The Port Authority has reached a tentative land deal with St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church at ground zero, removing a hurdle to the construction of a vehicle security center in the new World Trade Center, according to a Port Authority official. The deal is expected to come before the agency's board for approval today.

A dispute over the church's land, which sits south of Liberty Street across from ground zero, was highlighted in a Port Authority report last month as one of more than a dozen potential or impending major hurdles at the World Trade Center site.

In the agreement, the Port Authority would pay $20 million to the church, giving it a more than 8,000-square-foot site on which to build.  read more »

Governor Paterson indicated he would re-examine the rebuilding effort at the World Trade Center site, where the billions of dollars of projects faced years of delays before moving into the construction phase in the past year and a half.

“We have to go back and revisit the issue at Ground Zero,” Mr. Paterson said at a breakfast this morning hosted by the Association for a Better New York. “As we stand right now, it will be September 11 of 2011 before anything is actually built, and estimates are that that may be two or three years off. We can do better than that, because Ground Zero should always be a symbol of our resilience and an engine of our downtown economy.”

The implications of this statement--and what it means to "revisit" the issues there--are not entirely clear as construction on the Freedom Tower’s foundation is already well underway (we bumped into its architect, David Childs, this afternoon, who said construction is going well), as is sub-grade work on the PATH station, and the memorial. Developer Larry Silverstein recently started early work on two of his three towers for the site, too.  read more »

“Wow, look at the mist,” murmured Sarah Craig, a Vassar College freshman, as she and 60 other students walked onto the 52nd floor of Seven World Trade Center, developer Larry Silverstein’s glamorous office skyscraper that, this rainy afternoon, pierced the clouds.

Thanks to the top 10 floors still being up for lease, the penthouse hosts a lot of visitors — Mr. Silverstein’s publicist and his staff lead four to five tours a week — and lots of glamorous parties.

On Feb. 12, the starkly gorgeous concrete-and-glass space hosted babealicious swimsuit models celebrating the release of the 2008 Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue (the models traded their bikinis for cocktail dresses for a party that Silverstein Properties spokesman Dara McQuillan said was fabulous).

Of course, the Vassar students weren’t there to chat about star-studded fetes. The three classes — Intro to Urban Studies, Urban Geography and Architecture of the Modern World — had bussed in from Poughkeepsie and spent the day touring Chase Plaza and the perimeter of Ground Zero.  read more »

Yesterday the Port Authority awarded the largest single construction contract for the National September 11 Memorial and Museum at the World Trade Center to Navillus Contracting in Long Island City, City Room reported.

Navillus, which is new to ground zero, joined with Bovis Lend Lease to bid on the $103.9 million concrete contract.  read more »

The Port Authority has finished excavations in the bathtub for Tower 4 at the World Trade Center, making way for the Fumihiko Maki-designed, Larry Silverstein-developed, 64-story building.

The bi-state agency, which owns the site, said it is slated to finish excavations on the neighboring Tower 3 site in mid-February. The Port Authority missed its deadline of Jan. 1 to complete excavations on the two sites, and every day since, has owed Silverstein Properties $300,000 in penalties.  read more »

The Associated Press is reporting that the opening of the World Trade Center memorial (now officially known as the National Sept. 11 Memorial and Museum) has been pushed back two years until Sept. 11, 2011.

Here we go: writing an article about an article about an article, but we cannot resist because the subject of that last “article” is Larry Silverstein—who is, according to a Columbia Journalism Review blog post, the media’s favorite developer.  read more »

The NCR Corporation is leasing a floor at 7 World Trade Center, the first of Larry Silverstein’s buildings at Ground Zero, bringing the occupancy rate up to 74 percent. The rent is said to be somewhere around $70 a square foot annually—an aggressive rate even for a booming downtown.

Governor Spitzer announced the deal this morning. Press release after the jump.

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Taking another step toward selling off the Freedom Tower, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey has hired Deutsche Bank to explore “equity capital investments” in the building.

Michael Francois, the Port Authority’s director of development, said at a board committee meeting this morning that invitations to bid on the consulting job, which will examine ways to sell equity in the building, went out to eight leading financial firms, six of which responded. Deutsche Bank was chosen because it had the “best overall qualifications.”

Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau announced today that his office has opened an investigation into the Aug. 18 fire at the Deutsche Bank building near Ground Zero "to determine whether any criminal violations occurred in connection with the fire."

There's a lot to go on.

Did a construction worker's lit cigarette spark the fire? Bloomberg reports:  read more »