Developer Fought Bureaucracy to Rebuild Ground Zero, and Won

The 93-year-old commercial real estate developer Larry Silverstein is a remarkable man. He had the tenacity, vision, and expertise to overcome interfering and incompetent New York politicians, and Port Authority bureaucrats, to rebuild Lower Manhattan after the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001.

Silverstein tells the story of his trials and tribulations in his aptly titled book The Rising: The 20-year battle to rebuild the World Trade Center.

Shortly after taking office in 1995, Governor George Pataki announced that the World Trade Center (WTC) twin towers were poorly managed by its overseers, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey (PA).

And he was right.

A 400-page study prepared by Deloitte and Touche confirmed Pataki’s gut assessment. This scathing 1994 report documented the incompetence of the Trade Centers’ management.

From security, to cleaning, repair, maintenance, to administration and marketing, the PA-managed trade center was far more expensive and less effective than its peers in the private sector, Pataki directed the PA’s Board of Commissioners and the executive director (who happened to be me) to study options for the WTC — including privatization.

At the time, I believed Silverstein was the perfect choice because he had prior experience with the PA and understood its wily ways.

In the late 1970s, Silverstein negotiated with the PA to build a 1 million-square-foot building on the last remaining undeveloped piece of land in the WTC complex. Silverstein quickly learned that what should have been “a pretty quick and uncomplicated transaction” wasn’t.

Negotiations took over a year.

“Unlike those of us in the private sector,” Silverstein observed, “[the PA] didn’t worry about deadlines, about negotiations dragging on as pre-construction costs continued to mount.” The bureaucrats, believing they were the “best and the brightest,” put up endless roadblocks hoping the enemy — the private sector — would give up and walk away from the negotiating table.

But in Silverstein, the PA met its match. The PA relented and a deal was closed in 1980. The $300 million 7 WTC was opened in 1987 and was a financial success.

When the PA bureaucrats, after years of dawdling, finally issued a request for proposals to privatize the towers in 2000, Silverstein entered the competition and circumvented all the PA’s obstacles.

While he was awarded the 99-year lease, the final contact negotiations dragged on for another year. Then on July 24, 2001, two days after the signing, Pataki handed Silverstein a keyring holding an oversized symbolic set of cardboard keys “to the front doors of my hard-fought for purchase.”

Weeks later, after the worst terrorist attack in America’s history, Silverstein told a shocked and skeptical Pataki, “We need to rebuild. There’s not a doubt in my mind. We cannot allow the terrorists to win.”

Thus began Silverstein’s 20-year battle to rebuild the World Trade Center complex.

Instead of immediately turning to Silverstein — who still had to pay the PA $120 million a year rent — to design and rebuild the complex, the delusional Pataki was persuaded by his handlers that he could be dubbed the “Master Builder” of the 21^st century if he held on to the rebuilding reins.

It could, they claimed, enhance his third-term prospects and jumpstart a 2008 presidential candidacy.

To ensure Pataki’s control of the process, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC), a state agency run by Pataki loyalists, was created to collect the federal funds earmarked for rebuilding and to control the political swag.

To achieve his rebuilding dream, Silverstein had to battle with the LMDC, the Pataki administration, the Port Authority, the New York press, devious insurance companies, and a ludicrous Pataki-driven tower design by David Libeskind, who had not built anything bigger than a four-story building.

As the years dragged on, political columnist John Podhortez wrote in 2005, “Through a poisonous combination of arrogance, indolence, cowardness, and foolishness, Pataki has made sure the crater created by Al Qaeda will remain unfulfilled for at least 9 years….”

“Pataki’s Pit” was a national disgrace.

The governor’s fumbling played into the hands of the PA. The bureaucrats tried to reclaim direct control of the site. The agency that squandered hundreds of millions of dollars on failed projects argued they had “the expertise to find efficiencies” in rebuilding.

Pataki even abandoned his long-standing belief that government bureaucrats should not be in the commercial real estate business. He pressured Silverstein to turn the “Freedom Tower” project over to the Port Authority.

But the tenacious Silverstein refused to budge. And over time he beat Pataki and the PA bureaucrats.

Thanks to Larry Silverstein, today there are 4 gleaming towers on the site, and a magnificent memorial for our honored dead.

“All this stands,” Silverstein concludes in his memoir, “where there was once dust, charred rubble and the incinerated remains of those who tragically died that day.”

Silverstein has every reason to be proud of his accomplishment. And New Yorkers should be grateful that his first concerns were the Big Apple’s long-term needs — not those of interest groups and political hacks.