One World Trade Center Opens With Tenant Conde Nast: US Customs and Border Protection and More to Join Following Decreased Rent [Video]
One World Trade Center opens Monday in Lower Manhattan for its first tenant, publisher Conde Nast, to move in, reports CNN. The publisher is moving 3,400 staffers into 24 stories, from floors 20 through 44. The skyscraper opens 13 years after the World Trade Center Twin Towers were destroyed on Sept. 11, 2001.
While there are several buildings on site, the property centerpiece is the One World Trade Center, a building with 104 stories that stand an impressive 1,776 feet tall, a height that represents the year of U.S. independence. Architects accomplished the height by placing a 408 foot spire atop the 1,368 foot tower.
The structure is taller than the original Twin Towers, which were 1,727 feet with the antenna.
One World Trade Center has 3.5 million square feet of space, including parking, offices and an observatory that is scheduled to open spring 2015.
Many of the floors remain unoccupied. The tower owners recently dropped the rent from $75 to $69 per square foot, attracting new tenants U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and the China Center, a liaison for U.S. and Chinese businesses.
Developer Douglas Durst reportedly teamed up with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the 16-acre site near Wall Street in lower Manhattan, to build the structure at a cost of $3.9 billion.
The 1,776-foot tower has been named the tallest in the U.S. by the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, reports Businessweek, beating out Chicago's 1,451-foot Willis Tower.
The new skyscraper replaces the Twin Towers, which were destroyed on 9/11 by terrorists who hijacked Flight 11 and crashed it into the North Tower and crashed hijacked Flight 175 into the South Tower. In total, 19 hijackers affiliated with the al-Qaida terrorist network carried out a string of attacks at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and in Pennsylvania that killed nearly 3,000 people.
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