Jones reported.

The drop in vacant space -- a slight decrease from January's 13.4 percent and the 13.8 percent recorded a year earlier -- is attributed to Fried Frank Harris Shriver & Jacobson's renewal and expansion of a lease at 1 New York Plaza -- the largest real estate deal of the month. The law firm is also considering the possibility of moving to 7 World Trade Center once it is completed, according to Dow Jones.

Robert Sammons, director of research at Colliers, a commercial real estate services firm, expects downtown rents to rise from 4 percent to 5 percent in 2005, due to renewed interest in the area, Dow Jones said.

Vacancy rates for class A office space also fell throughout Manhattan for the fourth month in a row. In February, citywide rates dropped to 9.4 percent from 9.6 percent in January, steadily approaching a low of 9 percent not seen since April 2002, Dow Jones noted.

http://www.lowermanhattan.info/news...iew_89186.asp#0

[NYguy]

History repeats, March 19, 2005


http://www.pbase.com/nyguy/image/41012351/large.jpg


http://www.pbase.com/nyguy/image/41012312/large.jpg

[Jake]

I can't wait to see what the building will look like once the final lighting inside is completed. I hope it's gonna be really bright.

[PHLguy]

Looks like 7WTC might be getting some more tenants...

------------------
Demand for Downtown Office Space Continues to Grow
Friday, March 4: Lower Manhattan's vacancy rate for class A office space continued to fall in February, registering at 13.2 percent and signaling continued economic growth downtown, Dow Jones reported.

The drop in vacant space -- a slight decrease from January's 13.4 percent and the 13.8 percent recorded a year earlier -- is attributed to Fried Frank Harris Shriver & Jacobson's renewal and expansion of a lease at 1 New York Plaza -- the largest real estate deal of the month. The law firm is also considering the possibility of moving to 7 World Trade Center once it is completed, according to Dow Jones.

Robert Sammons, director of research at Colliers, a commercial real estate services firm, expects downtown rents to rise from 4 percent to 5 percent in 2005, due to renewed interest in the area, Dow Jones said.

Vacancy rates for class A office space also fell throughout Manhattan for the fourth month in a row. In February, citywide rates dropped to 9.4 percent from 9.6 percent in January, steadily approaching a low of 9 percent not seen since April 2002, Dow Jones noted.

http://www.lowermanhattan.info/news...iew_89186.asp#0


I wonder how this will effect the WTC redevelopment...only positive ways I hope!

[NYguy]

DAILY NEWS

Silverstein's eying CIT for 7 WTC deal

http://www.nydailynews.com/images/columnists/croghan_l.jpg


A new prospective tenant has surfaced for 7 World Trade Center, which Larry Silverstein is rebuilding at Ground Zero.

He's been searching for tenants as the new skyscraper takes shape. But so far, the only occupant of the 52-story building is a Con Edison substation on its bottom floors.

Now there's word that CIT Group has taken a look at the elegant glass tower, with an eye to possibly moving there. CIT, a big commercial lender, currently has its office in midtown, at 1211 Sixth Ave. CIT's broker is CB Richard Ellis - which also is Silverstein's leasing agent for 7 World Trade Center.

A spokesman for CB Richard Ellis declined to comment.

Some downtown real estate players aren't overly optimistic that Silverstein will ultimately land CIT as a tenant. They fear that CIT's new CEO Jeffrey Peek - a former investment banker from Merrill Lynch - prefers a high-profile midtown address for CIT.

CIT didn't return a call seeking comment.

Other prospects have come and gone without signing on the dotted line at 7 World Trade Center - among them the Securities and Exchange Commission, which had been a tenant in the original building before it was destroyed on 9/11.

Instead, the SEC wound up renting a big office at nearby 3 World Financial Center.

[BrooklynRider]

With the exception of Silverstein himself, I think it is very hard for any prospective tenant to "envision" the completed 7 WTC, its surrounding environment and its context in a development largely undecided. Just visiting the 7WTC site you are faced with the incomplete lower facade and the sub-station, which reinforces that you are sitting atop God knows what kind of electronic waves, rays, and devices pulsatingthrough you daily. The Fitterman building sits like roadkill from some long ago accident. The roads are horrendous. The Freedom Tower and new Calatrava train station construction is to the south, 10 Barclay and the Fulton station construction are to the east, BPC 5B & 5C are constructed to the north, Goldman Sachs is being constructed to the west. That building is isolated - completed or not - lovely or not - it is completely isolated. I think it's a hard sell and won't get much easier.

Oh wait, that's right, the "Museum of Freedom" will be right next store. Whoa! You're going to have to hold back the crowds to stop them from stampeding to get near it.

[Stern]

I think it comes down to this; if 7 WTC had a praiseworthy attention-getting design, it would have garnered the attention and tenants it needs.

[BrooklynRider]

True, but I do think it also loses because it cannot be positioned as a part of grander vision. The first 7WTC was monolithic and alone - facing the WTC wall. It was never a part of the WTC complex, despite its address. The new masterplan is out the window, whether anyone wants to say so out loud or not. Unfortunately, rather than abutting some new, amazing and highly anticipated district, 7WTC really sits at the edge of an abyss. There is just so much mystery about it (and the high profile coverage the demolition of the EPA hazard and highly contaminated Deutsche Bank doesn't help either).

[NYguy]

I think it comes down to this; if 7 WTC had a praiseworthy attention-getting design, it would have garnered the attention and tenants it needs.


I disagree. In the NY market, companies aren't necessarily looking for "attention-getting" designs. Just follow up on the buildings that are getting leased, and re-leased. If this building had been in midtown, it would have gotten tenants already. But even new buildings in midtown take time. The NY Times and BOA towers for instance, have primary tenants, but no others. That led to a delay in the NY Times tower for a while. It all comes down to location and the deals that are made.

But as far as this tower goes, its the World Trade Center. You can't get more attention than that in New York. Ironically, that may be the problem for some people.

[TomAuch]

7 WTC will get tenants eventually, but the fact that it's part of the WTC site may drive away potential tenants who fear working at a "target" or who are squimish about 9/11 itself.

[JMGarcia]

...or don't want to work in a 10 year construction zone.

[PHLguy]

^That too, But 7WTC will not excactly be in the construction zone, it's north of vesey street, above the WTC site. If your in a high office building hundreds of feet over the site with sound proof glass I don't think it would be that bad. Plus Freedom Tower will go up 4 years from now, that's what an average tower takes.

[ZippyTheChimp]

It will depend on what short-term (several years) changes are made when the building is ready for occupancy.

Unfortunately, nothing will change at Fiterman Hall. It will continue to be a blight. Hopefully, the surrounding streets will start ot look a bit less depressing. Items such as:

The sidewalk shed around Verizon.
The small triagular park in front of the building.
Vesey Street - partially opened to traffic?

[yyy]

History repeats, March 19, 2005


Wow - The 7 World Trade Center building looks great in that picture :) I see it is closed to be finished.

[JMGarcia]

Directly across a very narrow street (that will also necessarily be used for access to the site by construction equipment and deliveries) the FT, Arts Center, Tower 2 and all the underground infrastructure/shopping/memorial needs to be built.

The removal of the sidewalk shed isn't going to matter as Vesey is going to be an unpleasant place for a good long time.

On the other hand, if the small park opens and the area directly north of the tower does become pleasant, the construction site to the south can be more easily ignored.

[PHLguy]

^But who says Tower 2 is going to be built soon? For now it's just the Freedom Tower, we don't even know IF those other towers will rise, let alone when. and if the other three south of tower 2 go up then the construction site will be small enough that it can just be like normal manhattan construction.

[NYguy]

New York magazine article (PART I)
http://newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/realestate/urbandev/features/11718/index.html


Who Wants to Move to Ground Zero?
Larry Silverstein’s 52-story vacancy problem.

By Robert Kolker

http://newyorkmagazine.com/images/news/05/04/groundzero040511_400.jpg

Seven World Trade Center should be ready for tenants by the beginning of next year. (Photo Credit: Stuart Hawkins)



There’s a compulsive quickness to Larry Silverstein’s step. It’s the walk of a man paying $228 a minute in rent on buildings that don’t yet exist. We’re crossing a muddy expanse on the way to the workers’ elevator of 7 World Trade Center, Silverstein’s new skyscraper at the northern tip of ground zero. The stout, 52-story glass tower that has conspicuously sprouted at the barren corner of Greenwich and Barclay streets should be completed by the beginning of next year. Silverstein—who signed his 99-year lease on the Twin Towers just six weeks before they were destroyed—now has 1.7 million square feet of brand-new office space to lease.

We arrive on the 34th floor and walk out of the elevator onto cold concrete. The 73-year-old real-estate developer, short and square and tan as a yachtsman, is wearing a gray suit with padded shoulders to counteract his natural schlumpiness. On top of his improbably reddish hair is a hard hat with a flag and the slogan THE REBUILDING CONTINUES. He paces around, jabbing a finger toward the skyscraper’s floors, girders, and walls.

“The massiveness is the key!” he says. “See the steel beams going across? Look at the heftiness of it. The sheer strength of it. The massiveness of it!” He launches into a litany of his new skyscraper’s every safety feature. “We learned on 9/11 that you don’t build a core out of plasterboard,” he says. “Plasterboard doesn’t burn—terrific—but you can take a penknife and carve through it. It’s permitted by code, but it has no strength. It has no substance. Our core has concrete shear wall two feet in thickness—consisting of 12,000-pound concrete, the most dense form of concrete you can pour. It will sustain 12,000 pounds of pressure per square inch—without deflection. On every floor, that two-foot-thick shear wall is impregnated with 70 tons of steel reinforcing bars. Every floor!” He shakes his head, as if even he can’t believe it. “You’ve got a TRAILER-TRUCKLOAD of steel reinforcing bars on every floor of 7 World Trade Center!” Then he whispers, "Nothing is going to destroy that core."

Now Silverstein is selling the neighborhood to come—the 9/11 memorial, the new PATH station, the performing-arts center, and the 600,000 square feet of shopping (or “destination retail,” as he puts it) that will line the underground concourse that connects fourteen subway lines to a new glass Fulton Street subway station.

He plays up the world-class architects being brought in to design the various buildings: David Childs, Frank Gehry, Norman Foster, and Santiago Calatrava, the man who came up with the idea to turn the PATH terminal into a majestic, almost ethereal complex with a sexy shape and retractable roof. “My wife and I and Santiago and his wife had dinner together,” he says. “He’s an extraordinary guy. She is a dee-light-ful woman.”

While he paints a perfectly captivating picture of a shining downtown rebuilt from tragedy, that image doesn’t quite square with the immediate view. To the south, through nonreflective, non-tinted glass (“The most expensive glass you can buy!”), is the disaster area turned construction site of ground zero, where construction on the 1,776-foot Freedom Tower isn’t scheduled to start for several more months. To the north, there’s a straight shot of midtown—a pristine, symmetrical skyline view, sliced clean down the middle by the Empire State Building. This perspective is unique, but it wasn’t always. I haven’t seen a view like this—no one has—since the last time I was at the top of the World Trade Center.

“Look,” Silverstein says, pitching again. “Spectacular. Unobstructed, no matter where you work. Everything is column-free. And the curtain wall goes from the floor to the base!”

This is Silverstein’s standard sales presentation. He’s uttered it dozens of times to potential tenants, a cross section of Fortune 500 America, and they’ve all taken the same tour of the building and seen the same view. But so far, Silverstein has not been able to seduce one of them. As of now, in fact, he has secured a single tenant: Silverstein Properties.

Larry Silverstein has spent nearly four years as the odd man out at ground zero, written off by victims’ families, urban planners, and the media as the guy who was too broke to rebuild. He’s been continually upstaged by a series of louder, more mediagenic characters: George Pataki, celebrity architect Daniel Libeskind, and Rudy Giuliani, who sided with calls by the families of victims for a sixteen-acre memorial. Today, Silverstein has emerged as the most important player in lower Manhattan. He has the cash and the legal right to rebuild—and with 7 World Trade Center nearly ready to rent and construction of the Freedom Tower ramping up, he’s on his way to doing exactly that. “My world has been filled with people telling me what I can’t do, what I’ll never accomplish,” Silverstein says in his halting Brooklyn baritone. That he’s made it this far can’t help but make him crow a little. It’s almost enough to make him forget that what lies ahead may be the world’s most sensitive marketing challenge: asking tenants to move to the scene of the worst terrorist attacks in history.

Silverstein has always been at the center of the unprecedented peculiarities of ground zero. Pataki and the state technically control the site—the Port Authority, which the governor effectively runs, owns the land—but Silverstein’s 99-year lease on the World Trade Center is also tantamount to ownership. Although Silverstein originally had only $14 million of his own money in equity in the place (a consortium of partners put up more than $100 million), the lease gave him the right to rebuild all 10 million lost square feet of office space, regardless of the wishes of victims’ families, neighbors, or the governor. It also gave him the authority to force through much of his own architect’s design for the Freedom Tower. An initial $3.6 billion insurance payment allowed Silverstein to keep paying the $120 million annual rent after 9/11 while bankrolling the construction of the new 7 World Trade building and the Freedom Tower, but his detractors said he still lacked sufficient funds to properly develop the site. That all changed this past December, when Silverstein won a court victory forcing some insurers to pay him for two separate attacks. Before the $1.1 billion decision, reporters had been calling regularly to seek comment on confidential whispers that Larry was running out of money and that he couldn’t develop the site. After the verdict, the calls stopped.



Now, as Silverstein’s reward, the fate of one of the most valuable and closely scrutinized pieces of real estate in the world rests on his shoulders. Seven World Trade Center is more than just one piece of the $14 billion puzzle; it is, in a sense, the Ur-piece. Much of the project is made possible, or at least justifiable, only by Silverstein’s ability to get tenants for his five office towers. But because Silverstein still has just enough cash to build the first three office buildings— 7 World Trade, the Freedom Tower, and a subsequent building called Tower 2—any whiff of failure on the commercial front could slow down or derail the rest of the plan. If 7 World Trade doesn’t rent, the parts of the plan that Silverstein doesn’t control—the Gehry-designed theater, Calatrava’s $2 billion transit hub, and the 9/11 memorial, designed by Michael Arad—could all be stalled.

All eyes, then, turn to the fortunes of 7 World Trade Center. The tower has generated so much buzz in commercial-real-estate circles, rising so quickly at such a high-profile site, that leasing agents would simply be remiss in not asking for a tour. And the building has its virtues: The clear-glass-curtain wall with shimmering blue accents has impressive curb appeal; the floor plates are practical and customizable; the safety elements, like extra-wide stairwells and that concrete core, are, in fact, beyond what the city’s building code requires. Silverstein has also thrown in attention-getting bells and whistles: The entrance will feature a rhythmic flashing-light art display by Jamie Carpenter; the lobby will have an enormous $1 million LED art installation by Jenny Holzer.

Yet 7 World Trade Center has become the building everyone wants to date but no one wants to marry. For starters, Silverstein is asking $50 per square foot, easily the highest price in lower Manhattan. “The companies that have been through it think it’s great, but then they go to Water Street and can get about the same space for a lot cheaper,” says Robert Sammons, director of research for the real-estate firm Colliers ABR.

Morgan Stanley recently did a deal at 1 New York Plaza for $20 a square foot. The Securities and Exchange Commission signed at the World Financial Center, which asks about $35. Silverstein is known to have pitched Cravath, Swaine & Moore, and Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson, and they’ve all taken up elsewhere nearby. Con Edison, Verizon, and the United Federation of Teachers also haven’t bitten. Silverstein could always drop his price, or offer givebacks or rebates or free renovations—or the state could offer tax breaks—but despite a slight downward trend in the amount of available space downtown, there are still plenty of more affordable alternatives. Consider 1 Chase Manhattan Plaza, the sleek white tower with the playful Jean Dubuffet sculpture out front, which has more than a half-million square feet of space available at about $35 a foot. Silverstein’s building may be prettier, but $15-a-foot prettier?

Silverstein insists 7 World Trade Center and the Freedom Tower will compete not with downtown but with midtown, which historically charges up to double downtown’s rents. He argues that as midtown fills up, high-end firms will drift downtown in search of trophy space.

Even if a stadium spurs West Side development, he believes, his first buildings will be ready years before the ones planned for the rail yards. The way he sees it, his only real competition is two midtown towers coming online at about the same time: the Bank of America Building, asking $100 per square foot, and the New York Times Building, asking at least $75. “Seven is the much cheaper alternative by far,” Silverstein says. “For tenants needing 400,000, 500,000, 600,000 feet, they have very few choices.”


The long-term trends would seem to support Silverstein’s case. In Manhattan, there are fewer and fewer places to build, and very little new office space was built in the city in the nineties; as the economy expands, most any new high-quality tower is apt to be successful. But none of this great new demand has happened yet, at least not downtown. “There is no migration from midtown to downtown,” says M. Myers Mermel, a real-estate investor and owner of TenantWise, which tracks office space downtown. Mermel has found that for every office tenant that has moved from midtown to downtown since 9/11, four have gone in the other direction. There are reasons to believe that won’t change any time soon. Downtown buildings have to compete with Midtown South and Jersey City, Mermel says, and even with the promised $2 billion transit hub, downtown will continue to be a two-train ride away from Morris County, Fairfield County, the North Shore of Long Island—almost everywhere the executive class of New York lives.

Then there’s the X-factor: It’s still creepy down there. Before construction, Silverstein offered one prospect an early quote of $40 per square foot and was told that the company didn’t want its employees staring into a “construction site”—a charitable term for what is still, in some sense, an open grave. Even now, looking down into ground zero from a high floor, prospective tenants must wonder if their employees will abandon them, or if the best and brightest won’t sign on in the first place, because they—or their spouses and children—just don’t want them to spend five days a week in the place that terrorists have tried twice to destroy. As bad as it is for 7 World Trade Center, the Freedom Tower may be worse. “We have heard from tenants that they think those reconstructed buildings will be targets,” Mermel says.

Silverstein’s blanket response, aside from reflexively ticking off the safety features of 7 World Trade Center and its future neighbors, is the patriotism argument: Rebuilding is what New Yorkers do best; to go on living and working downtown is to show that the terrorists have lost. He also holds fast to the notion that time—and $14 billion in capital improvements—will temper fears of terrorism. In a few years, he says, the swank new amenities of the new World Trade Center will create a forward-looking place with none of the bad memories of ground zero.

[NYguy]

(PART II)

"Who Wants to Move to Ground Zero?"


Still, Silverstein can seem almost willfully naïve about how sensitive people can be. We’re in a boardroom at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Silverstein’s architects, where he’s agreed to take me through a sample pitch for 7 World Trade Center, punctuated freely with the words massive and spectacular. Red laser pointer in hand, Silverstein motions at a slide depicting a woman in the building’s lobby, heading toward an unusually high-tech elevator—another fabulous amenity. Visitors and workers, Silverstein says, will have a computer chip granting them access to the upper floors.

“The door closes behind her, and she doesn’t have to press a button,” he tells me. “There are no buttons to press! It’s a buttonless elevator system, right? It’s all automatic! Now! If she wants to visit a girlfriend on another floor, she can’t do that; she’s in deep trouble, right? There are no buttons in the elevator! So what she has to do . . .”

“She has to reason with the elevator?” I ask.

He smiles impatiently. “No, she can’t even reason. But! There’s a special button pad in the lobby in each elevator bank. There’s a button pad on each of the floors as well. But once you’re on the elevator, forget it! There will be no buttons!”

There’s a tightness in my chest.

“May I ask a safety question?”

“Sure!” he says.

“If you’re trapped in the elevator, do you have any control at all?”

“Oh, absolutely,” he says. “You have the same controls you have today. It’s no different.”

“But you have no button pad.”

“You don’t need it,” Silverstein says, exasperated. “People will be helping—communicating with you—from outside. The result is, you get about a 10 percent increase in elevator efficiency. It’s truly extraordinary! New Yorkers are always in such a goddamn rush, this’ll be fantastic!”

He throws up his hands, triumphant.

“Buttons are a thing of the past!”

On the morning of September 11, 2001, Silverstein was in his Park Avenue apartment, squabbling with his wife, Klara, about how he had to get to work on the 88th floor of the north tower, where he was moving his company’s offices.

Klara gave him an icy stare. Silverstein had a dermatologist’s appointment—after a lifetime of boating, he has a history of facial carcinomas—and there was no way he was missing the appointment. “So you’ll be there early tomorrow,” she told him.

Before he left, the phone rang. It was the captain of the Silversteins’ 130-foot yacht, which was docked at the piers in Chelsea with a clear view of downtown.

“Turn on your TV,” the captain said.

As surreal as it was for most of us to witness, one after the other, the explosion and collapse of the tallest buildings in New York, it was stranger still for the man who had just bought them. First he thought of his children. Silverstein’s son, Roger, was in the parking garage of the original 7 World Trade when the first plane hit, and his daughter Lisa was turned away by police farther uptown; they both work for their father. Others in Silverstein’s employ weren’t as fortunate. “We lost four people,” he says, “and they had six kids among them.” Lisa Silverstein saw some of the light in her father’s eyes dim after that day. “There was something that was sucked out of him—a spontaneity and almost a kidlike spirit,” she says. “Time and efficiency became the most important thing in his life. He started to say, ‘I have no time for green bananas anymore.’”

Another developer might have used the enormity of the moment to get the property seized by the state—to cut loose control of the site and the financial risk that came with it. Silverstein used what insurance proceeds he had to keep paying the rent to the Port Authority—$120 million a year, escalating over the next fifteen years to over $200 million—and start planning new towers. Ignoring survivors who said he was moving too quickly to build offices on hallowed ground, he spent six weeks patrolling the halls of Congress to win the same protection from lawsuits that the airlines had.

Then there was a mounting battle with the towers’ insurers, which had ensnared him in a Catch-22: The $3.6 billion he was entitled to wasn’t nearly enough to replace all 10 million square feet—but if he didn’t rebuild all 10 million square feet the way the lease specified, he wouldn’t be entitled to all the $3.6 billion. “Any less than 10 million feet, we give the insurance companies a gift,” he says.

He fumed as his authority over the site was questioned: by the victims’ families, by city planners, even by Giuliani, now an American hero, who in his final speech as mayor called for Silverstein’s new buildings to be built someplace else. When the Times editorial page suggested the creation of a new governmental entity to rebuild the site quickly, Silverstein’s name was not mentioned. He ignored the media and focused on wooing the man who held most of the power downtown: George Pataki.

The governor had his own considerations—should he sanctify the site as a park or memorial, or back Silverstein? It was, after all, an election year, so he took political cover: In November 2001, Pataki announced the creation of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, the state agency that would devise a master plan for the sixteen-acre site. There was no assurance that all 10 million feet of Silverstein’s office space would be part of the final master plan; Silverstein had no vote in the LMDC. “It’s fair to say he was a nonentity,” says LMDC member Roland Betts. “Larry did not have a seat at the table.”

There was another reason to marginalize Silverstein—he and Pataki weren’t exactly friends. It didn’t help that he supported Mario Cuomo in the 1994 election that had brought Pataki into office. It also didn’t help that Silverstein was pushy. “Generally speaking, everybody found him impossible and full of shit,” says one lawyer close to the interaction between the governor and Silverstein, adding that LMDC president Kevin Rampe, then–Port Authority chief Joe Seymour, and Pataki chief of staff John Cahill “all hated him.” Rampe denies this, Seymour declined to comment, and Cahill, with a noticeable lack of warmth, says, “Larry’s a very ambitious, aggressive developer. And that’s why he’s been successful.”

In January 2003, days before the commission was to choose a master planner for the site, Silverstein fired off a letter to LMDC chairman John Whitehead asserting his right to rebuild all 10 million square feet. The letter was a gauntlet: Leaked to local politicians and the media, its most blistering feature was the declaration that whichever master planner the LMDC chose would have to work with Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, whom Silverstein had already hired to devise a site plan and design for the main tower. Silverstein’s message was clear. The power of his lease could not be ignored, and attempts to push him aside would cost serious time and money. What’s more, without Silverstein’s rent payments, the Port Authority might have to consider raising tolls on bridges and tunnels, and Pataki would have another political headache.

Silverstein’s most public clash with the governor came over the design of the Freedom Tower. Pataki had picked Libeskind as the master planner for the sixteen-acre site, but Silverstein wanted Childs, his architect from Skidmore, to design the first and tallest tower. It was a forced marriage. “I don’t want you touching my building,” Silverstein is said to have told Libeskind, adding, “Danny, you’ve never designed a skyscraper. If I’m going to have heart surgery, I don’t want a surgeon who’s never done heart surgery before.”

Libeskind’s Freedom Tower may have had poetry on its side, but to Silverstein it had a small floor plate and columns that are inconvenient for tenants. Silverstein also thought it was too short and that the off-center spire was needlessly expensive. Childs, meanwhile, designed a 2,000-foot tower that twisted around a concrete core, providing the column-free interior spaces that office tenants adore.

The governor tried to force the two architects into collaborating, triggering a boardroom farce that unfolded publicly—almost like a serial in the media, complete with leaked accusations of sabotage and the enlistment of lawyers.

In December 2003, Silverstein cornered Pataki at a black-tie event at the Waldorf to plead Childs’s case against Libeskind’s off-center spire. Pataki’s patience had run out. “Larry was trying to make the pitch again that ‘we can’t do the replica of the Statue of Liberty,’ ” remembers John Cahill. “And the governor goes, ‘Larry. Look at the Statue of Liberty. The torch does not come out of her head, okay?’”

Silverstein capitulated, and the spire was moved to the side. Even Libeskind—who had sued Silverstein for back pay and bitterly described him as “not a man who cares much about how things look”—now admits, “I have an appreciation for the soft side of Larry. He didn’t get to be where he was by being a stupid man.” But if Silverstein lost the battle over the spire, he won the war. “It’s clear that Childs had a design in mind for the site, and essentially that’s what’s going up, plus a television tower,” says Alexander Garvin, the urban planner and former vice-president of the LMDC.

Silverstein lacks the shameless-showboat gene of a Donald Trump, and he doesn’t pack the sheer financial muscle of city real-estate heavyweights like Jerry Speyer or the Dursts. Nor is it Silverstein’s constitutional optimism that makes him stand out—that’s standard-issue for a developer. What’s unique about Silverstein, colleagues say, is his passionate salesmanship and his knack for betting on long shots—quite often, wisely.

Silverstein was born during the Depression in Bedford-Stuyvesant and raised within smelling distance of the Gowanus. His father, Harry, a Russian-Jewish immigrant, was a classical pianist who taught himself to be a broker of two-bit loft spaces in the rag district. Larry went to work for his father to put himself through NYU and returned full-time after graduation. Frustrated with the penny wages of a real-estate broker, he started buying cheap buildings in the late fifties with investors, fixing them up and flipping them like his idol, Harry Helmsley. These weren’t just any buildings. They were dumps in lousy neighborhoods that, as a broker, Larry sensed were undervalued. He lacked the financing and flash of other developers, but he had a marketing sensibility and an almost religious zeal in renting new property. “You’ve got to believe it to sell,” he says, remembering the days he persuaded friends and strangers to invest $5,000 or $10,000 in his buildings. “You’ve got to sell with a passion.”

[NYguy]

(PART III)

"Who Wants to Move to Ground Zero?"


He’s been married to the same woman since 1956. Around Klara, Silverstein is less brusque and frenetic, more calm and playful. They met as counselors at a Jewish summer camp, and she was teaching him how to run a dishwasher. “She was Attila the Hun!” Silverstein says.

“Couldn’t you at least call me Attila the Honey?” she says.

He winks. “You know, one of the reasons I married her was she was very wealthy,” he says. “She was earning $3,200 a year as a schoolteacher. I bought her engagement ring for $1,000. Made a sale, sold a building, that earned $1,000. Huge amount of money.”

“But basically we lived on my salary,” Klara reminds him. “By the way, it’s still the same ring. He has offered to get me bigger stones, and I said no. It wouldn’t be my engagement ring. Buy me a ring if you want, but this stays.”

Larry and Klara settled in White Plains and had three children: Lisa and Roger work for him; the oldest, Sharon, is a Harvard M.B.A. turned homemaker in California. He and Klara moved to Park Avenue after the kids grew up, but they assemble all the kids and grandkids together for jaunts on Silverstein’s yacht. The boat is his sanctuary; he’s partial to three- or four-day weekends and, before 9/11, he and Klara had planned to take it around the world.

“Someone once thought they’d make me jealous that they called the boat his mistress,” Klara says, “and I replied, ‘Isn’t he lucky he can be in the arms of his mistress and his wife at the same time?’ ”

Silverstein built his career by becoming an expert in buying and flipping properties. He bought 11 West 42nd Street, near Bryant Park before its renaissance. He built on the far West Side, at 42nd west of Eleventh Avenue, and in lower Manhattan at 120 Broadway, a 1.8 million-square-foot giant occupying a full square block, steps from Wall Street. By the eighties, he controlled more than 10 million square feet of Manhattan residential and commercial space and was a millionaire several times over. But he lacked a centerpiece, something to define his career. He set his sights on the last undeveloped parcel of the World Trade Center, at the northern tip of the site, and in 1980 he won the bid from the Port Authority to build the original 7 World Trade. Not long after he built that 47-story behemoth, he began to wonder what it would be like to own the Twin Towers. He saw them as the ultimate fixer-upper, in the ultimate undervalued neighborhood; everyone in the real-estate world knew the buildings needed renovations to command the rents they deserved. “The materials were beautiful, but in many ways it needed to sparkle,” he says. “When you walked in, it was important to look at it and say, God, this is spectacular.”

In the highly publicized ramp-up to the final bid, Silverstein was barely noticed among competitors like Vornado and Mort Zuckerman’s Boston Properties. Then, on a weekday evening in January 2001, five days before the bid was due, Silverstein was walking home from Le Cirque when, as he was crossing 57th and Madison, a drunk driver swerved right into him.

His pelvis was crushed—“If I wasn’t dead, I was gonna die,” he says—but once he’d been stabilized at the hospital, Silverstein told his doctors to dial down the morphine; he needed a clear head to formulate the final bid. His employees visited him at the hospital, where they worked round-the-clock to finish the bid in time. His $3.2 billion bid lost to Vornado Realty Trust by $50 million. “A rounding error, basically,” he says. But by the time he got out of the hospital, Vornado had dropped out—it had too much trouble navigating the Port Authority bureaucracy—and Silverstein was in. His experience with the Port Authority made it comparatively easy for him to close the deal.

What made the Trade Center more important than his pelvis? Silverstein had spent six months on the project; it had been so consuming that he had abandoned all of his other deals. “I remember,” Silverstein says, “I said, ‘I’m not gonna let my competitors get me this way. They’re not gonna knock me out like this.’”

Silverstein’s dream scenario is for each tower to make enough money to build the next one, and for all five office buildings to be completed by 2013. By then, the memorial and PATH terminal and retail would presumably be done, and Silverstein would be hailed as the man who helped downtown rise from the ashes.

All sorts of things, of course, could sink that dream. Libeskind’s off-center spire and television antenna atop Childs’s Freedom Tower is turning into an engineering nightmare, and it’s not clear who will pay to resolve it.

The Deutsche Bank building was supposed to be knocked down in December; it’s still there, plagued by air-quality problems. Fiterman Hall, an unsightly shell steps away from 7 World Trade controlled by the City University of New York, is still standing too, and there’s no plan yet for even a cleanup. A debate is raging over a proposal to sink four lanes of West Street underground, allowing visitors to ground zero to walk freely to and from the Hudson waterfront. The costly West Street tunnel project could tie up traffic for years—and has already alienated Goldman Sachs, which had planned to build its own tower where the state wants to place the tunnel’s northern mouth. Silverstein himself is 73, and he has no clear plans for succession. “The team has expanded significantly in size and in diversity” is all he will say. “And this staff, with our family, will just continue this operation.”

The Freedom Tower, meanwhile, has already been postponed a few months. If there’s any significant delay—if Silverstein runs out of insurance money waiting for tenants—he may be found in default and lose the right to develop. There’s always been speculation that the Port Authority is waiting to scoop up the lease; right now, the agency is looking for 400,000 square feet, but it hasn’t signed with Silverstein at 7 World Trade, reviving rumors that it’s rooting for Silverstein to fail.

There are those who suspect that Pataki is banking on Silverstein to default—that he’s used the developer for his insurance money all along. If Silverstein is forced out, the whole project could again be up for grabs. The next developer could ignore the Libeskind model and the Silverstein model and do anything he wants.

Silverstein won’t entertain doomsday scenarios. He’s a speculator and a salesman. The World Trade Center is the biggest long shot of his life. It’s not in him to let it go.

Circling the site in the backseat of his Mercedes, Silverstein gestures wildly out the window. He’s pitching again.

“We have major mass transit,” he tells me. “We have major residential, we’re gonna have major retail, we’re gonna have the best buildings ever built in an economic environment that favors everything we’re doing.”

We’re driving down an as-yet-unsunken West Street, rolling past a gaping construction pit. The open grave.


“How can we lose?” he says. “How can we miss?”

[antinimby]

If Silverstein is forced out, the whole project could again be up for grabs. The next developer could ignore the Libeskind model and the Silverstein model and do anything he wants.

Nothing personal but hey, Silverstein, FAIL! FAIL! FAIL! :D

[TomAuch]

I DON'T want Silverstein to fail, even though I can't stand him. As much as I dislike the FT, another developer coming in would give us a squat XYZ office park that's ten times worse! If Pataki has any cajones, he would strong-arm Silverstein and the PA into getting this project back off the ground.

[Gulcrapek]

It depends on which big developer would take over. There are of course some sucky ones, like Moinian, and I woildn't trust Vornado with anything nice (Bloomberg is the exception), but there's always Durst and Sciame. Not that the latter would take on such a gigantic project, especially with his hands already full (of cubes).

[JMGarcia]

The PA developed the original and are responsible for developing Calatrava's station. I don't see why they couldn't redevelop the office space too.

[Stern]

The PA developed the original and are responsible for developing Calatrava's station. I don't see why they couldn't redevelop the office space too.

Because they sold the WTC to Silverstein and Silverstein owns the WTC and the right to redevelop it.

[JMGarcia]

Because they sold the WTC to Silverstein and Silverstein owns the WTC and the right to redevelop it.

I was responding to the hypothetical case of finding a developer if Silverstein is out of the picture for whatever reason. I don't see any need for the PA to find another developer when they could do it themselves.

[Stern]

I was responding to the hypothetical case of finding a developer if Silverstein is out of the picture for whatever reason. I don't see any need for the PA to find another developer when they could do it themselves.

If that were to arise, I find it highly unlikely the PA would be involved since they sold the WTC in the first place, as I understand it they don't want to re-enter real estate and especially with this piece of real estate.

[Stern]

It depends on which big developer would take over. There are of course some sucky ones, like Moinian, and I woildn't trust Vornado with anything nice (Bloomberg is the exception), but there's always Durst and Sciame. Not that the latter would take on such a gigantic project, especially with his hands already full (of cubes).

I don't think Vornado would take over if that were to arise, but if it they did, why wouldn't you trust them? All there new developments seem to be nice enough.

[Gulcrapek]

I just had some serious deja vu reading that. Brr..


Vornado did the Queens Wal Mart thing and Gateway Center in Spring Creek. Both crap, especially the second one since it exists.

[Stern]

I just had some serious deja vu reading that. Brr..


Vornado did the Queens Wal Mart thing and Gateway Center in Spring Creek. Both crap, especially the second one since it exists.

You can't really compare his big-box retail developments in outter boroughs and the suburbs with his Manhattan properties. Apples and oranges.

[Gulcrapek]

I don't think that's necessarily true, but I do think this thread needs to go back to 7 WTC.



My, what a pretty facade you have...

[NYguy]

That was a very interesting article on the status of 7 WTC. I think this statement sums it up pretty well:

7 World Trade Center has become the building everyone wants to date but no one wants to marry. For starters, Silverstein is asking $50 per square foot, easily the highest price in lower Manhattan. “The companies that have been through it think it’s great, but then they go to Water Street and can get about the same space for a lot cheaper,” says Robert Sammons, director of research for the real-estate firm Colliers ABR.

Morgan Stanley recently did a deal at 1 New York Plaza for $20 a square foot. The Securities and Exchange Commission signed at the World Financial Center, which asks about $35. Silverstein is known to have pitched Cravath, Swaine & Moore, and Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson, and they’ve all taken up elsewhere nearby. Con Edison, Verizon, and the United Federation of Teachers also haven’t bitten. Silverstein could always drop his price, or offer givebacks or rebates or free renovations—or the state could offer tax breaks—but despite a slight downward trend in the amount of available space downtown, there are still plenty of more affordable alternatives. Consider 1 Chase Manhattan Plaza, the sleek white tower with the playful Jean Dubuffet sculpture out front, which has more than a half-million square feet of space available at about $35 a foot. Silverstein’s building may be prettier, but $15-a-foot prettier?

Silverstein insists 7 World Trade Center and the Freedom Tower will compete not with downtown but with midtown, which historically charges up to double downtown’s rents. He argues that as midtown fills up, high-end firms will drift downtown in search of trophy space.

Even if a stadium spurs West Side development, he believes, his first buildings will be ready years before the ones planned for the rail yards. The way he sees it, his only real competition is two midtown towers coming online at about the same time: the Bank of America Building, asking $100 per square foot, and the New York Times Building, asking at least $75. “Seven is the much cheaper alternative by far,” Silverstein says. “For tenants needing 400,000, 500,000, 600,000 feet, they have very few choices.”

Then there’s the X-factor: It’s still creepy down there. Before construction, Silverstein offered one prospect an early quote of $40 per square foot and was told that the company didn’t want its employees staring into a “construction site”—a charitable term for what is still, in some sense, an open grave.

The tenants will come eventually, the site just has to make that transition from "ground zero" back to the "World Trade Center".


Silverstein holds fast to the notion that time—and $14 billion in capital improvements—will temper fears of terrorism. In a few years, he says, the swank new amenities of the new World Trade Center will create a forward-looking place with none of the bad memories of ground zero.

That will only happen in time.

[JMGarcia]

If that were to arise, I find it highly unlikely the PA would be involved since they sold the WTC in the first place, as I understand it they don't want to re-enter real estate and especially with this piece of real estate.

The PA didn't sell it, they leased it. But I'm sure you're right that Pataki does not want them back in the real estate business.

[Edward]

Picture of 7 WTC (http://www.wirednewyork.com/wtc/7wtc/default.htm) from February, taken from the Staten Island Ferry.

http://www.wirednewyork.com/wtc/7wtc/images/7wtc_wfc_ferry.jpg (http://www.wirednewyork.com/wtc/7wtc/default.htm)

[macreator]

Great shot! I must say The World Financial Center and Battery Park City look really nice.

[gonzea]

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v488/gonzea/c6f9173e.jpg

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v488/gonzea/e62cd5ae.jpg

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v488/gonzea/2ae69757.bmp

[Jake]

Sorry guys, i've got the most current one

http://www.wirednewyork.com/forum/attachment.php?attachmentid=780&stc=1&thumb=1

I have a bunch of pics but I shot them at 2100X1600 resolution at 4 megapixels, how do I shrink them to fit this ridiculous 150K limit?, I can shrink their dimensions but they have to be really small.

[macreator]

Is it just me or are there three windows missing in the second shot of The World Financial Center in the tower on the right?

They all appear to be in a vertical line...

[yyy]

Nice pictures Edward, gonzea and Jake but I agree with macreator - do these windows are broken ?

[Jake]

I'm not sure but they might be temporary windows, the three you see in the first photos are normal windows now, on the other hand if you look at the pic I took you'll notice a window like that about halfway up Two WFC. Tha window was normal before and has been this way for a few months now. WFC windows are really four smaller windows and the covered up part is only 1/4 so I guess they do get broken. I figured out how to shrink pictures so im attaching a bunch of them. Enjoy

I don't have web space to post them but if anyone does and wants to post them, go right ahead.

[yyy]

Ok, thanks for the info.

[gonzea]

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v488/gonzea/962f852e.jpg

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v488/gonzea/77f661df.jpg

[gonzea]

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v488/gonzea/b75818ca.jpg

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v488/gonzea/0613125a.jpg

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v488/gonzea/628ba9e1.jpg

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v488/gonzea/792e0ac5.jpg

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v488/gonzea/898d358b.jpg

[mr qwerty]

In the last 3 pics, does anyone else notice the northeast corner of the top of the building being covered?

[gonzea]

Yes It is , that's why I took so many pics today. East side of the bldg top finally starting to be covered.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v488/gonzea/0b819834.jpg

[Gulcrapek]

Disappointing. The hat truss indicated in the renderings was just a PR ploy.


edit: My brain is rotting. I could have sworn there was a rendering with a hat truss.

[BrooklynRider]

I thought this building was a good start to the redevelopment of the WTC. But the longer it sits there all alone, the more disappointing it is (and the more I fear a Childs debacle for FT).

[NYguy]

I thought this building was a good start to the redevelopment of the WTC. But the longer it sits there all alone, the more disappointing it is (and the more I fear a Childs debacle for FT).

What does an empty 7 WTC have to do with the design of the FT??

[NYguy]

NY POST

WTC IN 7 HEAVEN

By TOM TOPOUSIS

April 22, 2005 -- Dramatic new images of 7 World Trade Center — the first office tower to rise at Ground Zero since 9/11 — reveal a glass-encased structure that will remake the city's skyline and restore part of the downtown streetscape.

But Ground Zero developer Larry Silverstein yesterday told a conference of civil engineers that the most spectacular parts of the building are buried deep in it