Less than a month before the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the World Trade Center site is starting to resemble a park with office towers as the buildings leap skywards and more trees are planted as part of the September 11th Memorial Plaza.
The dramatic 1 World Trade Center is finally towering over the skyline as it reaches 78 stories and can clearly be seen from parts of Midtown, Brooklyn and Queens, as it becomes the tallest building downtown.
At 1 WTC, The Post has learned, workers and visitors will enter the 50-foot-high lobby from either Vesey Street on the north, from the east on Greenwich Street or from Fulton Street on the south side.
Twenty stories above the lobby, on the first office floor, Condé Nast’s new 1-million-square-foot offices will run up through the 41st floor.
An express elevator will whisk other tenants and visitors 773 feet, 4 inches to the 64th story skylobby.
A block of 700,000 square feet is available from the 70th floor upwards through the 90th floor at rents that will also be sky-high. Cushman & Wakefield’s Tara Stacom is overseeing the leasing for the Port Authority and partner the Durst Organization.
Entrances to the 100th floor Observation Center will be on the west and south sides of the building. Unlike at the Empire State Building and GE Building observatories, there will not be any outdoor space or roof terraces for visitors.
In the plaza, swamp white oak trees continue to be planted around the Memorial Pools. The names of the victims along the edge of the giant pools are for now discreetly covered to protect them from construction debris. The names, cut through black metal plates in 1-inch tall stencil-like letters, will be lighted from below.
The two-story wedge-shaped Memorial Museum still needs a lot of work before it can accommodate visitors for the 2012 anniversary.
Greenwich Street is also taking shape and is now being resurfaced to create a north-south pathway through the site, but it is unlikely to ever become a true public street.
The Port Authority’s Executive Director Christopher Ward agrees that Greenwich won’t have taxis barreling down. But he insists, as Condé Nast has made clear in its lease, that the street will be open to traffic, albeit in a very controlled environment. [email protected]
