A Third PATH Station to Rise at the WTC Site

I've been following the goings on at the World Trade Center site very closely for over five years now, but there was a lot in Larry Silverstein's presentation today which was news to me, including one spectacular cock-up. It turns out that the land underneath the current temporary PATH station needs to be excavated. But the permanent PATH station – which was originally scheduled to open at the end of 2006 – won't be remotely ready in time. So the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey is going to have to build a second temporary PATH station, up near 7 WTC, to replace the first temporary PATH station, which itself cost $323 million.

Now, I'm not someone to take everything that Larry Silverstein says at face value. He claims, for instance, that he will start construction on new towers by Richard Rogers and Fumihiko Maki in January, start on his Norman Foster tower in July, and have all those three towers plus David Childs' Freedom Tower finished by 2012. I'll believe it when I see it. But something like the second PATH station – you really couldn't make it up.

I also took the opportunity to ask Larry about the size of trading floors. The new Goldman Sachs building is apparently going to have floors of 72,000 square feet, while Silverstein's towers will have nine 54,000 square-foot trading floors between them, all with their own dedicated elevators for SEC compliance reasons. Silverstein's original 7 World Trade Center was home to what was at the time the legendary Salomon Brothers trading floor – but it turns out that was a relative minnow, at 47,000 square feet.