Real estate developer Larry Silverstein's vision realized after 9/11
OPINION:
In the wake of the sack of Athens about 500 years before Christ, the city’s citizens were faced with a decision. They could either recover what remained from the smoking ruins of their city or toss it all in a pile and rebuild more or less from scratch. In a display of confidence in their ability to rebuild better, the Athenians decided to erase the blackboard and start fresh.
I mention this because Larry Silverstein, the man who held the leases for the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, and who subsequently rebuilt the site after the attack, recently wrote a book (“The Rising”) about the history and process of the rebuild. You should buy the book, but I’ll save you some time: Mr. Silverstein had a vision of the 16 acres of the World Trade Center being rebuilt better than they were, becoming a commercially vibrant part of the world’s most important city once again, and having a memorial to Sept. 11 fit for New York City and the United States.
In this vision, many opposed him, including Mayor Giuliani, who wanted the site to become a perpetual memorial. The Port Authority waged the usual bureaucratic war. Then-developer Donald Trump described the proposed Freedom Tower as: “Terrorist target No. 1 with a bull’s-eye around its neck.”
Of course, that building is now the tallest in the Western Hemisphere, providing an emphatic exclamation point to the recovery of Lower Manhattan.
Mr. Silverstein – a native New Yorker who has spent his entire adult life in the rather mundane world of commercial real estate development – had a much better sense of history and the import of the moment than did his opponents. He instinctively understood that allowing 16 of the most valuable acres in the United States to remain unproductive would be to give the terrorists and their sponsors an ongoing propaganda win; they would have successfully brought the great engine of American capitalism to a halt.
He intuitively understood that it would be a mistake to compound – let’s be honest – the defeat we suffered on Sept. 11 by memorializing the entire site. Rather, he correctly asserted, against the mayor, the New York Port Authority and Gov. George Pataki, that the right answer was to build the site back even better, taller, and prouder while accommodating the very real fact that it was and is a graveyard.
Anyone who has been to the site bounded by West and Church Streets knows that Larry Silverstein was right and that he executed his vision perfectly. Mr. Silverstein, born in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood in Brooklyn in 1931, is emblematic of the America he loves. Straightforward, honest, experienced and steady, he was in the right place at the right time by the grace of providence. It is difficult to think about his life, and its intersection with destiny on that awful September morning, and not conclude that God does indeed have a special providence for Americans.
Michael McKenna is a contributing editor at The Washington Times. He is a native of New York City.
