New York gets fresh look at trade center tower plans

Real Estate Weekly, Sept 12, 2007 by Daniel Gaiger

Just before the sixth anniversary of 9/11, Silverstein Properties unveiled detailed designs for the three office towers it is developing at the World Trade Center site.

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The schematics and renderings it presented gave a more in depth picture of the hundreds of thousands of square feet of retail in the base of the three buildings and also of the lobbies in the three buildings and surrounding streetscape.

Among the notable features to be highlighted was a large black slab of granite in the lobby of Tower 4, behind the reception desk and angled to align parallel with the eastern perimeter of the reflective pools at the World Trade Center Memorial. Gary Kamemoto, of the Fumihiko Maki design team that designed the tower, said that the somber wall was meant to reflect the image of the World Trade Center Memorial through the building's glass-paneled Greenwich Street entrance.

Among the prominent features in the lobby of Tower 3, a monster media screen will be suspended in the multi-story space. Kamemoto and a representative from the Richard Rodgers design team that designed Tower 3, both showed digital renderings of the Cortland Street pedestrian walkway that will exist between Towers 3 and 4 and the striking juxtaposition it will create by framing its canyon of glass against the densely forested plaza area of the Memorial just across Greenwich Street.

Tower 2, the tallest of the three towers that Silverstein is developing and, with its sharply slanted roof, perhaps also the most striking, will have a cruciform layout in which two intersecting perpendicular corridors forming a crosshair will house the elevator banks at the center of the building's floorplate. The entrances will be at the four comers of the rectangular lobby.

But who will fill the towers? Rumors are building that Merrill Lynch, whose hundreds of thousands of square feet at the World Financial Center are set to expire in the coming years, is considering taking most, if not all, of Tower 3. Avi Schick, the chairman of the LMDC, said at the press conference for the new renderings last week, that he was "working like hell" to keep Merrill downtown, but said that he wouldn't go so far as to offer the firm tax breaks or other incentives.