Janno Lieber hangs up the phone. It hasn’t happened often in recent days, as talks between the owner and the lessee of the World Trade Center site have now reached an agreement after a four-month stalemate that capped more than four years of negotiations.
It seems that Lieber, as project director of the 16-acre World Trade Center site for Silverstein Properties — and developer Larry Silverstein’s right hand — will have a job for at least the next six years until the $7 billion Ground Zero build-out is achieved.
But before that takes place, the job promises many challenges.
Today, it’s a dilemma presented by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the owner of the World Trade Center site. Now that the owner and lessee have a pact of sorts, the Port Authority wants to see design plans for two adjacent towers on Church Street — to be built by Silverstein — within four months.
The developer had agreed to do just that, but then Lieber glanced at the legal document drawn up by the Port Authority. And got right back on the phone.
“We’re dealing with people from the Port Authority who’ve never designed an office building,” he said. “They take some words they don’t understand and write them in a legal document. We have to explain to them that what they’ve written down would take 18 months to complete, not four.”
Over the course of the past four years, Silverstein Property’s negotiations with the public entity have been rocky at times. But with the new agreement, construction on the $2 billion Freedom Tower has begun.
Even more important, the cast of characters, and the roles they will play in the evolution of the World Trade Center site, have been set. Still, the drama is just beginning.
And Lieber, a 44-year-old native of Manhattan who brings a diverse background to his job, appears to have the wherewithal to carry on the show. A former lawyer who also worked as an assistant secretary of transportation under President Clinton, he then went on to real estate development with Lawrence Ruben Co., where he handled an $800 million project to build an office tower on the Port Authority Bus Terminal that got derailed by September 11.
That background honed skills that qualify Lieber for his current post at Ground Zero, where he has worked to unite the interests of a dozen contentious and emotional public and private entities in the world’s highest-profile development project.
In the jargon of the trade, Lieber handles for Silverstein the design and construction process for the World Trade Center site and all the economics involved in the business of development, which include management of billions of dollars in insurance money and, eventually, in tax-exempt Liberty Bond funds. He also oversees the legal aspects of that process, along with marketing and public relations.
In practice, that means Lieber has kept two world-renowned architects, David Childs and Daniel Libeskind, from throttling each other. He has consoled a fleet of architects who had their Freedom Tower designs panned at the 11th hour for not being as secure as a U.S. embassy ready for siege. He has also sold the city on an ambitious — and some say, misguided — plan for the creation of more than 8 million square feet of top-tier office space at Ground Zero.
From day to day, Lieber might be dealing with broadcasters angling to get their antennae on that coveted spot atop the Freedom Tower. Or finessing a Chinese company into creating the China Center at the reconstructed 7 World Trade Center, at long last realizing the vision for the original World Trade Center. Or, more recently, encouraging acclaimed architect Norman Foster to deliver a curtain wall design for one of the towers.
“What’s so interesting about this job is really the range of issues,” Lieber said. “It’s not just design. It’s not just politics and government affairs. It’s not just traditional real estate leasing and marketing. It’s all those things.”
Kevin Rampe, former president of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, worked with Lieber over the course of three years and said he displayed an impressive ability to keep all parties at the negotiating table.
He remembered one tense late-night meeting in particular, when the Silverstein-Childs team was ready to walk, but the force of Lieber’s personality kept them going. “He recognized that the way to keep it on track was to keep everybody talking,” Rampe said.
While versatility may have qualified him for the job, what clinched it, Lieber said, was a rapport with Silverstein himself. Lieber, a tactician who is tall, sandy-haired and freckled, presents a contrast to his boss, a diminutive, bespectacled businessman known for being shrewd and tenacious.
“Larry and I kind of hit it off, and when you’re working for Larry, it’s a very personal relationship,” Lieber said. “That’s probably the single-most important qualification for this job.”
With his experience in government, Lieber is able to smooth over some of Silverstein’s blunt angles.
“Larry’s experience is in the business world, where you sit down and negotiate a business deal and get it done,” Lieber said. “One of the challenges here is a lot of the players are governmental or aren’t accustomed to resolving things at the negotiating table in that manner.”
Lieber has tried to bring Silverstein — who has a softer side as an amateur pianist with a passion for classical music — closer to Port Authority officials — bureaucratic builders of bridges and tunnels delving into the fast-paced world of commercial real estate development. Silverstein’s abundant optimism has kept Lieber inspired.
“He is the most optimistic human being I have ever met,” Lieber said. “Every day, he wakes up believing that we’re going to work through all of the complications of this incredibly complex project. He really represents the best of New York and what New York’s about.”
A love of New York is a strong theme in their relationship. Lieber was born on the Upper West Side and spent some years bouncing around Manhattan’s less developed neighborhoods, such as Manhattan Valley and Harlem. Then he and his wife, Amy Glosser, moved to Flatbush in Brooklyn, where they are raising two daughters and a son.
Lieber sits on the board of the Brooklyn Children’s Museum, where he assists in construction and development, including a $40 million expansion of the existing building designed by Rafael Vi oly. It’s a pleasure, but somewhat small potatoes compared to the $7 billion reconstruction of the site at Ground Zero, which will have the tallest building in the world, Lieber jokes.
He said he was pleased to have negotiated a final development plan for the site, and that Silverstein was by no means cutting his losses by accepting a deal that reduces his development rights by 38 percent, losing concessions of more than $2 billion. The victory was won some time ago, Lieber said, when Silverstein Properties convinced the city to develop commercial towers of top caliber on the eastern portion of the site as opposed to residences or government offices.
“Yeah, we have one building less, and we’ve given up some insurance money, and the economics have changed slightly,” he said. “But the core concept of this as a first-class office district la Rockefeller Center won out, and I’m very proud of that.”
Some real estate professionals have expressed skepticism the space will lease — even if 25 percent of it will be filled by the government — but Eric Deutsch, president of the Alliance for Downtown New York, a group of business owners and residents in Lower Manhattan, said it was the right move.
“Recall that in the late 1990s, the vacancy rate was below 5 percent, and we had close to 110 million square feet of space,” he said. That has shrunk to about 90 million square feet of space, according to brokers. “So, bringing 8 million square feet on line still puts us well below the former total inventory of space Downtown.”
Deutsch commended Lieber and Silverstein Properties on the recent deal. “The private sector held up its end of the public-private sector partnership here,” he said.
But other critics have questioned how five towers can be constructed at once in a relatively small portion of Manhattan without destroying the quality of life for residents and businesses.
“The LMDC did a full environmental impact statement that analyzed traffic, noise and air quality issues,” Lieber said. “It’s going to have to be updated to reflect the new configuration that’s going on now. We need to build in a way that ensures that people who work and live down there do not have to just endure, but can continue to enjoy a Downtown experience that only gets better.”
With the best transportation hub in the region, a growing residential population, a commercial population diversifying from financial tenants, and the architectural marvel that will eventually be a redesigned Ground Zero — with buildings by architects Santiago Calatrava, Frank Gehry, David Childs, and Norman Foster, among others — Lieber said it’s hard to imagine that it won’t succeed.
“I drank the Kool-Aid on the future of Downtown, and I care passionately about it,” he said. “There’s no other project that I would more like to be involved with.”