Post by Trade facilitator on Sept 13, 2014 1:50:51 GMT 1
Anthony Gardner had sworn off high floors of skyscrapers until his guides on a tour of New York’s 1 World Trade Center offered to take people to the 83rd storey. That is the same floor his brother, Harvey Gardner III, was on 13 years ago when the first plane hit the site’s North Tower.
“That was a sign that I needed to go up there, and I was so glad and grateful that I did,” said Mr Gardner, 38, who left a public relations career after his brother’s death in the September 11, 2001, attacks to work on behalf of victims’ families.
The World Trade Center site’s integration of memory with commerce creates “a very powerful experience for visitors while also contributing to the economic revitalisation of lower Manhattan,” said Mr Gardner, now the executive director of the New Jersey State Museum in Trenton. “You’re really seeing that take form now today.”
Building at the 16-acre trade centre site is set to be substantially completed in the next year, following delays, litigation, disputes and power plays among a cast of stakeholders that included political officials, residents, architects and advocates such as Mr Gardner, survivors of the almost 3,000 people lost in the cataclysm. As construction nears a culmination, lower Manhattan is standing out for its revival.
Office leasing is accelerating, with media and technology companies joining the financial firms that traditionally inhabited the area, and the population has surged. With the 9/11 memorial and museum now fully open, and two office towers, a transit hub and retail centre to be done by late next year, people are finally going to get to live and work in the vision of a new downtown forged more than a decade ago.
The area is on the verge of becoming “the first modern commercial district to emerge in New York City in over a generation”, said Tom Wright, the executive director of the Regional Plan Association, which advocates progressive urban planning. “It’s going to be really remarkable.”
Lower Manhattan office asking rents have climbed almost 30 per cent from a 2010 low. Vacancy rates are down after companies such as Time and Bank of New York Mellon reached deals to move to the Brookfield Place complex.
The residential population more than doubled in the decade through the end of 2013, according to the Alliance for Downtown New York. An additional 2,200 apartments are slated to be completed by 2017, as developers including Larry Silverstein, Stephen Witkoff and Michael Shvo plan luxury high-rise condominiums.
The downtown alliance, an advocacy group for Lower Manhattan, estimates that $30 billion has been invested in the area in the past decade, at both the trade centre site and in projects elsewhere. Those include 12 new hotels, an esplanade along the East River and residential conversions including American International Group’s former skyscraper at 70 Pine Street, which is becoming an apartment building.
“This is not your father’s financial district any more,” Jessica Lappin, the alliance’s president, said at a briefing for reporters this week at 4 World Trade Center. “We do not close up the sidewalks at the sound of the closing bell.”
At the trade centre site, two skyscrapers are substantially done, although more than a third of their combined office space is unrented. The $3.95bn, 541-metre 1 World Trade Center, the western hemisphere’s tallest building, is scheduled to open before the end of this year.
Its lead tenant, the magazine publisher Condé Nast Publications, which will occupy 1.2 million of its 3 million square feet, is moving equipment into the tower, said Eric Engelhardt, the building’s leasing director for the Durst Organization, the partner in the skyscraper with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the trade centre site’s owner.
Source: www.thenational.ae/business/property/world-trade-center-rises-from-the-ashes-in-new-york
“That was a sign that I needed to go up there, and I was so glad and grateful that I did,” said Mr Gardner, 38, who left a public relations career after his brother’s death in the September 11, 2001, attacks to work on behalf of victims’ families.
The World Trade Center site’s integration of memory with commerce creates “a very powerful experience for visitors while also contributing to the economic revitalisation of lower Manhattan,” said Mr Gardner, now the executive director of the New Jersey State Museum in Trenton. “You’re really seeing that take form now today.”
Building at the 16-acre trade centre site is set to be substantially completed in the next year, following delays, litigation, disputes and power plays among a cast of stakeholders that included political officials, residents, architects and advocates such as Mr Gardner, survivors of the almost 3,000 people lost in the cataclysm. As construction nears a culmination, lower Manhattan is standing out for its revival.
Office leasing is accelerating, with media and technology companies joining the financial firms that traditionally inhabited the area, and the population has surged. With the 9/11 memorial and museum now fully open, and two office towers, a transit hub and retail centre to be done by late next year, people are finally going to get to live and work in the vision of a new downtown forged more than a decade ago.
The area is on the verge of becoming “the first modern commercial district to emerge in New York City in over a generation”, said Tom Wright, the executive director of the Regional Plan Association, which advocates progressive urban planning. “It’s going to be really remarkable.”
Lower Manhattan office asking rents have climbed almost 30 per cent from a 2010 low. Vacancy rates are down after companies such as Time and Bank of New York Mellon reached deals to move to the Brookfield Place complex.
The residential population more than doubled in the decade through the end of 2013, according to the Alliance for Downtown New York. An additional 2,200 apartments are slated to be completed by 2017, as developers including Larry Silverstein, Stephen Witkoff and Michael Shvo plan luxury high-rise condominiums.
The downtown alliance, an advocacy group for Lower Manhattan, estimates that $30 billion has been invested in the area in the past decade, at both the trade centre site and in projects elsewhere. Those include 12 new hotels, an esplanade along the East River and residential conversions including American International Group’s former skyscraper at 70 Pine Street, which is becoming an apartment building.
“This is not your father’s financial district any more,” Jessica Lappin, the alliance’s president, said at a briefing for reporters this week at 4 World Trade Center. “We do not close up the sidewalks at the sound of the closing bell.”
At the trade centre site, two skyscrapers are substantially done, although more than a third of their combined office space is unrented. The $3.95bn, 541-metre 1 World Trade Center, the western hemisphere’s tallest building, is scheduled to open before the end of this year.
Its lead tenant, the magazine publisher Condé Nast Publications, which will occupy 1.2 million of its 3 million square feet, is moving equipment into the tower, said Eric Engelhardt, the building’s leasing director for the Durst Organization, the partner in the skyscraper with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the trade centre site’s owner.
Source: www.thenational.ae/business/property/world-trade-center-rises-from-the-ashes-in-new-york
