Twenty-two years after 9/11, Larry Silverstein is getting closer to a long-elusive goal: a tenant for Two World Trade Center, the 1,000-foot-tall skyscraper that's the missing piece of the trade center puzzle. American Express is currently in lease negotiations with the building's builders. The tower's grounds are now a beer garden.
Silverstein built the two gigantic towers of this legendary complex and oversaw the construction of One World Trade Center, as well as the beautiful Seven World Trade Center across the street, both of which are bustling with major corporate tenants.
But despite his success rebuilding and opening other towers, the lost tower has long vexed Mr. Silverstein, who in his new book, “The Rising: The 22-Year Fight to Rebuild the World Trade Center,” vividly tells the dramatic, and sometimes painful, tale of political infighting set in New York City.
The 9/11 Memorial and Museum, the hundreds of shops at the Oculus, and the new Perelman Center for the Performing Arts draw tourists from around the world, but Silverstein's office tower is the economic engine that powers it all.
But at 93, he is something of an unheralded hero in his hometown.
But at least the cultural and philanthropic communities have taken notice. Finally, he and his wife of 68 years, Clara, will receive the proper celebration at the New York Philharmonic's premiere gala on September 24.
He took over management of the Twin Towers and the other World Trade Center buildings just months before the 2001 terrorist attacks and dedicated every minute and effort to making their reconstruction a reality, an act he called “my right and my duty.”
“After 9/11, I realized there were thousands of people who said the right things but didn't do them,” Silverstein told The Washington Post.
He was up against the governor, the mayor, bureaucrats, banks, architects, the Port Authority, 22 insurance companies, and several major media outlets, all trying to drive him completely off the 16 acres of “sacred grounds” that he had every legal and contractual right to reconstruct.
Silverstein spoke with me recently in person for the first time since I interviewed him in early January 2001. At the time, the Port Authority was planning to sell its 99-year lease on the Trade Center. In a January 30, 2001, Washington Post article, Silverstein said that, competing with three much larger publicly traded companies, “we covet the World Trade Center. It's the prize of all prizes.”
A few days later, Silverstein's “desire” seemed to disappear when he was nearly killed by a hit-and-run driver: “Suddenly I was lying in the street. I had never felt such pain in my life,” he wrote.
But he continued to campaign from his hospital bed, refusing to even take painkillers that hindered his concentration.
When Mr. Silverstein and his partners beat out much larger rivals Vornado Realty Trust, Boston Properties and Brookfield Properties, there was backlash. The New York Times and the Daily News, both owned by companies with big stakes in the New York real estate office market, were irked by Mr. Silverstein's plan to replace all of the office space in the old World Trade Center.
In his book, he recalls a Times editorial headlined “Greed vs. Goodness at Ground Zero,” and asks, “Who do you think was chosen to play Greed?”
Mr. Silverstein first got involved in the 1980s, when the Seven World Trade Center was built on land owned by the state of Pennsylvania across from the main complex. Mr. Silverstein wrote that the first desired tenant, Drexel Burnham Lambert & Co., backed out before the lease was even signed.
His next prospect, Salomon Brothers, decided to go with the proposed Uptown project, then called Columbus Centre.
“Then Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis saved us,” Silverstein recalls with a smile. The society-loving widow who had prevented the demolition of Grand Central Terminal warned that the hulking twin-tower Columbus Center would cast a long shadow over Central Park, a notoriety that scared Salomon's chief executive, John Gutfreund, so much so that he eventually decided to move into Silverstein's building.
Silverstein replaced the functional but unattractive original Seven World Trade with an elegant, smaller-scale building designed by architect David Childs. But as I reported at the time, when construction began on the building in 2003, what should have been celebration was “hated and feared” by Silverstein’s politically powerful competitors, who said that a 1.7 million-square-foot building with no signed tenants would saturate the market.
Then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg was initially a major opponent.
“We clashed violently,” Silverstein recalls. “I had run an ad in early 2006 offering Seven World Trade for rent for $50 a square foot. Bloomberg [said] In one article, Silverstein was asking an exorbitant price: He said the space was not worth more than $35.
“I called and said, 'Mayor, I want you to know you're wrong. I've rented in Lower Manhattan my whole life. I know what values are. You don't.'”
“He said, 'Well, prove me wrong.' A few months later, I signed an 800,000-square-foot lease with Moody's for $50 a square foot. Mike called to apologize. He said, 'You proved me wrong.' I said, 'You're a great guy.'”
Bloomberg declined to issue a public apology, but Silverstein said, “he has been a staunch supporter of mine ever since.”
Silverstein blamed the mayor's initial stance on Dan Doctoroff, Bloomberg's widely praised deputy mayor for economic development. “He comes from investment banking, not real estate,” Silverstein said. “He did an analysis that said land prices at Seven World Trade couldn't get above $35 a foot.”
But the project was a cakewalk compared with the challenges Mr. Silverstein faced at the main 16-acre site. At a time when experts said the terrorist attacks would mean the end of the city, Mr. Silverstein's plan to rebuild 14 million square feet of destroyed office space seemed foolhardy to some.
His biggest enemy was the Port Authority: “From the moment the debris removal began, the Port Authority seemed hell-bent on cutting me out of the reconstruction process,” Silverstein writes, and in 2005, “they decided it was time to remove me altogether.”
Hostility also extended to real estate and government circles. I asked Silverstein whether anyone would be reluctant to entrust the rebuild to a little Jewish guy who runs a local family-run real estate company and isn't part of the global development community.
With a faint smile he replied, “I have no doubt that the situation is real.”
Silverstein was paying $120 million a year in rent for a building that no longer exists, but the PA neglected to excavate the site, making it impossible to build on. In 2008, the PA had to pay him $300,000 a day in contractual penalties for the stalls.
Insurance companies were only willing to pay half of the $4.68 billion in damages for the two jet attacks, and Silverstein's case seemed hopeless, until then-Governor Eliot Spitzer stepped in and won him “100 cents on the dollar,” he recalls in his book.
Spitzer's predecessor, George Pataki, frustrated Silverstein on all fronts: his choice of Daniel Libeskind's “master site plan” undermined Silverstein's architect, David Childs; the governor forced the two men to work together on the construction of the so-called Freedom Tower, resulting in a supposedly unbuildable “hybrid” building.
“The giant 100-ton antenna pointing toward the Statue of Liberty was going to be placed on a corner of the roof, not in the middle, but a well-known structural engineer said that its weight would have caused the tower to collapse,” Silverstein told me.
Then, he recalls, “the next thing I heard was that the New York City police commissioner was warning the governor that the towers were too close to West Street and therefore vulnerable to truck bomb attacks.”
Still, Pataki held a “cornerstone-laying” ceremony on a muggy July 4, 2004. Silverstein, Bloomberg, other elected officials, Palestinian Authority officials, and victims' families participated in a sweltering photo-op ceremony, but it was a complete sham. When the need for a redesign and a new location soon became apparent, Silverstein was adamantly opposed.
“I said, 'David. [Childs] “We'll do it without Libeskind,” he recalled gleefully.
Silverstein hired renowned international architects Richard Rogers and Fumihiko Maki to design the 3 World Trade Center and 4 World Trade Center, respectively. But they had to wait for the PA to build the “bathtub,” which had been delayed for years, before laying the foundations for the towers. The 3rd Tower almost fell through completely after the 80-storey behemoth stalled at the 7-storey “podium” level. A tough lending market forced Silverstein to ask the PA for “backstop financing” on the construction loan, i.e. a guarantee rather than a loan. The plan, approved by newly elected Governor Andrew Cuomo, will not cost the PA a cent.
But Pennsylvania's rebellious commissioners balked: “They simply didn't like me,” Silverstein writes.
By then, he had already inked a lease worth $800 million with media company Group M as its anchor tenant. “What message does that unfinished, empty seven-storey stump now send?” I wrote in March 2014.
Only a dramatic improvement in financial markets enabled Silverstein to sell enough government-backed Liberty bonds to save the project.
The centerpiece of the new World Trade Center was to be the “Freedom Tower,” a name given by Pataki and which developer Donald Trump said at the time would be “Target No. 1 for terrorists with a bull's-eye on their necks.”
Silverstein began work, but “when the foundation work was nearly complete, we signed a contract to turn over construction responsibility to the Port Authority, because we realized we didn’t have enough money. [while we were also building towers 3 and 4].
“You have to be a realist, a practical businessman. I said, if they really want it, give it to them,” he said with a laugh that hid his obvious disappointment.
Regarding two-world trade, does he think it will happen in his lifetime? “Yes, I do. I think it will happen this time.”
Now it's all up to Amex.
