Weekend Newsbites: Sat. & Sun., September 11 & 12, 2010

Folks, I admit it... you don't find a great deal of "good" news on Newsbites.

Today being the ninth anniversary of 9/11, allow me to use this post to share some good news highlighted in a "Weekend Interview" conducted by Matt Kaminski of the Wall Street Journal with Larry Silverstein,

From the 38th floor at 7 World Trade Center, Larry Silverstein peers down on a flurry of activity below at Ground Zero. The sound of jackhammers and "beep, beep" of cement trucks filters into his corner office.

No superlative, expressed in his thick New York accent, appears to suffice. "Remarkable," "grand," "extraordinary," "spectacular," "tremendous," "phenomenal" - Mr. Silverstein, the real estate developer who signed the lease on the World Trade Center a few weeks before 9/11 and spent the last nine years fighting to rebuild the site on his terms, uses them all - some more than once.

On today's anniversary, for the first time, the mood around the rebuilding at Ground Zero is decidedly upbeat. Significant disputes that held everything up for so many years are resolved. Plainly it is no longer just a big, ugly hole in the ground.

The main 1 WTC building, the old Freedom Tower, has 36 floors, a third of the way up to its planned 1,776 feet. Each week or so another floor gets added, soon blocking Mr. Silverstein's view of the Hudson, for which he says he's thankful. Two thousand construction workers are on the site.

In the southeast corner of the 16-acre site, architect Fumihiko Maki's 4 WTC is well along, too. The granite slabs for the two reflecting pools in the footprint of the old towers are in place, awaiting the names of the victims of 9/11 and the 1993 WTC bombing to be engraved there. The pools will showcase the largest man-made waterfalls in America.

Swamp white oak trees cultivated in New Jersey are brought in by truck overnight. A little over a dozen are planted. There will be over 400 by the time, on this day next year, the memorial plaza is scheduled to be dedicated. The first commercial tenants are to move into the first two completed buildings in 2013. Another two office towers will be added to the complex, as well as architect Santiago Calatrava's sleek new PATH train hub.

Mr. Silverstein says he never considered throwing in the towel. For one thing, throughout the years of delay, his company Silverstein Properties paid $10 million a month in rent on the site, per the terms of his lease. The lease also obliged him to rebuild. Most of all, it has become an issue of his personal legacy.

While he spent years battling the insurers of the Twin Towers in courts and nudging politicians and agency heads, Mr. Silverstein says "the most emotional part of it" was the victims' families. His own life, he says, was spared "by a miracle, an absolute miracle." On the morning of 9/11 his wife insisted he make a dermatologist's appointment and skip a breakfast with tenants at the Windows on the World in the North Tower.

My buddy Rob was supposed to be at a morning meeting at one of the Towers on 9/11/2001... thankfully - for some reason I no longer recall - he never made it to that meeting.

Mr. Silverstein says the new World Trade Center - with 12 million square feet of office space, half a million square feet of retail, and a quarter million people coursing through the commercial and memorial complex every day - can do for Lower Manhattan what Rockefeller Center did for Midtown when it opened in the 1930s - revive and redefine a neighborhood.

The area around Ground Zero is already a different place than in 2001. The residential population has doubled, to some 60,000, while businesses continue the steady migration uptown. A Whole Foods is now here, along with some well-respected public schools and new kid-friendly park areas. Mr. Silverstein's daughter moved down with her family from suburban Westchester County. The south side of a long stretch of older, obsolete office buildings on Wall Street was turned into condos. "It's just a question of time before the north side is converted," says Mr. Silverstein.

But in this changing neighborhood, he still sees room for a new generation of office space. Goldman Sachs recently opened a brand-new world headquarters across West Street. Once the four office towers at WTC are built, its backers see the residential and commercial existing side-by-side in a way you won't find elsewhere in America.

"New York never stops, right," says the developer, who was born in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn and got involved in the family real estate business in the 1950s. "It's always getting rebuilt. Gentrification, modification, alternation, modernization, reuse, adaptive use, and you see this happening down here to an amazing degree."

The new towers were built with exceptional new security features. The staircases will be wider than in the Twin Towers and empty out into the street, not the lobby. The buildings will have two sprinkler systems. The exterior glass was blast tested, the pedestal will be fortified. Thick metal and concrete casing around the elevator shaft at 1 World Trade Center building can be seen now. The lobby has a blast wall.

Folks... every once in awhile I am indeed proud to be a New Yorker.