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Real estate developer Douglas Durst in front of One World Trade Center, July 2011 Stefan Ruiz
To the degree that it’s possible for a 102-story building to take a city by surprise, One World Trade Center snuck up on the New York skyline. For years the project, conceived in the throes of tragedy, has been debated, negotiated, renamed, redrawn, hailed as a beacon, and maligned as a boondoggle. It wasn’t until recently, though, that it presented itself as an immutable fact, beginning to replace the void above Ground Zero with steel and reflective glass. Designed to commemorate lost life and recapture lost revenue, the half-completed skyscraper is both a nationalistic statement—it was formerly known as the “Freedom Tower”—and the centerpiece of a speculative real estate project.
From his headquarters high above 42nd Street, about three miles to the north, real estate developer Douglas Durst has been keeping watch over One World Trade’s rise. “I think it’s going to be quite spectacular,” he says one sultry July afternoon, sitting in a room decorated with photographs of his forbears in the family real estate company. Looking south over the majestic spread of Manhattan, One World Trade was wrapped in midsummer haze, and the air was thick with irony. If anyone in power had listened to Durst years ago, the vastly expensive tower would not exist.
“My argument was that building these highly subsidized buildings was harmful to the economy overall,” Durst says. And while many of his peers said the same thing after Sept. 11, only Durst—a canny, cerebral 66-year-old introvert in a business of mellifluous promoters—took out newspaper ads calling One World Trade “the legacy of poor planning and decision-making.” At the time public officials were saying they had a patriotic obligation to rebuild, no matter how much it cost and whether or not Manhattan needed all the office space. Durst’s unemotional skepticism seemed almost heretical.
So it is not hard to understand why people involved with the redevelopment process let out a collective gasp when, last summer, the arch-critic bought a $100 million interest in One World Trade Center from its owner, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Soon after the developer came to this agreement, which calls for him to oversee the building’s construction, leasing, and eventual operations, the magazine publisher Condé Nast agreed to occupy half the building, and Durst’s turn began to appear very profitable. In explaining his reversal, Durst says One World Trade was going to be built anyway, and someone was going to make money off the government’s colossal expenditure. So he figured it might as well be him.
This, in a less literal sense, mirrors the progression the entire city of New York has followed over the 10 tumultuous years since the terrorist attacks. After cycling through the stages of grief, from denial (“I can’t believe they’re not there”), to anger (“We’ll build taller!”), to bargaining (“But who’s going to build it?”), to depression (“Will anyone build it?”), the redevelopment process has reached its inexorable endpoint: acceptance. This may not be the commemoration everyone imagined, but now it’s here, and it’s time to buy in.
Reaching this conclusion took a long struggle among clashing, sometimes irreconcilable, ideologies. The 16 acres occupied by the destroyed complex were not simply a graveyard or a pilgrimage site but immensely valuable real estate. There was no blueprint for how to proceed with a project that was unprecedented in its combination of scale, complexity, expense, and heated political and symbolic import. Yet in the traumatized and galvanized days of 2001, it seemed possible that the obstacles might be swept aside, and that a city famous for developmental deadlock—an inability to mobilize the kind of civic ambition that created places such as Rockefeller Center and Central Park—might unite in favor of a single vision.
