NEW YORK CITY-The pending relocation of Conde Nast into one million square feet at 1 World Trade Center has come to symbolize the positive light in which the Ground Zero mega-project is now seen after long being derided as a white elephant. “It’s unusual for a deal like this to be so publicly discussed,” especially when it hasn’t been finalized, comments Tara Stacom, vice chairman at Cushman & Wakefield and head of the leasing team for the 2.6-million-square-foot skyscraper since 2007. Yet Stacom tells GlobeSt.com that neither the Conde deal nor any other single factor has represented the pivot point.
In Stacom’s view, the momentum has been building at least since Chris Ward came on board in 2008 as executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the bistate agency responsible for rebuilding at Ground Zero. “He really began to place priorities on what had to happen and masterminded a very complex engineering nightmare, breaking it down into some achievable goals,” she says. Chief among those were “the completion of 1 World within a realistic timeline and the completion of the memorial” in time for the 10th anniversary of 9/11 next September.
Since then, other milestones have been achieved: the signing of Beijing Vantone, the first non-government tenant at the 1,776-foot tower; and the resolution of an impasse between the Port and Silverstein Properties Inc. over the timeline and funding for commercial construction at the site. More recent was the realization that 1 WTC would benefit from a developing partner, a selection process that ultimately resulted in the Durst Organization taking a $100-million equity stake.
“The Port’s terrific and they have done a yeoman’s job of getting a very complicated project started, but they don’t have the same track record of putting up office buildings as they do with bridges, tunnels and roads,” Stacom says. “In recognizing the need to bring in a developer, when we went out with an RFP, the interest was just overwhelming to us.” She notes that after would-be development partners walked the site and saw for themselves “the importance it will have on the world stage,” they all wanted to be part of the project.
Since Durst was selected this past summer, Stacom and the leasing team have been working with the owner/developer on a day-to-day basis. “Having just come off the completion of 1 Bryant Park, and 4 Times Square before that, they’re bringing such expertise to the table and helping us deliver a much better product even than the one we had originally designed,” she says. “They have great insight into what tenants want and desire, and that has helped us attract additional tenants, which we’re now trading paper with.”
Early on, state and federal agencies had committed to a total of roughly one million square feet at 1 WTC. Lately the tenant mix has changed; Stacom says New York State probably won’t be taking space there. “We’re in discussion with the federal government over their level of interest and how much space they’d like to take,” she says.
As the pending Conde deal makes clear, the mix of prospective 1 WTC tenants has become “much more diverse than we expected at first,” says Stacom. Many of these would-be tenants “tend to hire a great share of young people. A lot of their employee base lives in Brooklyn or New Jersey, so accessibility to Downtown is much easier.” To make the 1 WTC space more appealing to a younger workforce, “We’ve redone some of our test bids to include a more open, collaborative environment.”
The momentum the project has built up and the transformation of public perception have been “wonderful to see, especially since we’ve been involved since ’07 and people would say to me, ‘why are you doing this?’ ” Stacom says. “I couldn’t be more proud to be associated with the group, between the Port and the Durst Organization on this site and Larry Silverstein and what he’s doing on the East Bathtub side. It’s going to mark the city in a way that we haven’t seen since Rockefeller Center was built. And it’s going to be far more significant in size, impact and scale, than Rockefeller Center was in its day.”
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