Anniversary Tour: The World Trade Center 14 Years Later

The past year's seen the opening of 1 WTC, Conde Nast’s historic move into over 1M SF there, the opening of Greenwich Street through the complex, and more. This Sept. 11 marks not just another grim anniversary but a real statement of the WTC’s impact on Lower Manhattan. Take a look at our slideshow to see how things look on September 11, 2015.

Last week, Silverstein Properties SVP Jeremy Moss (snapped) took Bisnow around three of Silverstein’s WTC office towers: buildings Seven, Four and Three (we would’ve gone to the Bjarke Ingels Group-designed Building Two, but construction’s only up to the foundation).

Building Two (snapped, translucent model building in the center) will be 81 stories and 1,340 feet high, and its design team (snapped below) is comprised of about 75 people who are tweaking the design from an office in Building Seven.

Jeremy tells us that features like the Times Square-style tickers facing the ground under successive box-like sections of the building may or may not be part of the final product when the building opens. But the stacked-cube design, which will total 2.8M SF, will soon start to rise as the second-tallest building in the complex. Its anchor tenant is Fox and News Corp, which announced a deal to take 1.3M SF in June with the option to expand within the building. 

Construction on Building Three, right next door, is up to the 47th floor. It’ll rise 80 stories and 1,079 feet when completed by the end of 2018. The concrete core in the center was up to the 43rd floor when we visited, rising faster than the steel skeleton around it.

This means the project can be finished sooner, says Silverstein VP Sean Johnson (snapped with Jeremy). The design also makes open space for the massive 44k SF column-free floor plates that wrap around the core and allow for flexible use of the space that Jeremy says can work for “any imaginable tenant.” He says there are either leases or LOI’s out for tenants in media, tech, accounting, financial services and other industries in Silverstein's four WTC buildings. He calls it a “mass migration” to the area.

As we headed up the elevator to the 54th floor of Building Four, Jeremy had to get on a conference call. Turns out it was no problem, since the building’s hooked up for continuous wireless coverage throughout all 72 floors. From up there, the views of Manhattan, Brooklyn, NY Harbor and NJ remind you how unique the setting is. “A lot of tenants don’t want to just look into another office building,” Jeremy says. “They like being able to see the water and see what’s across the river.” Asking rents range from $70/SF to $80/SF.

Servcorp SVP Melanie Galdwell (snapped on a visit back in April) tells us that even in Servcorp’s 85th floor flagship space in Building One, you can’t feel the building sway on windy days. The solidness of the building has reassured prospective tenants, though she says the ones who lived and worked in the area while it was going up don’t need much reassuring. They could see it was being built like no other building in NYC, she tells us, pointing out that the building’s core goes nearly as far down into the ground as it rises above street level.

Three tenants who were in the Twin Towers pre-9/11 have taken space with Servcorp in Building One (snapped above from inside Building Four). Greg Carafello, owner of Cartridge World, rents about 1,500 SF in Servcorp's space. Melanie tells us he made it out of Tower Two on 9/11, and volunteers as a docent once a week at the 9/11 museum. “It’s a privilege to work in this building,” she says.