The Battle For Ground Zero, Part 115

Steve Cuozzo bursts the orthodox notion that the Freedom Tower would be a white elephant incapable of finding tenants or that the tower would put the hurt on the real estate market. He's right of course, but that doesn't stop other developers from whispering about the project, if only to boost their own competing projects. In fact, Cuozzo thinks that Pataki has this singular aspect right. NYC needs first class office space, and the Freedom Tower would deliver that.

It is a separate question as to whether people would want to work in Tower One, with all the connotations and implications that brings. For that matter, Tower Two would similarily have the same issues, though no one is talking about that perhaps because the other towers would be significantly shorter and perceived to be a lesser target for terrorists.

True, the Freedom Tower faces unique challenges, including the theoretical terrorist threat. What if, God forbid, nobody wants to move in?

To brokers and landlords, nothing is worse than an office building that temporarily has no tenants. But what's dangerous for the city is not to have first-class new office space available when job growth and the economy expand, as they invariably do after a contraction.

For some companies, buildings 20 years older suffice. But for others - like Goldman Sachs, which is erecting its own new headquarters Downtown, or PriceWaterhouseCoopers, which filled all of brand-new 300 Madison Ave. - only the most state-of-the-art, electronically sophisticated product will do.

In the late 1980s and early '90s, white elephants stampeded through the Times Square area. The towers at 1540 Broadway, 1585 Broadway and 750 Seventh Ave. rose when the neighborhood was still a war zone. With no tenants immediately in sight, the developers lost their gleaming new skyscrapers to their banks.

Yet those failures proved a boon to the area and the city. The towers were sold at discounts. Their new owners immediately moved into them or rented them out. All of a sudden, Bertelsmann and Morgan Stanley were in or near Times Square - paving the way for others to follow. Fifty years from now, no one will remember that the buildings stood briefly empty when new.

Or take the Twin Towers - the biggest spec buildings of all time, with 4.4 million square feet each. The World Trade Center dumped more than 10 million square feet of space on the market in the early '70s. For years, Downtown landlords had to settle for lower rents thanks to the depressing effect the temporary over-supply had on prices.

But the Twin Towers arrested Downtown's long slide. Even though then-Gov. Hugh Carey had to bail them out by temporarily moving much of the state government there, they became the global symbol of Lower Manhattan. Without the WTC, there would have been no Battery Park City or World Financial Center.

It took the towers more than 20 years to become fully successful. Yet those 20 years would have been a minor footnote to the centuries-long lifespan they'd surely have enjoyed had two airplanes not destroyed them on 9/11.

Meanwhile, more NY politicians take their digs at New Jersey's Governor Corzine for injecting himself into the Ground Zero debate:

New York's top fiscal watchdogs yesterday escalated the border war with New Jersey over Ground Zero, telling the Port Authority's Garden State representatives to stop dragging their heels on a deal to rebuild the World Trade Center.

"We are deeply troubled to learn of the objections now being voiced by the PA's New Jersey representatives regarding the final lease negotiations for Ground Zero," city Comptroller Bill Thompson and state Comptroller Alan Hevesi wrote in a letter.

Technorati: World Trade Center, WTC, Pataki, LMDC, urban policy, Freedom Tower, IFC, International Freedom Center, spitzer, silverstein.