Inside ‘hero without honor’ Larry Silverstein’s battle to rebuild the World Trade Center after 9/11

Twenty-two years after 9/11, Larry Silverstein is closing in on the prize that long eluded him — a tenant for Two World Trade Center, the 1,000-foot tall skyscraper that’s the missing piece in the Trade Center puzzle. American Express is now in lease talks with the developer to anchor the tower, the site for which is currently a beer garden.

Silverstein built two of the fabled complex’s great towers and got One World Trade Center off the ground. He also put up beautiful new Seven World Trade across the street. All are filled with major corporate tenants and thriving.

But the missing tower has long frustrated Silverstein, despite his triumph in rebuilding or launching the others — a dramatic New York City saga of political infighting that he tells vividly and sometimes painfully in his new book, “The Rising: The Twenty-Two Year Battle to Rebuild the World Trade Center.”

Visitors the world over flock to the 9/11 Memorial and Museum, the Oculus with its hundreds of stores and the new Perelman Performing Arts Center. But Silverstein’s office towers are the economic muscle behind them all.

Yet, at age 93, he’s been a hero without much honor in his hometown.

But the cultural and philanthropic worlds, at least, took note. At last, he and wife of 68 years, Klara, will be appropriately feted at the New York Philharmonic’s opening night gala on Sept. 24. 

He took control of the Twin Towers and other Trade Center buildings a few months before the 2001 terrorist attack. Pursuing what he called “both my right and my obligation” to rebuild, he struggled every hour and every inch of the way to make it happen.

“After 9/11, I found myself with how many thousands of people,” some who “said the right things but didn’t follow through,” Silverstein told The Post.

He tangled with governors, mayors, bureaucrats, banks, architects, the Port Authority, 22 insurance companies and some major media organs who wanted to completely boot him from the 16-acre “hallowed ground” where he had every legal and contractual right to rebuild.

Silverstein recently sat down with me for our first face-to-face talk since I interviewed him in early January 2001. At the time, the Port Authority planned to sell a 99-year leasehold on the Trade Center. In my story for The Post on Jan. 30, 2001, Silverstein — who was bidding against three much larger, publicly traded companies — said, “We’re lusting for the World Trade Center, the prize of all prizes.”

Days later, Silverstein’s “lust” seemed turned to dust when he was struck and nearly killed by a hit-and-run driver. “All of a sudden I was lying flat-out on the street. I had never felt such pain in my life,” he writes.

He nonetheless pressed his campaign from a hospital bed, even refusing pain killers when they interfered with his concentration.

There was resentment when Silverstein and his partners beat out much larger rivals Vornado Realty Trust, Boston Properties and Brookfield Properties. The New York Times and the Daily News, both owned by companies with significant stakes in the city’s real estate office market, hated Silverstein for wanting to replace all of the old World Trade Center’s office space.

Recalling in his book a Times editorial headlined “Greed vs. Good at Ground Zero,” he asks: “Guess who was cast in the role of Greed?”  

Silverstein first got involved in the 1980s when he built Seven World Trade Center on PA-owned land across from the main complex. His first hoped-for tenant, Drexel  Burnham Lambert, ripped up the lease before it was signed, Silverstein writes.

His next prospect, Salomon Brothers, decided instead to go to the planned uptown project then called Columbus Center.

“And then Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis saves us,” Silverstein recalled with a smile. The civic-minded presidential widow, who saved Grand Central Terminal from demolition, stepped up to warn that the huge, twin-towered Columbus Center would cast long shadows on Central Park. The bad publicity spooked Salomon chief John Gutfreund, who decided to move to Silverstein’s building after all.

Silverstein replaced the original, functional but unattractive Seven World Trade with an elegant, smaller one designed by architect David Childs. But as it began to rise in 2003, what should have been cause for celebration was, as I reported at the time, “detested and feared” by Silverstein’s politically potent competitors — who said that 1.7 million square feet without signed tenants would glut the market.

Then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg was, at first, a major detractor.

“We clashed heavily,” Silverstein recalled. “I was advertising in early 2006 to rent Seven World Trade at $50 a square foot. Bloomberg [said] in an article Silverstein was asking a ridiculous price. He said the space wasn’t worth a dime more than $35.

“I called and said, ‘Mr. Mayor, I just want you to know you’re wrong. I spent my life renting space in Lower Manhattan. I know exactly what the values are. You don’t.’

“He said, ‘Then prove me wrong.’ Months go by, I signed a lease for 800,000 square feet with Moody’s at $50 a square foot. Mike called to apologize. He said, ‘You proved me wrong.’ I said, ‘You’re a beautiful human being.’ ”

Although Bloomberg declined to make his apology public, Silverstein said, “After that, he became my staunch supporter all the way through.”

He blamed the mayor’s initial position on the Bloomberg administration’s widely praised deputy mayor for economic development, Dan Doctoroff. “He had an investment banking background, which is not the same as a real estate background,” Silverstein said. “He did an analysis which said we’d never get more than $35 a foot for Seven World Trade.”

But the project was a cakewalk compared with the challenges Silverstein faced at the 16-acre main site.  His intention to replace 14 million square feet of destroyed offices struck some as reckless when pundits were saying that the terrorist attack spelled the end of cities.

His worst nemesis was the Port Authority. Silverstein writes, “From the moment the rubble had started to be cleared . . . the Port had seemed eager to shove me out of the reconstruction process.” In 2005, “It decided it was time to push me out of the picture once and for all.”

The animosity was widespread in real estate and government circles as well. I asked Silverstein if he felt that maybe some people didn’t want “one little Jewish guy with a local family real estate company — not part of the global development pantheon — to be in charge of rebuilding.”

He answered with a faint smile: “I have no doubt of the reality of that situation.”

Although Silverstein was paying $120 million a year in ground rent for buildings that no longer existed, the PA made construction impossible by failing to excavate the site. In 2008, the PA had to pay him $300,000 a day in contractual penalties for the stall.

His insurers wanted to pay only half of what he was owed — $4.68 billion for two separate jet attacks. Silverstein’s case looked hopeless until then-Gov. Eliot Spitzer intervened and got him “one hundred cents on the dollar,” he recalls in the book.

Spitzer’s predecessor, George Pataki, frustrated Silverstein at every turn. His choice of a “master site plan” by architect Daniel Libeskind undermined Silverstein’s architect David Childs. The governor forced the two men to team up on the so-called Freedom Tower, resulting in a “mongrel” structure that likely couldn’t be built.

“The antenna” — a 100-ton monster pointing toward the Statue of Liberty — was to be “on a corner of the roof rather than the middle,” which one prominent structural engineer said would cause the tower to collapse from its weight, Silverstein told me.

Then, he recalled, “The next thing I hear is that the New York City Police commissioner” warned the governor that the tower was situated too near to West Street, making it vulnerable to truck bombs.

Even so, Pataki staged a ceremonial “cornerstone laying” on steamy July 4, 2004. Silverstein, Bloomberg, other elected and PA officials and victims’ family members sweltered through a photo-op ceremony, which was entirely a sham. When the need for a redesign and new location soon became known, Silverstein put his foot down.

“I said, ‘David [Childs] will do it without Libeskind,’ ” he recalled with relish.

Silverstein tapped distinguished international architects Richard Rogers and Fumihiko Maki to design Three and Four World Trade Center, respectively. But they had to wait for the PA’s years-delayed construction of a “bathtub” to form the towers’ foundations. Tower Three was nearly derailed for good after the 80-story giant was stalled at the seven-story “podium” level, when a tough lending market forced Silverstein to ask the PA for “backstop financing” — not a loan, but a guarantee — for  a construction loan. The plan, blessed by newly elected Gov. Andrew Cuomo, wouldn’t cost the agency a cent.

But rogue PA commissioners balked. Silverstein writes, “It was simply that they didn’t like me.”

By then, he had already signed a lease worth $800 million with media company GroupM to be the anchor tenant. I wrote in March 2014, “What signal would be sent now by an unfinished, empty, seven-story stump?”

Only a dramatic improvement in the financial markets enabled Silverstein to sell enough government-backed Liberty Bonds to save the project.

The new World Trade Center’s crown jewel was to be the “Freedom Tower,” a name given to it by Pataki and which then-developer Donald Trump said made it “Terrorist target No. 1 with a bull’s-eye around its neck.”

Silverstein started work on it. But, “By the time the foundation was just about finished, we made a deal to cede responsibility for building it to the Port. Because we recognized we didn’t have enough capital for it [while we were also building towers 3 and 4].

“You have to be a realist and a practical businessman. I said, if they really want it, give it to them,” he said with a laugh that surely belied his disappointment.

As for Two World Trade: Does he think it will happen in his lifetime? “Yes, I do. I think this time, it’s going to happen.”

Now, it’s all up to Amex.