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.

77 Water Street.

Mr. D’Avanzo and colleagues Robert Constable and Joseph Fabrizi, who are also top executives at C&W, have filled close to 600,000 square feet at the property in recent years, almost the entirety of the building, at times braving the recession’s darkest depths to do it. The string of deals has been so impressive that even brokers at rival firms have pointed to the activity as an early sign of momentum in an area that just a few years ago seemed haunted by the possibility of high vacancy.

A recent deal to fill the building’s 16,400-square-foot mezzanine level has shown that the team, despite all its success, hasn’t turned away from the property, a postmodern skyscraper built in the late 1960s by the family-owned Kaufman Organization.

“I’ve been telling my team, let’s wrap this up,” Mr. D’Avanzo said. “If you don’t follow through to the bitter end, all your client remembers is the bitter end.”

The C&W team inked the mezzanine-level deal with the Lactalis Group, a large French cheese making and dairy company that owns the popular cheese brands Sorrento and Président.

Mr. D’Avanzo said that several tenants had been interested in the space. The floor sits between the building’s ground level entrance and the second floor and is called the mezzanine due to its configuration; its perimeter, which encompasses 16,400 square feet, steps back from the 25,000-square-foot footprint of the floors higher above in the 26-story tower. Though smaller and close to the street, the space was attractive because of its above-average 14-foot ceiling heights. The floor, in fact, had sat vacant for as long as it did so that the team could have the option of offering it to larger tenants who wanted to add to existing space or use it as an entrance.

“There were options to potentially run an escalator up to the mezzanine level so we didn’t want to lease it until we were done with the rest of the building,” Mr. D’Avanzo said.

Goldman Sachs initially leased 77 Water Street in the early 2000s, but the banking institution later reconsidered the lease soon after and never moved in. Mr. D’Avanzo said he couldn’t discuss Goldman because the firm remains one of his clients, but brokers familiar with the building told The Commercial Observer that the space had been toggling on and off the market for years.

It wasn’t until Goldman hired the C&W team in 2009 that deals at the property got going. Despite the fact that the economy was in a serious downturn and leasing in the city ground to a near standstill that year, the C&W team began signing tenants. By the end of that year, the group had finished deals amounting to hundreds of thousands of square feet with big-name tenants including AT&T, the engineering company Arup, the law firm Lewis Brisbois Bisgaard & Smith and the insurer OneBeacon Insurance Group.

“Our strategy has always been to be aggressive in pursuing deals,” Mr. D’Avanzo said.

Mr. D’Avanzo wouldn’t discuss rents or concession packages at the property, but several sources said that Goldman officials demonstrated uncommon savvy in judging the market conditions at the time and cooked up economics that would spur transactions at the property despite the daunting headwinds. The company gave the C&W group leeway to offer rents in the $30s per square foot, a competitive rate, and generous incentive packages such as work allowances that would allow tenants to build out their offices. Goldman also invested more than $20 million in the property, money that was used in part to correct what was widely regarded as its principal weakness: a diminutive lobby.

“We have a beautiful lobby in the property now,” Mr. D’Avanzo said.

Mr. D’Avanzo’s team did its part, recruiting brand name space takers with sterling credit.

It is the practice of some leasing teams to be especially choosy with what deals they do for the final slivers of a large space that has mostly been leased. After filling much of the downtown office building 7 World Trade Center, for instance, developer Larry Silverstein waited years before signing deals for the building’s uppermost floors to hold out for very high rents.

Mr. D’Avanzo and his team knew they didn’t have that luxury at 77 Water Street. Because the space is being offered as a sublease, rather than directly from Kaufman, the landlord—which, depending on the floor, expires in either 2018 or 2021—the pressure was on from the start. Because large tenants typically sign leases for long periods of time, a big block of space with a dwindling term would become only less valuable and harder to fill as time went by.

For that very reason, the building’s roster of brand-name tenants shows a clear preference for creditworthiness, officials explained.

“We had to be very careful with who we selected,” Mr. D’Avanzo said. “If you have a seven-year lease term left on the sublease and your subtenant gives up the space after five years, the space you get back with a two-year term is just about worthless.”

Mr. D’Avanzo took the same approach with the mezzanine floor.

Numerous tenants had been circling the mezzanine space and making offers for the floor but when he and his team connected with Lactalis, they quickly zeroed in. The company, which will relocate from 950 Third Avenue in Midtown, is one of the world’s largest producers of dairy products and has solid financials.

“We looked at everything, even office condos that we could buy,” said Lactalis’s broker in the deal, Michael Burlant, a leasing executive who also works for C&W. “In the end 77 Water had the right combination of criteria. It was a very cool building, the mezzanine level has great ceiling heights, and the rents are competitive. When Lactalis saw this space, there wasn’t any hesitation; they were sold.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Mr. D’Avanzo, a boyish-looking broker who has worked at C&W for most of his career, appeared preoccupied with the second floor rather than celebratory. In his determination to fill the building’s remaining vacancy, he showed the same ethos that bred success throughout the leasing campaign.

“We want to lease that space,” Mr. D’Avanzo said.

Sure enough, Mr. D’Avanzo is close to a deal for about half of the floor, he claimed. Nonetheless, even with only about 12,000 square feet of space left to lease, the agent hardly seemed satisfied.

“I told my guys, bring me a list of every tenant in the market who could be a taker for that remaining piece,” he added. “Let’s make sure we’re reaching out to them.”

dgeiger@observer.com

Once a runway, the last three floors at 7 World Trade Center will now just be offices. (Silverstein Properties)

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.

“I am thrilled to welcome MSCI to the stellar roster of top-tier companies at 7 World Trade Center,” Mr. Silverstein said in a release. “The success of 7 World Trade Center is proof that in New York City, first-class office buildings always fill up. It also reaffirms our belief that our other buildings at the new World Trade Center will be just as successful.”

MSCI is a provider of financial data to investors around the world, its marquee offering being an index of 170 global indices. There move must be an indicator of something, green building, perhaps, as the deal incorporates sustainability language pioneered at 7 World Trade Center earlier this year when, law firm WilmerHale moved in and received rent breaks for incorporating "green features" into their office. MSCI is moving from nearby One Chase Plaza.

Moving out will be two of The Observer's favorite things at 7 World Trade, the artists in residence program and a popular events space. Whether either will be relocated within the building was unclear.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

Solid.

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.”

It was the invention of the iron-framed building that ushered in skyscrapers 120 years ago. The evolution into steel-framing paved the way for the skyscraper boom of the 1920s and '30s, the race between the Chrysler and Empire State buildings for pride of place on the skyline, the iconic photo New York Construction Workers Lunching on a Crossbeam.

Construction continued this way in New York for decades, even as the rest of the world has embraced concrete as the ideal material for the core of the walls of commercial buildings. This is because of the efficiency, affordability and flexibility of this hybrid design—steel has to be fabricated and shipped long distances while concrete can be made locally and poured quickly on-site, saving precious months and dollars and allowing for more time for redesigns. Most important of all for 7 World Trade Center, it is much easier to make an unshakeable six-foot-thick wall out of concrete than steel.

But the entrenchment—and a measure of xenophobia—on the part of the construction unions kept concrete to a minimum in New York’s office market. The ironworkers tended to be old-timers, their unions run by Irish and Italian immigrants and their descendents. The carpenters and concrete workers were newer arrivals, from the Caribbean and Eastern Europe. Because a concrete core typically rises ahead of the steel frame, “there was a feeling it was dangerous, that they might drop shit on you, especially if there was a disagreement on the site the day before,” one construction manager said. In addition, there was the perception that it would rob the ironworkers of jobs.

Silverstein Properties managed to achieve a ground-breaking agreement for the unions to work together on 7 World Trade Center. “We’ve been talking about this kind of partnership for a long time, but it was 9/11 finally brought all the sides together,“ said Kenneth Lewis, the project manager at SOM, the firm that designed 7 World Trade.

The concrete core and the steel frame would essentially rise simultaneously, as though one building were being built inside another. It was technologically strenuous work, but from a security standpoint, essential. Not only were the stairs encased in the hardened core, but so too were the communications and climate control systems. "All the essential infrastructure you would need in the event of an emergency is protected by the core," Mr. Lieber said. This would not necessarily prevent another catastrophe like 9/11, but it would help occupants escape in such an event. The safety of the building was even a factor in the marketing of the building to prospective tenants.

"Buildings that achieve high aspirations are 'game-changers' making possible and, perhaps, inevitable, what comes after," said Rick Bell, president of the American Institute of Architects New York chapter.

Since then, almost every new office building in New York has capitalized on the concrete core, from the Time Warner Center to Goldman Sachs’ new headquarters, the Bloomberg Building to, of course, 1 World Trade Center. “The unions are just doing stellar work together,” Mr. Lewis said. Their partnership has progressed so far that at 11 Times Square and now Tower 3 at the World Trade Center, the concrete cores come first, with the steel frame rising after it, bringing New York up to the international standard.

For all the talk of unity, of the city and the country and the world coming together in the wake of 9/11, it is nice to know that, with much of that fractured over the past decade, at least the city's hard hats are still getting along.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC

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 him. When the South Korean president was executed in 1980, Mr. Park's parents decided to send him away, though they stayed behind.

"I started reading the Bible because it was the only book I could find in both English and Korean," Mr. Park told The Observer over lunch recently at Petite Abeille in Tribeca. "And even then, it did not appeal to me. That came much later."

That Mr. Park would go on to found two churches, a thousand-strong congregation in Cambridge, Mass., and a burgeoning flock called the River that now holds services at 7 World Trade Center—and which was featured in this week's print Observer—came as a surprise to everyone, and not least of all to Mr. Park himself.

He grew up in Seoul, where his father taught German philosophy at Korea University. He was an agnostic while his stay-at-home mother practiced Buddhism with the same fervor most Americans bring to their Presbyterianism, which is to say not much at all. "This is my rebellion, I guess," Mr. Park said with a chuckle.

But that was not until much later, after he graduated as valedictorian at Warren High School and began studying at Stanford. There he majored in computer science and economics, neither of which was particularly challenging. Meanwhile, the $20,000 his father had given him a year after coming to America had multiplied into a couple hundred thousand, by Mr. Park's estimation. His father had told him it was important that he know how to handle money. Clearly, the son did.

"The problem I experienced at Stanford was, I got all I wanted, I worked really hard to be where I am, I've got the American dream," Mr. Park said. "Objectively speaking, I'm young, I've got stimulating people all around me, who give me a good education and a good experience, and, really, life doesn't get too much better. It was really a good time. And the fact that I'm not happy, and the people around me aren't happy, what do I do about it? I drank and did some stuff with some other unhappy people. The question was, what do I do with that experience."

The partying did not last long—Mr. Park said he did not have a taste for it—but it was not until he arrived in Cambridge, Mass., where he was pursuing a Ph.D. in economics at M.I.T., that the brainy investor began attending church. Before that, he had mostly just returned to his Bible. "As it pays off, you give it a little more," Mr. Park said. Throughout grad school, he continued to invest, and his fortune reached into the millions by his early 20s. Still unfulfilled by the money, Mr. Park set his sights on a billion dollars. "I began to do riskier and riskier things," he said, "and I lost it all, $40 million." Yet it was not only recklessness but also the tech bubble that brought Mr. Park down.

Looking back, he says he does not really care about the loss, calling it "just another point in my life," albeit an important one. It allowed Mr. Park to realize he could live without all that money, that he could dedicate himself to the church. With a few dozen families, he established the Vineyard in Cambridge just as he was wrapping up his doctorate. Within five years, it surpassed 1,000 members. He even convinced his parents to convert to Christianity.

Part of the appeal for many of Mr. Park's parishioners is the intellectual rigor and Ivy League sensibility he brings to services. "A lot of people here went to an Ivy, studied science and philosophy growing up, and we all understand it does not have to be one or the other," Jin, who volunteers at the church and works in finance, said after a recent Sunday service.

"This church would not be what it is if it weren't for Charles," John Furste, the associate pastor and band leader, told The Observer after he had finished performing. "He is just so smart and brings such a different perspective to Jesus."

Mr. Park's teachings draw in part from the work of M. Scott Peck, the psychiatrist and author, and his "Four Stages of Spiritual Development." Just as a child grows into an adult, so does humanity develop spiritually. In Mr. Park's telling, the chaotic first stage was the age of myth and paganism, followed by the order of early Judeo-Christian religions, which were heavy on rules and belief, but lacked the faith and compassion Mr. Park sees in his own church. Then came the skepticism, the teenage rebellion of the Reformation, and only now are we approaching the fourth stage, which borders on enlightenment, though not in the Buddhist form, the pastor points out, as the Buddha rejects while Mr. Park embraces.

"I think New York is at the vanguard of this change," he said. 

And yet he is also equally comfortable trafficking in pop culture, and even admits to a weakness for his iPhone, though he also uses it to remind himself of the fulfillment offered by Jesus over man. "That's a disconnected place," he said of modern distractions during a recent sermon, "that's not a place of fullness."

In that same sermon, Mr. Park compared Jesus' telling of the parables at the Sea of Gallilee to an opportunity to hear the ultimate speaker at Madison Square Garden, a cross between Bono and Nelson Mandela—"Bondela," he called him, exclaiming ever so slightly in his soft-spoken, accented English, as a picture of Morgan Freeman flashed across his screen. The parishioners chuckled, a far more common refrain than "hallelujahs" or other exaltations.

At lunch later that day, Mr. Park, in addition to his numerous references to the comedian Louis C.K., touched on cultural figures both high and low, among them Charlie Sheen, Sheryl Crowe and Lilly Tomlin. "She made a joke once, 'How is it that when people pray, they are said to be talking to God, but when God talks to them, they are said to be schizophrenic?,'" Mr. Park said, in reference to a question about his comment that he had been talking to God for decades.

The same characters can be found in the Zizmor-style subway campaign the River recently launched. They feature the usual offerings from St. Augustine and C.S. Lewis but also more unusual quotes from Gaughin, Helen Keller and Vladimir Lenin. "'If I keep listening to Beethoven's Appossionata, I won't be able to finish the revolution.' COULD CHURCH bring peace?" the latter ad reads.

The pastor lives in Battery Park City with his wife, who also works for the church, and their three kids. He said he spends about 50 hours a week working for the church, which does pay him a salary—funds come from member donations—though he also spends about five to 10 hours a week investing, embracing the value model of Warren Buffett and Rudi Dornbusch, his mentor at M.I.T, an approach that he said provides him with a comfortable six-figure salary. "I don't believe in efficient markets theory," Mr. Park said. "There are always inefficiencies in the market that can be exploited."

He is also good at spotting inefficiencies in the soul, though investing in them has proven more difficult.

Even with his gospel of love, Mr. Park does not always find it returned to him by his neighbors. "I don't blame them," Mr. Park said. "They think I'll be proselytizing, there is a ce
rtain stigma involved. It's funny, I had more cache as a venture capitalist. It used to be the other way around, that pastors were respected."

Favoring smart, colorful gingham shirts and loose slacks, the trim and unimposing Mr. Park could easily pass for the money man he once was; and he still embraces the finer things in life, even if he is not indulging. Part of the reason he suggested Petite Abeille, the Belgian bistro on West Broadway, for lunch is because of its expansive beer selection. He ordered a beer, suggested The Observer do the same, and suggested one a few more times, as he thoroughly enjoyed his (yet it was the only one he had during the course of our two-hour meal).

"I feel more comfortable in secular culture, to be honest," Mr. Park admits. "The church culture can be weird."

RELATED: Spirit in the Sky. >>

mchaban [at] observer.com | @mc_nyo

The River has held services on the 40th floor of 7 World Trade Center since the fall of 2009. The church rents the space on Sundays from the New York Academy of Sciences. There are  double helixes of DNA on the carpet and a shrine to Charles Darwin near the entrance. The views stretch from Jersey City to J.F.K., and to ground zero right below, with all its fervor, religious and otherwise.

"When we came here, the view, it just allowed us to have fellowship even more," said Amos, who has been attending the River for three years with his wife and was wearing red chinos, a cardigan and a bow tie. "As New Yorkers, we rarely take the time to look up--we always look down or we look straight ahead. Being here helps us look up, it helps bring us closer together and bring us closer to God."

RELATED: The River Runs Through Him. >>

Besides, the skyscraper space is cheaper than the church's old digs in a bank building on Broad Street. Many of the parishioners appreciate the apparent irony of their nave in the sky, and to the academy they are just another rent check. "Pepsico, Pfizer, various alumni organizations, an Irish entrepreneurship group and the Israeli Consulate are among the many external groups, like the River, that rent our space for their own events with no connection to NYAS," the academy's director of public outreach wrote in an email.

The River was founded by Charles Park, an economics Ph.D. from M.I.T. who launched a similar church in Cambridge, Mass., before setting up shop in Greenwich Village. While that Boston parish, called the Vineyard, grew to more than 1,000 members in five years, Mr. Park has only reached a few hundreed here in the same span. Still, he says he sees even greater potential in New York, in no small part because God told him, afer he denied it repeatedly, that his duty was to preach at ground zero.

"There's more to life, and I think New Yorkers instinctively feel that," Mr. Park told The Observer over lunch at Petite Abeille on West Broadway, where he ordered the tuna salad sandwich and a Palm beer between services two Sundays ago.. "Why do people come to New York? I think they want more out of life than could happen in their hometown. I think they want to experience something bigger, more refreshing, a bigger dimension of life. That is what this city is about. It is a city of dreams." A city where an out-of-town pastor could hope to win converts with Zizmor-style subway ads, too.

A mix of tent revival and corporate boardroom, with a healthy dose of pop culture, Mr. Park's sermons move easily between St. Matthew, Bono and Schopenhauer. A band on the light side of indie rock opens and closes things, though there are no Bibles or hymnals--just a PowerPoint presentation, which then gets posted at TheRiver.org. The flock is drawn from across the city, particularly Wall Street, with attire ranging from the frumpy (baggy striped sweaters, khakis) to the fashionable (4-inch snakeskin stilettos, pageboy caps).

Call it the Gotham Gospel.

"I hated going to church growing up," Collin, a recent N.Y.U. grad who now volunteers as the River's youth coordinator, said. Dressed in a hoodie over a flannel shirt and jeans, Collin was cutting doughnuts in half to go with jugs of Dunkin Donuts coffee and cartons of Minute Maid for after services. "I had an agnostic mom and a lapsed Catholic dad, and we basically went out of this sense of guilt. Here, the sermons are tailored to life in the city."

In many ways, the church reflects its founder. Mr. Park emigrated from South Korea as a teenager, got into Stanford and then M.I.T. and made more than $40 million on the stock market. "I was living the American dream, I had everything, and yet I was still miserable," he said. That led him to attend church in Boston before founding his own.

Mr. Park sees much the same anguish in his fellow New Yorkers. His favorite parable is the one told by the comedian Louis C.K. on The Late Show with Conan O'Brien two years ago, "Everything's Amazing and Nobody's Happy."

"If everyone thought, 'My job is to bring fullness of life to those around me,'" Mr. Park said, "New York would be a much better place."

RELATED: The River Runs Through Him. >>

mchaban [at] observer.com | @mc_nyo

In the world of trading, timing is everything, and FXDD’s chairman, Emil Assentato, said the firm had “seized upon this opportunity in the real estate cycle” to lock down highly economic rates.

And while the financial universe may be contracting, it’s apparently not a bad time to be trading currencies. Although FXDD was originally looking for 20,000 square feet of space, that figure more than doubled due to the company’s rapid growth.

Soon after developer Larry Silverstein began showing the World Trade Center building in 2007, company representatives from Tradition North America, which has a minority stake in FXDD, toured the property. When ABN AMRO was bought by the Royal Bank of Scotland, its space in the building (which had been elaborately built out but never actually used) became available for sublet, and FXDD sprang at the opportunity.

Hank Walker of Grubb & Ellis, who represented FXDD in negotiations, said the company wanted “a prestigious Wall Street address in the center of currency trading. The firm never considered midtown.”

Joe Harkins and Barry Lewen of Grubb & Ellis represented sublandlord the Royal Bank of Scotland.

egeminder@observer.com

The Port Authority, which is developing the Freedom Tower, is slated to approve the deal at its Thursday board meeting, allowing the lease to be signed, those familiar with discussions said. Vantone, which signed a letter of intent to take space with the Port Authority in June, plans to create something of a portal for Chinese and American companies doing business with each other—dubbed “China Center”—in the 102-story tower that is scheduled for completion in 2013.

Should the lease indeed be signed, it would put an end to years of flirtations with Lower Manhattan and the World Trade Center by Vantone. The firm has nearly had deals at two other downtown locations, Larry Silverstein’s 7 World Trade Center and L&L’s 195 Broadway, both of which fell apart late in the negotiating process.
The deal is for five full floors of the tower and the terms of the deal are said to be similar to what was outlined in June. Those terms called for an approximately 23-year lease with rents that start at around $80 a square foot.

In January, the Port Authority transferred rent incentives once intended for a JPMorgan Chase tower downtown to the Freedom Tower, perhaps a sign that Vantone will benefit from the subsidies, valued at $5 a square foot. The Partnership for New York City has also committed money for the project.

A spokesman for the Port Authority, Stephen Sigmund, said in a statement that the agency is “continuing to work to turn the term sheet into the first signed lease for a private tenant in the building.”

Brokerage Jones Lang LaSalle, led by Peter Riguardi, represents Vantone and advises the Port Authority.

Between the federal, city and state governments, more than 2.3 million square feet has been committed at the four-tower World Trade Center complex, though leases have not yet been signed. That leaves more than 7 million square feet completely unaccounted for, including two entire planned buildings, Mr. Silverstein’s Towers 2 and 3, with no prospective tenants. Mr. Silverstein and the Port Authority are in discussions on how to adjust his lease and allow for him to build some of his towers amid the recession.

ebrown@observer.com

So concludes Jones Lang LaSalle, which gave The Observer its most recent, and still unreleased, 2008 Skyline Review.

Since July, average asking rents at trophies like 9 West 57th Street, the GM Building and 7 World Trade Center have dropped 6.2 percent, from $109.61 a square foot to $102.85. Given how much more negotiable asking rents are these days, we’re guessing the taking rents are probably below $100. Either way, that means substantial savings for tenants.

Researchers at JLL identify trophy properties as a subset of the overall Class A office sector. And that sector, too, has proven permeable to economic malaise. According to the review, in the one month separating the end of November from the end of October, average Class A asking rents dropped from $84.72 to $83.10 a square foot. Moreover, a number of leases in the works were re-traded at 10 to 15 percent below the original terms.

JLL’s wonk in chief James Delmonte said, in a statement, that he expects the situation will only worsen: “For the overall Class A office market, we are projecting asking rents to decline by as much as 25 percent to 30 percent by year-end 2009.”

drubinstein@observer.com

Such is the enormity of the good news for a Downtown wracked by the collapse of Wall Street that Mayor Bloomberg and Mr. Silverstein will, in roughly 15 minutes, formally announce the lease at a pomp-filled news conference on the tower's 52^nd (and top) floor.

It's particularly sweet for Mr. Silverstein, who has seen a number of would-be tenants toy with the idea of taking some of the remaining 10 floors in his glassy skyscraper, including NBC and HSBC, only to back out. Even so, Mr. Silverstein isn't entirely home free. Seven floors, or 17 percent, of the 1.7 million-square-foot building, which opened in 2006, remain empty.

Sources say that 7 World Trade's eco-friendliness and operational efficiency were deciding factors in WestLB's decision to move Downtown. The tower is a LEED Gold building, and its column-free floors and tight building core will allow WestLB to house its entire New York City branch on just three floors. WestLB right now has offices scattered throughout the city, including its main office of 60,000 square feet at 1211 Avenue of the Americas. The bank plans to relocate Downtown in the second quarter of 2010.

CB Richard Ellis' Mary Ann Tighe and Stephen Siegel represented Silverstein Properties in the transaction. Scott Klau, Robert Eisenberg and Mark Weiss of Newmark Knight Frank represented WestLB.