It would have been easy for Lou D’Avanzo and his Cushman & Wakefield leasing team to rest on their laurels.
While Condé Nast’s million-square-foot lease at 1 World Trade Center last year has become a dominant emblem of downtown’s resurgence as a popular destination for office tenants, the C&W group’s lease-up of 77 Water Street has also etched its way into recent lore in the neighborhood. Read More
In perhaps the final capstone to the 9/11 commemorations, Larry Silverstein has found his final tenant for 7 World Trade Center. Considered a boondoggle by many when Mr. Silverstein decided to rebuild the glass tower shortly after the attacks, it opened in May 2006 and was slow to find tenants, the first of which was the New York Academy of Sciences.
Slowly but surely more firms arrived, and now MSCI has joined them on the 47th through 49th floors of the 52-story building—it was the tallest structure downtown until recently being surpassed by its big brother. Read More
The city’s ironworkers and carpenters have never much gotten along. Falling somewhere between rival sports teams and armies at war, the construction unions responsible for the city’s tall buildings rarely work together—office buildings are made from steel, apartments from concrete (which is poured by the carpenter’s union). “Is there ego? There is certainly pride amongst these unions, and not a little competition,” said Gary Higby director of industry development at the Steel Institute of New York, a trade group.
But 9/11 changed that, or at least the rebuilding of 7 World Trade Center did. It was not simply a matter of camaraderie but also necessity. “Obviously, what you had to do after 9/11 was address the fundamental question of how are we going to create buildings that are as safe as can be in a post-9/11 world,” said Janno Lieber, president of World Trade Center Properties at Silverstein Properties. “The concrete core was probably the single most important of hundreds of safety innovations at 7 World Trade Center that went beyond code. It was a huge step forward for safety and structural robustness.” Read More
Charles Park did not grow up believing in God. He did not even pick up a Bible until he emigrated to America from South Korea at 13, arriving in Los Angeles, where a number of his relatives lived. His uncle had already been exiled there for criticizing the republic, and his grandmother joined Read More
The River is probably the only church where one of the ministers used to write the Heard on the Street column for The Wall Street Journal and now uses his iPad to deliver messages directly from God to parishioners. It is also likely the only church, at least in New York, where a penitent’s ears Read More
The currency-trading dynamos at FXDD will take the entire 32nd floor, a space of 40,717 square feet, at 7 World Trade Center. Founded in 2004, FXDD provides software and trading platforms for the global currency-exchange market.
In the world of trading, timing is everything, and FXDD’s chairman, Emil Assentato, said the firm had “seized upon Read More
The first office lease in the rebuilt World Trade Center is expected to be signed on Thursday, according to officials and others familiar with plans, as the China-based Beijing Vantone Real Estate Company has completed negotiations to take about 190,000 square feet of space in the Freedom Tower.
The Port Authority, which is developing the Read More
No tower is immune from the ravages of the ever deepening economic collapse. Not even Manhattan’s so-called trophy towers, known as such because their outrageous prestige and sky-high rents render them must-have items among top investors.
So concludes Jones Lang LaSalle, which gave The Observer its most recent, and still unreleased, 2008 Skyline Review. Read More
WestLB, the German bank that for months has scoured New York for massive new offices, signed a lease on Dec. 2 for 129,000 square feet on the 50th through 52nd loors of Larry Silverstein’s 7 World Trade Center. Sources say the average rent for the three floors was in the high $70s a square foot. Read More
From Real Estate Weekly: "Brokers say that the German bank WestLB has pulled away from doing a deal at 7 World Trade Center and is now looking at a host of options in midtown, including 114 West 47th Street, 1633 Broadway and 1290 Avenue of the Americas."
