http://www.observer.com/2007/ground-...tribeca-patina
Ground Zero Is Rebranded With Tribeca Patina
Silverstein Project Gets Greenwich Street Address, As Trade Centers Rise
Larry Silverstein, right, with state Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver.
by Matthew Schuerman
September 11, 2007
Of all the ideas to come out of the many public-planning meetings held after Sept. 11, none caught on so successfully than the proposal to drive Greenwich Street through the 16 acres of the World Trade Center site. People said the once and future street would restore New York’s famed street grid and make the area friendlier by making it more manageable.
And so, in the next couple of years, after the deep pit known as ground zero gets filled up to ground level with sewers and utilities and subway tunnels, Greenwich Street will run along those four blocks, between Liberty Street and Vesey Street, once again. Its western side will harbor the landscaped waterfalls of the World Trade Center memorial; its eastern flank will house three modern office towers, each designed by a different boldfaced architect.
In fact, it is a mark of just how popular the future street has become that the developer Larry Silverstein, who is building those towers, has given those three buildings Greenwich Street addresses. In his preferred nomenclature, what were heretofore known as Towers 2, 3 and 4 are 200 Greenwich Street, 175 Greenwich Street and 150 Greenwich Street, respectively. According to sources, he has even approached the Manhattan borough president, Scott M. Stringer, to see if it is O.K. to put even-numbered addresses on the eastern side of the street, which is usually where odd numbers go. (Mr. Stringer’s spokesman, Eric Pugatch, said that a formal application will not be made nor reviewed until the buildings are complete.)
This rebranding is not total, nor is it irreversible, and there is some question whether it will catch on. But its advantages are obvious: It distances the new towers from the Sept. 11 attacks and connects them instead to Tribeca and the spiffy neighborhood to the south that is itself being rebranded as “Greenwich South.” Even without the tragic overtones, naming a building after the World Trade Center would conjure up concrete columns rising dizzyingly into the sky. Naming it after Greenwich Street evokes Robert De Niro emerging from the fog on a cobblestone alley, surrounded by red-brick warehouses containing design firms and expensive sushi restaurants.
“What’s happening is that Greenwich Street is emerging as an identifiable corridor for lower Manhattan,” said Janno Lieber, the World Trade Center project manager for Silverstein Properties. “What we’ve got south of the World Trade Center on Greenwich Street has become an interesting residential community with all those conversions going on, and north of us we’ve got Tribeca. It’s happening organically. It’s not a rebranding.”
It is true that Mr. Silverstein is by no means running from the name “World Trade Center.” The promotional Web site for the three buildings is www.wtc.com. Besides, the towers may end up being called something different, especially if a company rents one in its entirety and wants its name on the front stoop. Mr. Silverstein marketed the first tower he rebuilt, just to the north of the World Trade Center footprint, as “7 World Trade Center,” and it is often referred to in the trade simply as “Seven.”
But he has embarked on some double-branding. Midway through the lease-up, Mr. Silverstein started to use the name “250 Greenwich” as an alternative address, and recruited the Zagat Survey company to produce a special guidebook to restaurants, bars and shopping south of Canal Street, which he handed out to prospective tenants.
“From day one, Larry has believed that the World Trade Center name had real value and that some day non-World Trade Center buildings would try to link their identities to the World Trade Center name in the same way that buildings on Sixth Avenue were linked to Rockefeller Center,” said Simon Wasserberger, senior vice president at CB Richard Ellis and the leasing agent for 7 World Trade Center. As for the 250 Greenwich address, Mr. Wasserberger added, “When it came to the marketing of Seven, we wanted people to understand that four out of the five top restaurants in Tribeca are within four blocks of it.”
The full name of the building is “7 World Trade Center at 250 Greenwich,” Mr. Lieber, the project manager, said. The 52-story building, which actually saw its footprint trimmed to make way for the reborn Greenwich Street, opened last May. It is 72 percent leased.
Still, starting last year, Mr. Silverstein and his company began to refer to the three towers on the eastern edge of the site by their Greenwich Street addresses. While unveiling updated designs at a news conference on Sept. 6, Mr. Lieber took pains to introduce speakers in the order of the street address of the building they were working on, starting with 150 Greenwich Street (Tower 4) and working his way up, as opposed to going in order of the tower number, which would have put Tower 2 (200 Greenwich Street) first.
“‘Greenwich Street’ does not have nearly the amount of weight that ‘World Trade Center’ does,” said Petra Todorovich, a senior planner at the Regional Plan Association, which played a big role in getting part of the street grid reinstated. “Silverstein is clearly trying to establish a new identity for the buildings and not associate them with a tragic past.”
Michael Sorkin, an architect who early during the planning process advocated keeping the entire site as a memorial and public space, was neither surprised nor overly dismayed to learn of Mr. Silverstein’s rebranding attempts.
“Obviously he is going to be rebranding this to make as much money as possible. Why should we be surprised that he is maximizing his business opportunities at this site?” said Mr. Sorkin, the director of the Graduate Urban Design Program at the City College of New York. “Certainly nobody is going to fail to recognize where they are. To me, the battle was lost when they decided to replace the 10 million square feet of office space.”
But what will we be talking about when we talk about the World Trade Center in five years, when towers 1 through 4 are supposed to be finished? The office towers? The whole site west of Church Street? The memorial plaza? Or a historical idea?
In some ways, the disappearance of that name would represent a victory for the planners and neighbors who saw the destruction of the towers as a singular opportunity to undo an urban planning mistake, a giant, 16-acre plaza that was elevated and separated from the rest of the city like a castle surrounded by a moat.
Rather than two nearly identical towers designed by one architect, the new World Trade Center is all about diversity and mixed use. Five different architects are building six variously styled buildings. The Church Street sides of the lower floors of Mr. Silverstein’s office towers will be occupied by retail stores, melting into the shopping strip that now hosts Century 21 and Brooks Brothers. A performing arts center, if it ever gets built, will bring a little bit of culture into the site. And then there’s Greenwich Street, which will carry people north and south into more residential areas.
Even the eight-acre memorial quadrant, which will re-create the footprints of the twin towers, World Trade Center 1 and 2, with waterfalls, has been renamed. It is now “The National September 11 Memorial and Museum at the World Trade Center.” The change, according to Joe Daniels, president of the nonprofit organization of the same name that is raising money for it, makes it more relevant to the rest of the country. In doing so, however, the memorial’s geography is now secondary to its place in history.
Oddly enough, there is one place where the renaming seems to be going in the other direction. In July, a high-ranking administrator in the Port Authority, which still owns the 16 acres (Mr. Silverstein is just leasing), sent out an e-mail to all concerned.
The e-mail proclaimed, according to a copy obtained by The Observer, “Effective immediately references to the skyscraper being built by 1 World Trade Center LLC at the WTC site should be as follows: 1 World Trade Center, ‘the Freedom Tower.’” It seems that, no matter what value the World Trade Center brand may be losing, “Freedom Tower” is losing it faster.