Larry Silverstein, the famed New York developer key to rebuilding lower Manhattan after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in 2001, is still hard at work. More than two decades later, he has released a memoir, “The Rising: The Twenty-Year Battle to Rebuild the World Trade Center.”
The 93-year-old real estate mogul reflected this week on the 23rd anniversary of the attacks and on why he opted to write a book at this time about the rebuilding project that's defined his life.
“In truth, I really didn't expect it to take 23 years,” Silverstein said about the reconstruction at a press event from his namesake firm’s headquarters at 7 World Trade Center. It was the first tower in the World Trade Center complex to be rebuilt, in 2006.
“I really expected to finish this in a 10-year time frame. … The fact that it took this amount of time, you can trace directly to the fact that it's a public-private partnership endeavor. … Because the public aspects take more time. It’s just a fact of life. … If this whole [project] is strictly private, I think it could have been done in 10 years. It's taken only 23 years. I'm not quite finished yet.”
The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey owns and operates the World Trade Center campus, and Silverstein signed a 99-year ground lease for the former Twin Towers and other properties on the complex in 2001 just before the attacks.
A top item on Silverstein's to-do list today is lining up an anchor office tenant so he can secure financing to build 2 World Trade Center, where the land is currently home to a beer garden near the Oculus shopping center and transit hub. Other buildings on the campus include The Ronald O. Perelman Performing Arts Center that opened last year and One World Trade Center, New York's tallest building better known as Freedom Tower, that was developed by the Port Authority and Durst Organization.
Silverstein Properties also is developing 5 World Trade Center with partners including Brookfield Properties as a mixed-use development that houses about 1,200 apartments.
“Stay tuned. Stuff is happening,” Silverstein said, referring to the progress on 2 World Trade Center. He declined to comment on reports that his namesake company is in talks with American Express to become the anchor tenant of the building after it was said that prior talks with Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. and Fox Corp. as well as with Citigroup fell through.
Silverstein is no stranger to dealing with challenges in the process of rebuilding the complex. After paying $3.2 billion for the Twin Towers in 2001 and getting $3.2 billion of insurance, Silverstein said, he ended up having to sue 22 insurance companies in a five-year process before they finally paid $4.5 billion that would be used to help his firm rebuild 3 and 4 World Trade Center.
Changed neighborhood
While the journey to rebuild may be slower than Silverstein would have liked and involved many complications, he thinks his firm has done “a reasonably good job,” adding he’s pleased with the work that’s been done and what’s become of the transformation in lower Manhattan.
“The neighborhood is a totally different neighborhood today than what it was prior to 9/11,” Silverstein said. “Things happened from nine to five during the day, five days a week. If you came here at six o'clock on a Wednesday evening, or you came here anytime on a Saturday or a Sunday, you could literally roll a bowling ball down Wall Street, it wouldn’t hit anything because there was nobody. There were no cars, no trucks, no people. It was dead. … If you roll that bowling ball down Wall Street today, you would see that between Broad Street and Water Street, every office building that existed prior to 9/11 today is residential. People are living in every one of those buildings. Today, there isn’t a building left on the south side of Wall Street that hasn't been converted. … There’s a whole community down here.”
In fact, Silverstein and Klara Silverstein, Larry's wife of nearly 70 years, in 2018 moved to Four Seasons private residences, atop the Four Seasons Downtown luxury hotel that Silverstein Properties developed, at 30 Park Place, just a five-minute walk to Silverstein Properties’ headquarters.
The couple had lived at 500 Park Ave. in midtown. Silverstein said he told his wife, "'I don't want to die in this building. I'd like to get the hell out here. Let's get where the young people are.'"
They are by far the oldest people in their new building, he said. "It's a different life, a different lifestyle downtown, you see a different world here that existed prior to 9/11.”
Silverstein Properties is contributing to the shift toward more residences in lower Manhattan. The firm and its partner Metro Loft have bought the 30-story office building at 55 Broad St. and is converting that to a residential building, Silverstein’s first office conversion project, with leasing expected to begin later this year.