“A lot of people died. This building right here is a landmark for them. They had to put a building back up. They had to. And they put a great one up. And I’m blessed to be here to do it.”

TOM HICKEY, Ironworker, Rise, 2014

Some remnants of the original site that were protected under federal law had to be preserved. Not one but two rail lines ran continuously through the site during construction.

But the project represents far more than the resolution of internecine battles: The push and pull of multiple agendas produced better buildings than a lesser struggle would have. The “to-ing and fro-ing and the conflicts and the resolution and the consensus are what makes the project real. It’s not just some abstraction,” said Daniel Libeskind, who created the site’s master plan. These struggles provided the psychological means, critical to the mourning and rebuilding process, of reconciling the losses suffered there.

Did it take a long time to build? Yes, it did. Opinions were voiced and lengthy debates ensued. The project was uniquely bound and slowed by this preponderance of good will, a smothering of noble intentions, and hindered too by a few politicians who wanted to drape themselves in the project’s glory. There were other hurdles. Despite One’s minimal appearance, every single floor, and nearly every piece of steel, is different. Also, it went up in tandem with eight other buildings, an interconnected maze of below-ground structures, and a public memorial—all of it intensely scrutinized, controlled by dozens of owners, and subject to the tightest security measures ever implemented. Hovering like a black cloud was the 2008 recession, which stalled construction everywhere. From this demanding framework, the World Trade Center emerged. Frankly, given all the challenges, it should not have, but it did because so many people cared so much.

Despite the finite amount of acreage on Manhattan island and its demand-driven market, the city needs buildings that make you stop in awe and reflect on what human beings are capable of. Not everything has to be utilitarian, or should be. And you don’t have to be an architect to appreciate a great building. In fact, the public, with its questionable taste and unerring instinct, will decide what’s great about the World Trade Center. Since its opening, people have voted with their feet—the place is so wildly popular that one reporter, previously vociferous in his criticism, had no choice but to quote Yogi Berra’s zinger “Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.”

Cities everywhere are a compilation of good ideas and missed chances. Art will always be imperfect. That is the nature of making thought physical, and the nature too of human beings: People make mistakes and defend their turf. Money talks, and so does personal ambition. Even so, One World Trade Center soars. Along with the neighboring towers, it replaces almost eleven million square feet (1,023,000 m²) of commercial space, connects to dozens of commuter lines, and provides thousands with a place to work, eat, and pick up a pair of Jimmy Choos. The belief that all those things could be accomplished, backed up by more than a decade of strenuous labor, qualifies it as a masterpiece in my book.

 

The Port Authority of New York & New Jersey

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the bistate entity in charge of the region’s vast network of bridges, tunnels, marine terminals, and airports, owns and manages the World Trade Center. The agency is responsible for the entire site, which includes its own projects—One World Trade Center, the Transportation Hub, and the Vehicle Security Center—and the infrastructure that is shared among all World Trade Center structures. Hundreds of Port Authority staff, including builders, architects, engineers, landscape architects, surveyors, police, and security experts, rebuilt the Trade Center, their home for almost fifty years.

Created in 1921, the Port Authority is a government agency controlled by both New York and New Jersey. Its unique governance was intended to insulate it from the political powers and parochial views of either state and free it to focus on regional transportation. Having no taxing powers, the financially self-supporting agency raises revenues by collecting tolls, fees, and rents and by issuing bonds. Over the past century, the authority has built tunnels and bridges that are engineering landmarks, revolutionized the handling of cargo worldwide, and operated five airports that form the epicenter of the American aviation industry.

In 1962, the Port Authority took over the Hudson and Manhattan Railroad and renamed it the Port Authority Trans-Hudson, or PATH, line. In exchange for relieving New Jersey of the unprofitable H&M, the authority gained approval to develop a new center for international trade in New York. Originally designed by SOM and planned for the Lower East Side, the World Trade Center was moved west to accommodate New Jersey commuters. Construction of the Twin Towers began in 1965; then, as now, the PATH line had to remain operational while the new towers were being built. Designed by Minoru Yamasaki and Emery Roth & Sons, engineered by Leslie E. Robertson Associates, and built by Tishman Construction, the Twin Towers were the tallest buildings in the world when they opened in 1972.

After the towers were attacked, the authority shouldered the rebuilding of Ground Zero. “In addition to the national imperative to rebuild, the Port Authority had its own institutional imperative.… Eighty-four members of the Port Authority family were murdered on 9/11, and a significant investment was destroyed,” said Patrick J. Foye, its executive director. Only the Port Authority had the financial and organizational heft to rebuild, but doing so took them out of their comfort zone. In the years that followed, the authority got “pummeled” for not being “a good player,” said Christopher O. Ward, the agency’s director from 2008 to 2011, even though it had “mortgaged its future to fill a financial gap that no other entity in this country could have ever been able to do. It wasn’t that the Port said, ‘We’re going to bail everybody out’… [rather, Governor] Pataki turned to the Port Authority and basically said, ‘You guys are going to do it.’”

Although the authority was not set up to conduct rebuilding on this scale after a disaster, they owned the real estate and, according to Foye, felt a moral obligation to do so.

The Port has the considerable clout and force of the states of New York and New Jersey behind it. But because it is a two-state agency, every dime spent in New York demanded that an equivalent dime be spent in New Jersey. The states’ two governors oversee the entity, which has a budget larger than that of half the states in the country, so conflict is unavoidable. That’s been true for much of the authority’s history, but usually it would regroup and regain its equilibrium, said Scott H. Rechler, vice chairman of the Port Authority’s Board of Commissioners. However, “9/11 was just such a shock to the system, and threw that all off,” he said. “The New York side of the equation was, ‘We’ve got to rebuild the Trade Center; it’s a national mission.’ On the New Jersey side, it was, ‘Look at all this allocation of capital going to New York. We want our share.’”

Some thought the city should swap the city-owned land under Kennedy and LaGuardia airports, which the Port Authority operates, for the World Trade Center. The idea, floated in 2002, would have given New York City and State control over the rebuilding, but the discrepancy between the values of the airport land and the Trade Center was too great. Moreover, the city and state were not in a position to take over because of laws that govern how contractors and consultants are hired; developing the Trade Center would have required an entirely new bureaucratic structure, in addition to astronomical cash outlays.

The constant turnover in Port Authority leadership also made it difficult to achieve consistent direction. With every new governor came a new executive director. Since 2001, four New York governors have appointed five executive directors, and five New Jersey governors have appointed four chairmen. The governance structure is meant to safeguard the interests of both states; instead, according to a special evaluatory panel convened by New York governor Andrew Cuomo and New Jersey governor Chris Christie, that structure produced internal divisiveness and a lack of managerial accountability. Their 2014 report recommended that the agency “prudently divest itself” of its World Trade Center holdings and focus on its considerable, but aging, transportation assets. “The agency for the last couple of decades has lost its way,” Rechler said. “It became politicized. We were doing small reforms, but it needed surgery, not therapy. There is still a need for the agency, but we need to refocus it for the twenty-first century. That starts with reinvigorating its corporate governance and organizational structure so that it once again is immune to politics and more focused on the region, its fiduciary duty, and its longevity.”

In fact, the authority had already tried to extricate itself from the real estate business by selling the World Trade Center lease to developer Larry Silverstein, just weeks before September 11. After Silverstein purchased the ninety-nine-year lease on July 24, 2001, he owned the rights to develop the Twin Towers, Towers Four and Five, and nearly a half million square feet (465,000 m²) of retail space. Earlier, in a different deal with the Port Authority, he had acquired the rights to develop Seven World Trade Center, which, like every other building bearing the World Trade Center address, also was destroyed on 9/11. Silverstein and the Port Authority, by necessity if not inclination, were thrust onto center stage. As the years passed, concerns grew about Silverstein’s ability to complete the work. “However, he had a lease. He had legal rights. You’re not going to unilaterally terminate that lease, because you’d be in court forever,” Kenneth Ringler, director of the Port Authority at the time, said. The Port re-acquired their interest in One World Trade Center and Tower Five from Silverstein in 2006. According to Foye, “because of the site’s importance on a national and international level, and because of the perceived lack of progress five years after 9/11, the consensus was reached that the Port Authority ought to take control of building One, and Silverstein agreed. The Port delivered on its part of the bargain, and so has Larry.”

“The World Trade Center and its tenant companies will directly and indirectly account for more than 128,200 jobs… with more than $13 billion in wages.”

NYU Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management, October 29, 2015

Over the past decade, the Port Authority has entered partnerships and selectively shed assets to more efficiently complete the Trade Center, reduce long-term financial risk, and generate investment capital for their transportation projects. To these ends, their moves have been deliberate, strategic, and quite successful. “While real estate development is not a core competency, building and designing and operating very complicated construction projects really is a core competency. By real estate development, I don’t mean the construction and design or management of a construction site; what I mean is leasing Class A office space in a hyper-competitive market like Manhattan,” Foye said. The Port Authority addressed that issue by bringing on the Durst Organization as a partner in One in 2010. In 2012, the agency entered into a joint venture with the Westfield Group, which paid $612.5 million for a fifty percent stake in the leasing and operation of shopping and dining space at the Trade Center; a year later, it sold its remaining interest to Westfield for $800 million. The authority’s 2013 agreement with Legends to develop and operate One’s observatory deck is worth $875 million over the term of the fifteen-year lease. They collect ground rent on towers Two, Three, and Four, which increases as tenants move in. They own, manage, and operate the Transportation Hub, along with the PATH line that runs through it, and the Vehicle Security Center, which all tenants use. The National September 11 Memorial & Museum and St. Nicholas National Shrine own their properties and help pay for shared infrastructure costs. “We lived through the hard times and pumped money into the project,” Rechler observed, and “we’ve finally gotten to the point where it’s earning. You don’t want to throw that benefit away. The challenge of divestiture is finding the best way to monetize that and reallocate money to the region’s transportation needs.”

The Port Authority was determined to rebuild the Trade Center to the highest standards of quality, hospitality, and security, and it has done so. Over the course of fifteen years, it untangled myriad competing claims of private and public institutions and overcame innumerable aesthetic, structural, and financial challenges. The agency spared no effort or expense to realize its vision in a singular social and political climate that we can only hope to never see again.

Diplomat, taskmaster, and banker—Patrick J. Foye, the executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey since 2011, wears many hats. A native New Yorker, a first-generation American, and the first in his family to attend college, Foye worked summers as an elevator operator and doorman. He attended Fordham University on a scholarship from the Local 32BJ, his father’s union; he later earned a law degree at Fordham. Foye was New York State’s deputy secretary for economic development before Governor Andrew Cuomo selected him to head the Port Authority. He became a mergers and acquisitions partner at Skadden Arps, later managing the firm’s offices in Brussels, Budapest, and Moscow. In the 1990s, Foye worked closely with former U.S. senator Alfonse D’Amato, helping to put together the Long Island Power Authority’s takeover of the Long Island Lighting Company, which, at the time, involved the largest-ever issuance of municipal bonds. He was the executive president of AIMCO, a real estate investment trust and a component of the S&P 500. Foye served as president and chief executive of the United Way of Long Island, and serves on the board of the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

The Port Authority was established by the Compact of April 30, 1921, and one of the first interstate agencies created under a clause of the United States Constitution. The compact defined the Port District, an area centered on New York Harbor and covering about 1,500 square miles, where the agency builds and operates infrastructure critical to the region’s trade and transportation network. In addition to the World Trade Center, its facilities include John F. Kennedy International, LaGuardia, and Newark Liberty International airports; marine terminals and ports; the PATH train; and six tunnels and bridges between New York and New Jersey.

“It’s a positive, self-reinforcing cycle—as different types of tenants arrive and people move downtown for the quality of life there, as public transportation attracts more people and companies, the workforce increases, which attracts still other companies and higher-quality retail—that has become unstoppable.”

SCOTT H. RECHLER

Vice Chairman, Board of Commissioners, The Port Authority