If you build it, they will come. Promise. (Edward Reed/Flickr)

One of the big debates that has been raging around the rezoning of Midtown East is how it might impact development already underway around the city, much of it funded in part by the public sector, and thus taxpayers. Should these projects fail, Joe Public could lose out on his investment.

The World Trade Center and Hudson Yards have been two focal points, but Manhattan West, which broke ground yesterday, ought to be considered, too. While the project's backers bragged at the groundbreaking about building without public subsidy, they are still competing for the same anchor tenants as their rivals further east. Furthermore, the $2 billion the city contributed to the construction of the 7 train nearby is to be paid back through property taxes on the new projects. No new development, no bond proceeds, big trouble for the city.

Still, Mayor Bloomberg is standing by the decision to fast-track the Midtown rezoning and ensure it gets completed this year.

"There's lots of development going on all over the city, not only on the West Side but downtown, at the World Trade Center, in Brooklyn and Long Island City," the mayor said. "People are surprised by how much interest there is."

Still, the mayor thinks there are provisions being taken to protect these projects. "That's why we set the five year sunrise," the mayor said, referring to the delay in the rezoning taking effect until 2017. Some landlords have complained about the delay, as has Post columnist Steve Cuozzo.

"We think that's a decision to give people plenty of breathing room to get their projects off the ground," the mayor said of the sunrise provision.

John Zuccotti, the former Brookfield chairman who was on hand for the groundbreaking yesterday was unconcerned about the Midtown East rezoning, as well. "I think the rezoning will come in its time, but it won't be as tranformative as this because they're building where there are already office building," Mr. Zuccotti said. "Here there was nothing, and it's all gonna change." It is this total transformation, this neighborhood from nothing, its brand-new glowing greatness, that will make the project so appealing (and cheaper) to companies and residents.

Not that the transformation comes as a surprise to Mr. Zuccotti.

"It all started with Battery Park City," he said, where Brookfield (then Olympia and York, still led by Mr. Zuccotti) was one of the first builders, creating the World Financial Center. "I was there when the ships left, and it was clear we had to find a whole new use for the West Side. My father took me to the Normandie when it was on fire, so I remember the old West Side, and it's not that anymore, hasn't been for a long time."

"From Nelson Rockefeller to Michael Bloomberg, that's been the transformation, and here we are."

“With today’s groundbreaking, we’re taking a major step forward in the transformation and rebirth of the Far West Side of Manhattan,” Mayor Michael Bloomberg said from the podium at the corner of 33rd Street and Ninth Avenue.

Behind him stood the Farley Post Office, some day to become a grand new entrance for Penn Station. In front of him, earth movers had already begun tearing up this former parking lot, making way for one of the project's two 60-story office towers. Directly across the tracks below, on 31st Street, construction workers had not even stopped for the groundbreaking ceremony as they prepped the southwest corner for a residential tower that will rise there. All three towers and a large retail building on the northwest corner are being designed by Ken Lewis and SOM.

Ric Clark, Brookfield's Chief Executive, told The Observer after the ceremony that the project had actually been ready to move forward last year, but the market felt better now, particularly for the inclusion of apartments. "We weren't sure if we would be building one tower at first, or two, but as things progressed, it just made more sense, in terms of economic and market conditions," Mr. Clark said. He had on a long navy overcoat to stave off the cold of the winter morning groundbreaking.

Brookfield has actually controlled most of the parcel since the 1980s, but in the middle of last decade, it acquired the piece Mr. Clark was standing on, at the northeast corner of the site. This unlocked the next important piece of the project, which was determining to build to construct any buildings along the edges of the site. That way, the foundations and cores could be built over terra firma, with only a small section of each building cantilevering out over the train yard below.

In 2009, Brookfield hit upon using a concrete bridging technology that would allow it to deck over the tracks without having to build a huge steel structure reaching down to the yard, holding up what will eventually become the 1.5-acre public plaza at the development's core. Instead, this bridge will be suspended across the 5-acre site.

The final piece was acquiring a 75 percent stake in 450 West 33rd Street, the massive pyramid-with-its-top-shorn-off tower that was the former home of the Daily News and occupied the block front on 10th Avenue. Brookfield is currently redeveloping the property, with architecture firm REX redesigning the structure.

"It's finally the right time," Mr. Clark said.

The developer is still working on finding an anchor tenant before the tower will rise, but until then foundation work will move forward, and numerous tenants are said to be interested.

Correction 1/16: An earlier version of this post stated that 450 West 33rd Street was located on 11th Avenue, not 10th Avenue. The Observer regrets the error.

Mr. Rivera admitted that the protestors are "sincere," to the complete shock of Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade, but said Brookfield is nonetheless correct in postponing the clean-up because the freezing rain could drive protesters away sooner. He compared those at the protest to the people waiting in line for the new iPhone at the Fifth Avenue Apple Store--or, as he puts it, "basically young people in their mid-twenties on their parents' payroll."

Mr. Rivera said he'd return to cover the protest for his show on Sunday and that Occupy Wall Street "lied" when they said he was driven out of Zuccotti Park. Apparently his show was done filming.

After the smartest man on Wall Street, Jesse LaGreca, made a Fox News producer look stupid, it's not hard to see where the enmity comes from.

"Don't tread on me," Occupy Wall Street has no plans of vacating for city clean-up

Update: Check bottom of post for Occupy Wall Street's official response, which involves a 6:00 a.m. "non-violent eviction defense."

After being told that they would have to "temporarily" vacate Zuccotti Park for sanitation reasons by Mayor Bloomberg, Occupy Wall Street responded to what one member is calling "an eviction notice."

According to one of OWS' Media team, a young man named Luke, there is "no way" that the protesters can comply with all the outlines set in Brookfield's letter to the city, since OWS has been expressly forbidden from emptying the parks trash receptacles themselves; that the "cleaning" would include the removal of all tarps and sleeping bags, which the residents have been using to spend the night in the parks.
Brookfield's Letter to NYPD asking to "clear" Zuccotti Park of Occupy Wall Street protesters

In reaction, Occupy Wall Street has planned to clean the park up in their own, which they announced on Twitter:

Much like Bloomberg's plan, Luke told us by phone that members of OWS will be cleaning up the park in phases. They will also be going down to Wall Street, to clean up "where the real mess is," referring (obviously) not to the protesters' own leavings. The fear is that if all the protesters vacate en mass, they will not be allowed back into the park once it is "cleaned."

"We will redouble our efforts to clean up the park, but what is outlined in (Brookfield's) memo is tantamount to banning us from the park," Luke said.

Currently OWS is asking for donations of brooms, mops, buckets, etc., all to be shipped to their Zuccotti Park location, which one could argue is part of the problem that Brookfield has with the protesters occupation.

As for how Mayor Bloomberg reacted when meeting the protesters last night, Luke said that he only saw him from afar, but "knows that he was treated respectfully...if not warmly."

Update: This email call to arms has just been sent out by members of Occupy Wall Street.

Tell Bloomberg: Don't Foreclose the Occupation.
Join us at 6AM FRIDAY for non-violent eviction defense.

Please take a minute to read this, and please take action and spread
the word far and wide.

Occupy Wall Street is gaining momentum, with occupation actions now
happening in cities across the country.

But last night Mayor Bloomberg and the NYPD notified Occupy Wall
Street participants about plans to “clean the park”—the site of the
Wall Street protests—tomorrow starting at 7am. "Cleaning" was used as
a pretext to shut down “Bloombergville” a few months back, and to shut
down peaceful occupations elsewhere.

Bloomberg says that the park will be open for public usage following
the cleaning, but with a notable caveat: Occupy Wall Street
participants must follow the “rules”. These rules include, "no tarps
or sleeping bags" and "no lying down."

So, seems likely that this is their attempt to shut down #OWS for good.
PLEASE TAKE ACTION:

1) Call 311 and tell Bloomberg to support our right to assemble and to
not interfere with #OWS. If you are calling from outside NY use this
number 212-NEW-YORK.

2) Come to #OWS on FRIDAY AT 6AM to defend the occupation from eviction.

Occupy Wall Street is committed to keeping the park clean and safe —
we even have a Sanitation Working Group whose purpose this is. We are
organizing major cleaning operations today and will do so regularly.

If Bloomberg truly cares about sanitation here he should support the
installation of portopans and dumpsters. #OWS allies have been working
to secure these things to support our efforts.

We know where the real dirt is: on Wall Street. Billionaire Bloomberg
is beholden to bankers.
We won't allow Bloomberg and the NYPD to foreclose our occupation.
This is an occupation, not a permitted picnic.

The Commercial Observer: So, why don’t you assess your progress over your first 60 days at Brookfield?

Mr. Rudin: It’s been terrific. I wouldn’t quite call this my midterm report card, but I’ve been here for two months, and to the extent that there have been any surprises they’ve all been pleasant.

What kind of surprises?

I wouldn’t even call them surprises, but the quality of the people, the strength of the office, and the individuals in New York and the other people I’ve met, both in New York and around the country, have been outstanding.

How have you been spending your time since joining Brookfield?

One of the things I endeavored to do was get to every office right away, which I did. My last visits were to Denver and Minneapolis, and I accomplished that two weeks ago. And I was very impressed, as I said, by the portfolio and the people.

I’ve been to, in this order, Boston, Washington, Houston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Denver and, finally, Minneapolis. I would say that, certainly, each marketplace has a different dynamic, but I would say we have top professionals in each of those markets. Each one has a different dynamic depending on where the market is.

When I started, I wanted to get an understanding of the organization, both with and without New York City, and I’ve really gotten the opportunity to understand the capability of the key individuals here. And I happened to join at an opportune time. We really have a tremendous amount of leasing activity throughout the portfolio—so part of my job is not to get in the middle of anything and not foul anything up.

Do you worry that, as you continue working at Brookfield, your allegiances will shift to Canada? Is there any chance of your turning into a Canuck?

Well, I have been to Toronto, and I’m catching up on my hockey rules.

It’s probably not a huge surprise to many real estate brokers here in New York, but I wonder if a lot of people forget just how big Brookfield is? Behind SL Green and Vornado, it’s the third largest office landlord in the city.

We’re a very understated organization, with one of the best portfolios in the city. But I’ll tell you one thing: when I thought about making this change I was coming from a 100-plus-year organization with a very strong culture and going to a 100-plus-year-old organization with a very strong culture. And that’s what facilitated my decision; and now, whether we call it a midterm review or just two months, the transition has been as easy as can be.

And, while I look back very fondly at the years I spent with CB Richard Ellis and its predecessors, this opportunity has proven to be extraordinary in the short term, and I expect even better as we move into midterm and long term.

What is the latest to happen with Brookfield’s mixed-use project on the Hudson Rail Yards near Ninth Avenue? Is there any progress since earlier this year?

We’re going ahead with the platform in the first quarter of next year. It’s been designed and we have most of the approvals in place. We’ve substantially value-engineered it so that it will be coming in at some number well under $300 million.

And with the site itself—while we have been fairly quiet—we’ve had a number of selective and good conversations with people about it. Many of them were unaware of a few things: first, that the cores of the two lead buildings will be on terra firma; also that we can develop and deliver the first building in 2015; and that the deck, as I mentioned, is designed, approved and being brought in at a manageable price.

One thing Ric Clark had mentioned to me earlier this year is that, while many other developers were scrambling at the outset of the downturn, Brookfield immediately contracted a new engineering study at the site, which resulted in a lot of savings.

We definitely put that time to good use. And we’re seeing that, with new technology, it will be safe, secure and also completely value-engineered.

Nearby that site, Brookfield is also repositioning 450 West 33rd Street, the former Daily News and U.S. News & World Report building. What’s happening at the site now?

We’re in the process of developing a scheme for that building. We have an architect engaged to start looking at some different scenarios. That has attracted a lot of attention, both because it sits in the middle of that neighborhood and also because its footprint provides a cost-effective alternative for a lot of different types of users, from financial services to those in the publishing or advertising arenas.

Do plans for that building run in tandem with the plans for the rail yard project, being as they’re so close to one another and that they’re both being envisioned as part of a project to create something of a brand-new neighborhood in Manhattan?

There is a separate ownership, in part, but we think that they’re going to be synergistic. So you have an opportunity to go into a state-of-the-art new product or you have the opportunity to go into a more cost-effective alternative in a building that’s among the most solidly built in the City of New York—and with larger floor plates and ceiling heights in a location that’s only going to be improving with time.

It’s an interesting building. I used to work there.

And, as the world goes around, in my prior life at Edward S. Gordon, I was part of the leasing team for the building many years ago. So it’s déjà vu all over again.

jsederstrom@observer.com

- Max Abelson

It is unclear where Dow Jones and The Journal will resettle downtown. Companyexecutivessay they're keen to return to their former home at the World Financial Center-abandoned on Sept. 11-but are also mulling other locations in the area.

Paul Steiger, managing editor of The Journal , was traveling and unavailable for comment. But Dow Jones vice president Steve Goldstein confirmed the decision to stay near Wall Street. "We will remain downtown," Mr. Goldstein said. "While we've looked at a lot of other locations, our goal is to stay at the World Financial Center if possible."

Dow Jones' decision ends a period of geographic uncertainty for the company and its flagship newspaper. Since Sept. 11, both Dow Jones employees and The Journal 's staff have worked out of temporary spaces in New York and New Jersey.

Recently, Dow Jones made serious inquiries about moving its and The Journal 's headquarters out of the downtown and up to the midtown area. One source familiar with the company's search said that Dow Jones had priced two sites-including one near Penn Station.

Utlimately, Dow Jones decided to stick close to Wall Street. For advocates of lower Manhattan, the return of The Journal and Dow Jones is certain to be a boon, both economically and symbolically. The company intends to bring roughly 400 employees back to the area-not an insignificant number in terms of financial impact. Dow Jones and the 113-year-old Journal are also among the most recognized and influential names in the financial world.

"The presence of The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones in lower Manhattan will strengthen our effort to market international headquarters to the world investment community," said Kathryn Wylde, the president of the New York City Partnership, an advocacy group for New York businesses.

Still, it's uncertain when Dow Jones and The Journal might return to the World Financial Center. The paper's lease of seven floors inside the World Financial Center will expire in 2005, and currently Dow Jones is shopping for half that space for sublease.

As for the remaining space, the company has yet to set a move-in date. The Journal and Dow Jones had targeted May 1 as a date for reconstruction to begin on the damaged World Financial Center offices, but that date has been pushed back several days amid charges by both Dow Jones and its employee union that the clean-up of the site is incomplete. A test recently conducted by Dow Jones found traces of asbestos on the firm's 11th floor. Mr. Goldstein now says the reconstruction will begin on May 6, with the company looking to move back in either in late July or early August.

That's a significant delay from initial estimates about when The Journal would return.

On Sept. 24, 2001, executives of Brookfield Properties, the World Financial Center's landlord, pledged to have most tenants back in two months. As of today, half the firms-but only 25 percent of the total office space in the building-have returned. Returning firms include Deloitte & Touche, the Battery Park City Authority and Revco. Dow Jones, CIBC and Lehman Brothers have yet to come back.

Quietly, sources at Brookfield expressed exasperation at firms' unwillingness to accept the government standards for safety in the building. But Ric Clark, chief executive of Brookfield Properties, would say only that "we've encouraged all of our tenants to hire private companies for testing … and we've been aggressively testing and have had clean-up efforts in place since Sept. 13." Mr. Clark said the company's own tests meet or exceed city, state and federal environmental-protection standards. Brookfield is testing again on the 11th floor, in response to the results of Dow Jones' independent testing firm, and is awaiting the new results.

Dow Jones raised the clean-up issue with Brookfield Properties as it deliberated moving to midtown. A memo sent to union members by IAPE/Communications Workers of America Local 1096, which represents Dow Jones and Journal employees, noted that Dow Jones "began sniffing around" at other properties, according to Guy Nardo, the Dow Jones vice president of general services, because the company wished to alert Brookfield that it had other options.

Mr. Goldstein said, "We are negotiating with Brookfield. This is part of that process. It's only prudent that we've looked at other locations.

"Brookfield has been very accommodating," Mr. Goldstein continued. "They've done everything we've asked them to do. They understand our position that we won't return until it's safe. But we owe it to our stockholders to look at other downtown locations and determine the most prudent place to be."

(A spokesperson for Brookfield said the company doesn't comment on going investigations.) Ron Chen, a copy editor with The Journal and president of IAPE, said that his colleagues want to make sure Dow Jones considers all its options before returning to the World Financial Center, and that this effort is genuine and not merely a negotiating tool.

"From our conversations with management, all indications are that once the lease comes due, they will review all their options," Mr. Chen said. But he added, "Whether they're saying this because they really mean it or because they want a better deal with Brookfield is hard to tell."

Throughout The Journal 's displacement, sources from the paper have indicated a strong desire not to return to the World Financial Center-both because of the challenges to commuting and convenience the site still presents, and also because of the terrible memories that people still have of Sept. 11. Mr. Chen told Off the Record that when Dow Jones decided against returning to four of its seven floors at the World Financial Center-and in the process, permanently relocating 300 employees to New Jersey-it should have abandoned the site completely.

"We believe," Mr. Chen said, "given out company history and our product, that we should maintain a presence in lower Manhattan. But it doesn't have to be in the World Financial Center."

-with Tom McGeveran

The New York Times sports section could look very different by mid-summer, as it continues to draw the attention of executive editor and crazed college-football fan Howell Raines, sources at the paper said.

"Howell wants to shake things up," said one Times source. "There's a sense from the higher-ups that sports is not as national as the rest of the paper. They want to change that."

Part of this would involve, according to sources, de-emphasizing what are considered minor beats in the metropolitan region-the Devils, Islanders and Nets-in favor of more national stories. It would also include new, higher-profile assignments for tennis and Olympics writer Selena Roberts, National Football League beat writer Mike Freeman and Mike Wise, who currently covers pro basketball. Sources said one possible scenario would have Mr. Freeman and Ms. Roberts receiving their own columns, with Mr. Wise moving from the N.B.A. beat to write features.

Ms. Roberts and Mr. Wise did not return calls for comment. Mr. Freeman, who almost left the paper in late March to become a columnist for the S t. Louis Post-Dispatch -his fiancée even planned a going-away party, said a source-was unsure if he would become a columnist at the Times . "I'm not sure what I'm going to do yet," Mr. Freeman said.

Any potential column space for Mr. Freeman and Ms. Roberts might depend on columnist Harvey Araton, who sources indicated was mulling an offer to write for the paper's Metro section. When reached, Mr. Araton declined to go into details but did say: "There's been some discussion of moving to another part of the paper. For the time being, nothing's been finalized. I'm still writing the column and I enjoy doing so."

Neither Times sports editor Neil Amdur nor Mr. Raines returned calls for comment.

-S.P.

That Steve Brill is some barrel of laughs. The founder of the late, humorless media magazine Brill's Content tried to get a rise out of his old Primedia pals after Primedia's New York magazine tweaked Mr. Brill by naming him to its "Straight 25: New York's Un queerest Folks" list in its "Gay Life Now" issue.

After the Big Gay New York hit newsstands on April 22, Mr. Brill-who until October of last year ran his Content and Inside.com in a complicated joint venture with Primedia-dashed off an e-mail to Primedia chief executive Tom Rogers and Primedia vice chairman and general counsel Beverly Chell complaining that being named to the "Straight 25" was "outrageous slander" and a violation of the non-disparagement clause he signed with the company on his way out the door.

Mr. Brill, who confirmed to Off the Record that he sent the e-mail, said he was just joking. But one Primedia source said that at least for a few moments, Mr. Rogers and Ms. Chell were worried they had a new legal tussle with the mercurial Mr. Brill.

Mr. Brill scoffed at that suggestion, and forwarded us Ms. Chell's reply to his missive.

"Steve, we want to assure you that we had no intention of denigrating you by suggesting you are one of the straightest New Yorkers," Ms. Chell wrote. "I can assure you no one here had any input. Not sure what I would have said if I was asked." She added: "If you want to escape the list next year, I would ditch the bespoke tailoring and suspenders."

When asked if she took Mr. Brill seriously, Ms. Chell said: "Does it look like I took him seriously?"

-Gabriel Snyder

Call him "Li'l Brill": John Battelle, the founder of the formerly-white-hot-but-now-cold-dead Industry Standard , is launching a quarterly media review.

Since the Industry Standard went out of biz last year, Mr. Battelle has been teaching a course called "Making a Media Review" at the University of California at Berkeley's journalism school. Borrowing a page from famed law professor Alan Dershowitz, Mr. Battelle put his class to work on a publication called The Big Story , which will examine how the media covers a current, major news event. The first Big Story -which explores coverage of Sept. 11-is due out in a few weeks.

"It's a way of criticizing and understanding big corporate media," Mr. Battelle said of his new title, which at this point will only be available around Berkeley.

Mr. Battelle hopes that The Big Story will live for a second issue, but that will depend on finding a funding source. The Big Story , Mr. Battelle made clear, is not a business enterprise. "As we've seen, the idea of a commercial media review is sort of a non-starter," he said.

In addition to his journalism students, Mr. Battelle has also lined up some pros to write for the first issue, including Michael Elliott, editor at large for Time , and Bill Drummond, the former Jerusalem bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times .

Mr. Battelle said that he was still cooking up an idea for a new, real magazine. "As I shake off the blows from the Standard ," he said, "I'm just one of those weird people who goes to the newsstand and says, 'There's nothing here I want to read'-so I go and make it."

-G.S.

The New York Times has settled on a Los Angeles bureau chief. John Broder, currently the Washington editor under D.C. bureau chief Jill Abramson, will be heading west over the summer. Asked why he was going, Mr. Broder said, "Romance! Adventure! A percentage of the gross! Isn't that why everyone goes to Hollywood?"

The L.A. bureau-chief job has been vacant since last summer, when Todd Purdum moved to D.C., where he's now covering the State Department. Adam Nagourney, the chief New York political correspondent, was supposed to replace Mr. Purdum shortly after last year's mayoral election, but in the wake of Sept. 11, executive editor Howell Raines and Mr. Nagourney decided that he could best serve the paper by covering New York politics as the city, state and federal government worked to rebuild lower Manhattan.

Before joining The New York Times , Mr. Broder worked for the Los Angeles Times from 1985 to 1997. But he only worked in L.A. for his first two and a half years with the paper; for the last 15 years, he's lived in Washington. Mr. Broder said he was ready to cover a new story. "After a certain amount of time-with the exception of the impeachment and Sept. 11-the Washington story takes on a certain amount of predictability," he said. "And after going through it three or four cycles, it was time to write about something else." Mr. Broder also noted the old adage that politics is show business for ugly people. "I want to go where the beautiful people are," he said.

-G.S.

George W. Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld plead that their new war

on terrorism will require a severe clampdown on media access, the public's

appetite for up-to-the-minute leaks and inside reporting shows no sign of

abating.

Part of this is generational,

of course. Lines like Mr. Rumsfeld's "the Defense Department is not going to

discuss operational issues" won't cut it with an audience that got accustomed

to hearing about grand-jury testimony as soon as it was given, blue Gap dresses

and their stains, and admissions of affairs during allegedly closed police interviews.

But in this new battleground,

it is natural to assume there will be new sources of inside dope. And in the

days following the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon-and as

the U.S. geared up for a military response-people have begun passing around a

link to Debka.com, a crudely designed, Jerusalem-based Web site that offers

Middle Eastern military, diplomatic and intelligence information far more

detailed (and frightening) than what is offered by many news organizations. At

its best, Debka.com reads like a tip sheet from the desert, from people who

seem to know a lot more than Jeff Greenfield.

The Web site begins ominously,

with one-line updates at the top of the page like "German KSK Commandos Dropped

by Helicopter into Afghanistan Sunday Night, to Join U.S. and British Special

Forces," or "Russian Intelligence Officers Guide U.S.

CommandosThrough Afghan Mountains Following Putin's Offer of Cooperation." Many

of these "tips" offer little or no sourcing. Then there is a series of brief

items of about 600 words or so, often sourced just to "Washington

sources" or  "Palestinian sources" or

"Israeli intelligence sources."

A lot of the material on

Debka.com is just plain scary, the kind of stuff that makes you want to close

your eyes and hide under your desk. On Sept. 14 there was an unattributed

report of "an estimated 30 to 50 suicide killers … waiting inside the U.S.

for their orders to strike." And then there was another report (also

unattributed) describing Osama bin Laden's army as "not ragged rabble, but a

well-drilled, dedicated Islamic legion of at least 110,000 zealots, raring to

take on Western armies and unafraid of elite U.S. Delta, Rangers and Seals or

British S.A.S. commandos descending on their strongholds."

But on several occasions,

Debka.com has beaten the Western media to information that has later shown up

in U.S.

newspapers. On Sept. 16, for example, the site was reporting that U.S.

war planners were airlifting the 82nd and 101st Airborne to Pakistan,

as well as contemplating a campaign into Iraq.

This was reported before the Bush administration leaked that one of the

hijackers may have been connected to Saddam Hussein.

As a result of information

like this-and some pretty quick word-of-mouth in the U.S.-Debka.com

has experienced a massive surge of traffic in the past two weeks. Since the

Sept. 11 attacks, it has gone from 150,000 visitors a week to 250,000 per week,

said Giora Shamis, one of the two Israeli journalists who run the site. (Mr.

Shamis and his partner, Diane Shalem, also publish a weekly newsletter at $120

a year, which at the moment has 320 paying customers.) Debka.com claims its

readers include American military and intelligence officials, as well as

foreign correspondents covering the Middle East.

As for the veracity of

Debka.com's information, that is harder to assess. Considering how tight-lipped

the Bush administration is being about its war plans-and the current level of

rumor-mongering, paranoia and conflicting reporting-it's tough to cross-check

many stories about military planning.

But one Debka.com story that

looked particularly prescient was its report on Saudi Arabian reluctance to

allow the U.S.

use of a major airfield as its central base of operations. On Sept. 22, when

the Associated Press was moving a story headlined "Saudi

Arabia, Turkey Cooperating in Anti-Terrorism

Effort, Encouraging U.S. Officials," Debka.com reported that Saudi

Arabia had "refused to let the U.S.

use the kingdom's new combined air operations command center at Prince Sultan Air

Base near Riyadh." That refusal,

the Web site said, would delay the beginning of the Americanoffensiveagainst Afghanistan.

Indeed, two days later, on Sept. 24, The New York Times published a front-page

story about problems the U.S.

was having in getting permission to use the Saudi air base.

Mr. Shamis-who was born in Israel

and says he's worked as a military and intelligence reporter in the region

since the 1970's for daily papers and The Economist-said he started the site

because of the circumspect nature of foreign-affairs reporting. Journalists

covering international affairs often write their dispatches in the same

cautious and euphemistic language as the diplomats they cover, Mr. Shamis said.

Which is not to say their reports aren't accurate, he added-it's just that

their messages are not always apparent to the average reader.

The Saudi Arabian story, he

said, was a prime example. "With all due respect, The New York Times' fragile,

handle-with-care, approach on U.S.-Saudi relations has not changed in the last

10 years," Mr. Shamis said. "Hinting and not telling may serve diplomatic

purposes, but does not always satisfy the informed reader."

Ms. Shalem, who was born in England,

has lived much of her life in Israel

working as a journalist for The Economist and other news organizations. She

agreed with her partner's assessment of foreign coverage: "I think [readers]

are a lot more intelligent than they are given credit for being. And I think

very often, people get very resentful when you patronize them. And we try not

to do that."

But what about the warnings

from American officials? After all, Mr. Rumsfeld has, in his public comments,

made revealing information tantamount to putting lives at risk. Mr. Shamis said

the site's received some calls and e-mails from readers in the American

military or intelligence services to express concern. "And somebody from the

American embassy here [in Israel]

called us, concerned."

Ms. Shalem added, "They are

all very polite."

Mr. Shamis said he's not

worried about publishing damaging information. "I think we have enough

experience to put out information that will cause no harm to anybody," he said.

"Somebody might say, 'Oh my God! They're telling them the troops are in Tajikistan!'

But people who are in the field, they know it. It doesn't mean the enemy

doesn't know it."

So what is Debka.com's mission

in its dispatches from the murky world of intelligence and counterintelligence?

The two reporters acknowledged a pro-Israeli bias. "Let's put it this way," Mr.

Shamis said. "We are Israelis. So whatever bias is coming out of this, that is

possible. It doesn't mean that we are presenting and defending the official

Israeli points of view, certainly. You can imagine that officials in Israel,

the people who are in charge of whatever they call it, information or

propaganda or whatever … they don't like us very much."

Prior to the Sept. 11 attacks,

Debka.com was, according to a Google search, most popular among right-wing

sites like WorldNetDaily.com, as well as Zionist supporters of Israel

and, in a few cases, religious apocalyptics who, one supposes, wanted a

real-time account of the Book of Revelation. And in any case, having an

agenda  does not necessarily mean that

your information is always inaccurate. Just ask Matt Drudge about that blue Gap

dress.

-Gabriel Snyder

Since fleeing its headquarters

at 1 World Financial Center on Sept. 11, the staff of The Wall Street Journal

has relocated across the city and broader metro area-sometimes working from

apartments-and assembling the paper in buildings in New Jersey and on Sixth

Avenue.

To date, it's unclear when The

Journal can return to its home in lower Manhattan.

But this week, Dow Jones, the paper's parent company, started implementing a

long-haul emergency plan for The Journal, Barron's and the rest of its

displaced employees. Of the 750 people who worked in the World

Financial Center

building, 250-including W.S.J. managing editor Paul Steiger-will continue to

work from the company's campus in South Brunswick.

Another 250 will be at two buildings along Sixth

Avenue, while 40 will report from Jersey

City.

"At one point, we thought

about moving the entire newsroom," said Dow Jones vice president Steven

Goldstein. "Realistically, it wasn't feasible to do. What we want to do is try

and move by sector versus moving by person."

On Thursday, Sept. 20, with

passes from the Mayor's office, some Dow Jones staffers made the company's

first post-attack sweep of its seven W.F.C. floors. According to Mr. Goldstein,

the building sustained little damage from the explosions, but suffered serious

damage when the towers collapsed. The 16th floor-which houses Barron's-is in

decent shape, Mr. Goldstein said, but The Journal's main offices on floors 9

and 10 have "a lot of debris and dust." Still, he said, no computer servers or

other critical pieces of equipment were destroyed, and the building has no

structural damage.

But while the World

Financial Center's

owner, Brookfield Properties, has promised to have Dow Jones back in six to

eight weeks, Mr. Goldstein has his doubts. By some accounts, the disaster area

is only a tenth of the way cleared. Commuting into lower Manhattan

is still chaotic. And how can a newspaper-or any business, for that

matter-operate without phones and T1 lines?

"Realistically, the

infrastructure won't be done in eight weeks," Mr. Goldstein said. "We plan on

moving back, but we just don't know when that will be."

Indeed, just how much remains

to be done was evident in a conference call on the afternoon of Monday, Sept.

24, hosted by executives from Brookfield.

During the call, Brookfield reps

reaffirmed their pledge to have most tenants back in two months. Water, they

said, was now available for their buildings, and power would begin returning

this week. Access to the W.F.C. buildings, said Brookfield president and chief

executive Bruce Flatt, would come from the north and south rather than from

West Street.

At the same time, however,

Brookfield commissioned an environmental-damage report, and its findings have

yet to be released. A timetable for restoring telephone service, said one

Brookfield executive, was something "we don't know right now. That's something

we'll have to deal with in short order."

Dow Jones vice president of

administrative service Guy Nardo responded by saying: "We can repair our space

tomorrow, but if I don't have telephones, it's not going to do me any good."

Of course, the actual

homecoming itself will present its own unique difficulties. Though Mr. Steiger

was unavailable for comment, Barron's editor Edwin Finn put it this way: "I

think there could be emotional concerns. A lot of people on my staff saw some

pretty gruesome stuff."

-Sridhar Pappu

On Friday, Sept. 21, every

employee of Time Inc. received a small American flag in the mail. The flag,

perfect for taping to a computer monitor or putting in a coffee cup of pens,

was the gift of the consumer-marketing division of Time magazine.

"They thought it would be a

nice idea to give everyone a flag," said Time Inc. spokesman Peter Costiglio.

"It was something informal, it wasn't institutional."

Brian Wolfe, the vice

president for consumer marketing at Time, said the flags were used in a

previous promotion and had been sitting around in a Time Inc. warehouse in

Tampa, Fla., before his group decided to hand them out to all Time Inc.

employees.

Still, some at Time

magazine-which is distributed around the world, and whose foreign

correspondents need to maintain a sense of objectivity and impartiality (can

you imagine trying to cross into Afghanistan with a flag in your

backpack?)-found the gesture inappropriate.

Time managing editor Jim Kelly

said he didn't sign off on the flag distribution, but added: "I wasn't offended

when it ended up in my in basket." The question of impartiality comes down to

what is published in his magazine, he said. "As far as Time magazine goes, I am

completely comfortable with the objectivity of the reporting. There is no

jingoism in the magazine."

-G.S.

On Sept. 16, The New York

Times featured a story by David Barstow headlined "Envisioning an Expensive

Future in the Brave New World of Fortress New York." The piece surveyed

security experts, examined the safety of potential terrorist targets-St.

Patrick's, Grand Central, the Statue of Liberty-and displayed a map showing

what life would be like in the eight-block region around Times Square under

"maximum security."

And while the map labeled some

of the area's heavyweights-the Paramount Plaza, the Time & Life Building,

the towers for both Reuters and Condé Nast-it failed to label the building for The

Times itself, on 43rd Street between Seventh and Eighth avenues. Of course, the

omission seemed particularly strange, given it was a map of, um, Times

Square. 

"The map didn't label every

building," a Times spokesperson told Off the Record. "Those that were labeled

were large skyscrapers in the area. Our building is a much smaller building,

and brick rather than glass."

John Zuccotti's office on the sixth floor of One Liberty Plaza. Published in

1981, The Future of the World Trade

Center represents the findings of a blue-ribbon panel chaired by Mr.

Zuccotti, a former deputy mayor who was then settling into life as a

high-powered private attorney. The trade center, Mr. Zuccotti's report said,

ought to be sold to a private developer.

Nearly 20 years later, it appears that the man who wrote the

book on the Twin Towers may end up owning them, too.

The company Mr. Zuccotti now heads, Brookfield Financial

Properties, has emerged as the favorite among four finalists in the Port

Authority of New York and New Jersey's competition to win a 99-year lease on

the Trade Center, according to numerous real estate executives, brokers and

financial analysts. "Brookfield is a no-brainer as the logical buyer," said

Michael Cohen, the president and chief executive of the brokerage GVA Williams,

summing up the conventional wisdom.

The lease, expected to cost the winner as much as $3

billion, would add New York's two tallest buildings to Brookfield's downtown

portfolio, which already includes three of the four World Financial Center

buildings and One Liberty Plaza, just across a wind-swept square. Buying it would

allow the company to take advantage of economies of scale and would create, in

the words of one broker, "a city within a city." And that's just the beginning

of Brookfield's recent flurry of development activity: In the last few months,

the company has broken ground on a new office tower at 300 Madison Avenue, at

42nd Street, for the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce; it has leased the top

floors of One Liberty to the Nasdaq stock exchange, which plans to make the

building its new headquarters; it has begun negotiating a deal to build a new

Battery Park City office tower for Brown Brothers Harriman; and it has sought

city approvals to build a 2.5-million-square-foot office building on top of the

rail yards at 31st Street and Ninth Avenue, hoping to capitalize on plans for a

new Penn Station and the westward expansion of midtown.

Leading this charge, at least strategically, has been Mr.

Zuccotti, 63. Part Zelig and part Talleyrand (the French foreign minister who

served the king, the Jacobins and

Napoleon), Mr. Zuccotti has an uncanny knack for being where the action is and

emerging without a scratch. He survived two harrowing years as Abraham D.

Beame's first deputy mayor, weathering the city's fiscal crisis so well that

some wanted him to run for Mayor himself. At Brookfield, Mr. Zuccotti steadied

a company that had come on hard times and made it into a contender again.

Brookfield was formed out of the remnants of the American

subsidiary of Olympia & York, the legendary real estate company owned by

Toronto's Reichmann family. The company became Manhattan's largest private

landlord in the early 1990's, but it couldn't escape the weight of bad debt.

Mr. Zuccotti, once a trusted confidant of the Reichmanns, took over Olympia

& York's U.S. branch in 1990 and hung on as it buckled beneath $5 billion

in debts, fell out of the Reichmanns' hands and came under the control of a

Canadian conglomerate.

"John pretty much single-handedly kept them out of

bankruptcy," said Carl Weisbrod, who was the president of the city's Economic

Development Corporation at the time Olympia & York went belly up and is now

the head of the Alliance for Downtown New York. The company now owns 10 million

square feet of Manhattan office space, making it one of the city's biggest

landlords. Its stock price, trading at more than $16 a share on the New York

Stock Exchange, is up 55 percent over the course of this year.

So it's no wonder that Mr. Zuccotti is bullish about his

Twin Towers.

"We believe we will win. We will take it over," he told the

Toronto Globe and Mail in July.

Citing a confidentiality agreement the company signed with the Port Authority,

neither Mr. Zuccotti nor any Brookfield executives would comment for this

story. But in a conference call with analysts earlier this month, Brookfield

executives disclosed that they had lined up two financial partners as

co-investors in the project. They say they plan to refinance their Manhattan

office buildings, or sell part-ownership stakes in them, as a way to raise

money for their expansion drive.

Sources with knowledge of

the bidding confirmed that the company was one of four finalists, along with

Mortimer Zuckerman's Boston Properties Inc., Steve Roth's Vornado Realty Trust

and Larry Silverstein. The eventual winner will have to have the patience and

tact to first strike an agreement with the Port Authority, then negotiate a

settlement with the city on the real estate taxes owed by the building, all

while carefully balancing the competing egos and agendas of New Jersey Governor

Christine Todd Whitman, Governor George Pataki and Mayor Rudolph Giuliani.

To complete such a deal, you need an operator. Someone like

Mr. Zuccotti.

"John, I think, has a very shrewd understanding of how to

work with government," Mr. Weisbrod said. "He's always maintained good

relations, but the important thing is he knows how to use those relations. He

knows when to go to the commissioner, when to go to the deputy mayor, when to

go to the line operative on issues."

A Rumpled Genius?

Friends describe Mr. Zuccotti as capable and gregarious, if

a bit schlumpy and scatterbrained. He's heavyset and has a big, meaty

handshake. "He looks like a rumpled professor," said Leonard Stern, for whom

Mr. Zuccotti did legal work back in his private practice days. "He's a softy in

the sense that he doesn't yell and scream, and he has a bit of a Columbo thing

to him," said Tom Falus, a former Olympia & York executive who is now at

the brokerage Cushman & Wakefield Inc.

Mr. Zuccotti grew up in the Village and attended Princeton

University and Yale Law. He and his wife Susan, a historian, still live in a

brownstone in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, which they bought in the 1970's, when

Mr. Zuccotti was in city government.

Mr. Zuccotti has always had an instinct for survival.

Appointed chairman of the Planning Commission by Republican Mayor John Lindsay

in the late 1960's, Mr. Zuccotti managed to stay on even after the Democrats

took back City Hall in 1973 under Mr. Beame. Mr. Beame tapped Mr. Zuccotti as

his first deputy mayor in 1975, as the city struggled to avoid bankruptcy. The

acrimony was thick, but Mr. Zuccotti earned high marks from all parties, mostly

by telling the hard numerical truth.

"Even during the financial crisis, he was the one guy

everyone felt they could trust," said civic activist Richard Kahan, then an

official at the state's Urban Development Corporation.

In 1977, as he prepared to leave city government, Mr.

Zuccotti was asked to consider a run for Mayor. But Mr. Beame was running

again, and Mr. Zuccotti said he thought it would be disloyal to challenge him.

Mr. Zuccotti went to England for the summer and read Trollope. Mr. Beame was

defeated in the Democratic primary by Ed Koch.

When he returned, Mr.

Zuccotti traded on his brains, expertise and connections to get very rich. He

went into private practice with his law school roommate, Peter Tufo (now

ambassador to Hungary). He represented developers like Mr. Stern, Mr. Zuckerman

and Paul Milstein, who called Mr. Zuccotti "my cardinal." He also represented

Paul Reichmann.

In 1990, Mr. Zuccotti left his firm behind to go to Olympia

& York. Mr. Reichmann was spending more and more time on Canary Wharf in

London and wanted someone to keep on eye on New York operations. An old

acquaintance and company executive, Meyer (Sandy) Frucher, recommended Mr.

Zuccotti.

"Clearly, in hindsight, he stepped onto the bridge of the Titanic ," Mr. Falus said.

When he took the job, Mr. Zuccotti thought he was going to

be masterminding large-scale developments in New York and San Francisco. By

Christmastime, 1991, he was flying from New York to Japan on Paul Reichmann's

jet, along with his boss and Richard Holbrooke, then of Lehman Brothers, to try

to renegotiate repayment of a large debt to Nomura Securities.

"I remember how stressed out he was," said Alan Wiener, a

friend and former colleague of Mr. Zuccotti in the Beame administration, now a

mortgage lender. "You could just see it was the same as when we were at the

depths of the fiscal crisis."

The turning point, as Olympia & York veterans now

remember it, came in the spring of 1992. Mr. Zuccotti called 100 or so of the

company's creditors to a meeting in a recently emptied office suite on the top

floor of One Liberty Plaza. Mr. Zuccotti took the podium and went through a

statement of principles-among them, a commitment that the American company

would operate separately from the Canadian company, its creditors and the

Reichmanns. "You will all get your money back," one participant remembers Mr.

Zuccotti declaring.

"I think we all almost fell out of our chairs," Mr. Falus

said. "The facts and the numbers made it very, very difficult to understand how

that was possible. But he was saying 'I'm going to take care of you,' and

everyone knew [him] as the person who saved New York."

Political Skills Help

He would need all his political skills to do it. With the

city, Mr. Zuccotti negotiated a deal in which Olympia & York paid its real

estate taxes on a month-to-month basis, as rents came in. Later, when it seemed

that huge real estate transfer taxes might keep the company from reorganizing

under American control, he and Mr. Frucher lobbied the city to forgo the tax.

They convinced the state legislature to repeal a similar state tax, and got

Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno to

write letters to the bankruptcy court judge saying the law would be changed

soon and the tax shouldn't hold up the reorganization.

At the same time, Mr. Zuccotti had to negotiate a thicket of

boardroom intrigue. At one point just prior to the crucial 1992 creditors'

meeting, Paul Reichmann had flown to New York to ask Mr. Zuccotti to pay back

what was essentially a $330 million loan from a Bronfman family company, taken

out against the World Financial Center. Mr. Zuccotti refused, saying that he

had American banks which were owed money first, and they might force the

company into bankruptcy if he seemed to be favoring Mr. Reichmann's friends.

Mr. Reichmann took the refusal as an act of betrayal. But Mr. Zuccotti had

wrested the company from his boss' control.

For the next three years, the nearly insolvent American

branch of Olympia & York would resemble a Roman court with plots and

counterplots. Robert Lowe, an accountant who took over the Canadian company on

behalf of the banks, tried to seize the American buildings to pay off Mr.

Reichmann's debts. Vulture investor Leon Black, along with developer Jerry

Speyer, bought a large chunk of the company's debt on the bond market in a

takeover bid.

Mr. Zuccotti sided with a group of debtors who included,

ironically enough, the onetime Bronfman conglomerate Edper-Brascan (it's now

owned by its Canadian management), which Mr. Zuccotti had refused to repay a

few years before. When the company was carved up, Mr. Zuccotti's group ended up

with the sweetest plums: 245 Park Avenue, three of the four towers of the World

Financial Center and One Liberty Plaza.

The buildings were added

to Edper-Brascan's publicly traded real estate portfolio, which includes

buildings in Toronto, Boston and other cities, and rechristened as Brookfield.

As the real estate market

roared back, so did Brookfield. Now, a decade later, Mr. Zuccotti finally has

the chance to oversee the expansion Paul Reichmann hired him to lead-but

carefully this time. "If there is one word to appropriately describe

Brookfield, it is 'discipline,'" said Frank Mayer, a senior real estate analyst

with HSBC Securities [Canada] Inc. in Toronto.

Mr. Zuccotti's role in the company has decreased with the

good times. He seems content to leave the day-to-day decisions to his second in

command, chief executive Rick Clark. He's gone back to practicing law a bit at

Weil, Gotshal and Manges, where he's of counsel. And he is spending more time

traveling and in the outdoors. He is an avid fisherman. "I think it may have

something to do with how he does business," said Paul Selver, a former law

partner who considers Mr. Zuccotti his mentor. "In fishing, what is required is

a lot of patience, a willingness to think through how an unpredictable fish is

going to react so you can get the catch."

And Mr. Selver won't be surprised if his mentor reels in the

tallest buildings in New York.