Silverstein reflects on year that changed course of WTC.

In-so-much as a memorial can preserve an event in the consciousness of all who look at it, the World Trade Center site had become a perverse monument of remembrance by the start of the year.

It was the great open wound that wouldn't heal, whose imperviousness to all the sparkling renderings and bold redevelopment plans for the site seemed to only grow as Ground Zero's ceaseless stagnancy charged closer and closer to the fifth anniversary of 9/11.

While five years isn't a long time, the pit in the ground--whose only sign of progress was the steel guts of the PATH terminal tucked away along the site's eastern flank--assured that it felt fresh in the minds of all who gathered along the site's fringe to gaze down into its bare, gravel-strewn belly. Of course, it didn't inspire honor and reverence the in the way that a proper memorial should, but instead seemed to affirm among the most feared repercussions of the calamity: that 9/11 had punched an indelible hole where downtown's heart and soul should be.

The crisis didn't go unnoticed by public figures and the site's stakeholders, who quickly heaped much of the blame for Ground Zero's failures onto Larry Silverstein. Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff unleashed a particularly potent argument at a meeting before the city council earlier in the year stating that Silverstein could delay building on the site's development parcels while pocketing hundreds of millions of dollars in insurance proceeds. The accusation was just one in a string of egregious smears against Silverstein that came as the WTC site's frustrated redevelopment efforts heated to a boiling point earlier in the year.

The city said that Silverstein ought to cut his rents at 7 World Trade Center and that the amount of office space slated for the site should be reduced to make for residential and hotel space, suggestions that seem just as preposterous now as the conspiratorial intentions that Doctoroff had attached to Silverstein's involvement at the site.

"Mayor Bloomberg is a fantastic mayor, but the real estate business is not his business," Silverstein said in a conversation with Real Estate Weekly this week. Showing the same kind of class and calm that were his trademark amid the conflicts and turmoil of the past year and on numerous occasions during the five years since the attack as well, Silverstein prefaced that comment by saying that Bloomberg was one of the best mayors the city has ever had.

"His interests are completely aligned with what is in the best interest of New York," Silverstein said.

Silverstein's detractors didn't have as nice things to say about his interests at the WTC site, claiming they were misaligned with an expedited rebuilding effort. Indeed, Port Authority officials as well as Governor Pataki accused Silverstein of being greedy when talks broke down in April to hash out a new redevelopment plan. At worst, Silverstein was bargaining too hard for his own interests--an absurd concept in the world of private business--but if he was, he nonetheless ended up making significant concessions to the Port Authority in the deal they eventually agreed upon.

His ability to step above the name-calling and concentrate on coming to an agreement can't be underestimated in the site's progress over the past few months.

"I just never took any of that personally," Silverstein said. "I took this whole thing as business and in business it's not a personal thing and I resolved myself quickly that I wouldn't get mired in the infighting, I was going to remain above the fray. I really feel that I was prepared for the way things went, friends and family told me pretty early on that, if things didn't go well at the site because of government inefficiency or conflict, they would eventually get to blaming me."

It has been nothing short of a revelatory year for Silverstein, one that he began without knowing what exactly was in store for the future of the WTC site and is now ending with a green light for his development plans for three glorious towers located on the site's most commercially viable parcels, its eastern edge, positioned over a new retail mall complex and in direct proximity to the area's Santiago Calatrava designed transportation hub.

If there is anyone who can a stake a claim at having predicted the resurgence of the downtown market it is Silverstein, who developed 7 World Trade Center during a bleak period in office demand but has since been able to lease most of the building's space at rents that even market experts thought would be unachievable a year ago. And Silverstein is just as bullish about the leasing prospects of the millions of square feet to come.

"When you do the math, the demand is there," he said simply.

Now that the site seems to have found a resolution, Silverstein has been able to shift his focus to other projects. He has partnered with one of the largest pension funds in the world, CalSTRS, to purchase $2 billion worth of property in the metropolitan area, a buying quota that Silverstein hinted would be met within the next six months. He is also going to develop a residential project at 99 Church Street, a building he purchased from Moody's after the firm took a huge 600,000 s/f lease in 7 World Trade Center. He is about to break ground on one of the city's largest rental buildings, the 1350-unit Riverplace II on the far West Side, a neighborhood that, like downtown before it, could be a future commercial hub of the city.

And on the WTC site, after months of construction, 50 foot tall structural beams are scheduled to begin rising from the Freedom Tower's foundation in the next few weeks.

The steel will be the first to rise skyward on the site and is yet another sign of progress that will give spectators a new monument to gaze at, one of progress.

And from his corner office on the 38th floor of 7 World Trade Center, Silverstein, who is charged with developing the building for the Port Authority, can gaze down and make sure it's on track.