As Mary Ann Tighe walked through a stunned Manhattan on Sept. 11, 2001, after spending the day at Marsh & McLennan's midtown office helping the company account for employees in its World Trade Center offices, she ran into developer Larry Silverstein. His company had taken control of the World Trade Center leasehold just weeks before.
She never got the chance to say what she had meant to.
“I was intending to say some words of comfort, and in the moment, I could do nothing but cry,” Tighe, now CEO of CBRE's New York tristate region, said in an interview. “That's when he said to me, ‘Sweetheart, we're going to rebuild.’”
Twenty-five years after the Sept. 11 attacks, the rebuilding of the World Trade Center has evolved into one of the nation's most consequential urban redevelopment projects. What began as an effort to replace lost office towers helped transform Lower Manhattan from a finance-centric business district into a mixed-use neighborhood, anticipating trends now reshaping downtowns across the country as cities compete for residents, employers and younger workers.
The shift has altered who uses the neighborhood and why companies want to be there. Employers increasingly consider where current and future workers live when making office decisions, and Lower Manhattan's growing residential population, transit connectivity and cultural amenities have helped attract a broader mix of tenants beyond the financial firms that once dominated the district.
The 16-acre World Trade Center now stands as both a memorial and a symbol of Lower Manhattan's reinvention. The district, once heavily dependent on financial firms, now attracts technology, media and creative companies. Apartments, restaurants, shops, cultural venues, community events and transit investments have also helped create a neighborhood where tens of thousands of residents live alongside office workers.
The area's residential population has grown to more than 70,000 from about 14,000 in 1995, according to the Alliance for Downtown New York.
Tighe, who has helped lease Silverstein Properties' 7, 3 and 4 World Trade Center towers since 2004 and still meets with Silverstein and his team most weeks, said the challenge is no longer persuading tenants to come downtown.
“Downtown became the youngest part of the city.”
"For the first 15 years, we dealt with people who were still fearful of the site," Tighe said. Prospective tenants and even some real estate brokers touring the neighborhood would remark that they had not been downtown since before 9/11. When they arrived at the rebuilt World Trade Center, many would ask, "Wow, when did all this get built?"
“The irony of downtown, the oldest part of Manhattan, is that after the tragedy of 9/11, downtown became the youngest part of the city,” she said.
That transformation stems from tens of billions of dollars in public and private investment, a growing residential population, and an expansion of retail, entertainment and cultural offerings.
A neighborhood finds its footing
The next chapter in that evolution is unfolding at 7 World Trade Center, the first tower completed as part of the rebuilding effort. Moody's plans to vacate roughly 735,000 square feet next year for nearby Brookfield Place, creating one of Manhattan's largest blocks of available office space.
Silverstein Properties views the Moody's departure as much an opportunity as a setback. The landlord already has more than 2 million square feet of tenant interest for the space, including more than 1 million square feet of offers and another 1 million square feet of prospects, according to Keith Cody, the company's head of commercial leasing.
Across Manhattan, only eight office buildings have at least 500,000 square feet available for direct lease, according to CoStar data. Only six are rated four stars or higher by CoStar, and 7 World Trade Center is the only five-star tower, underscoring how scarce large blocks of top-tier office space have become.
Cody said that scarcity, combined with tenants’ preference for top-tier office space, positions 7 World Trade Center to capitalize on Moody's departure rather than be hurt by it.
"The challenge is you have about 735,000 square feet coming back to you," Cody told CoStar News. "But the opportunity is we really feel that we can certainly improve the mark-to-market rents. … If there's a tenant in Manhattan that wants to be in a trophy asset, there's a limited amount of inventory. ... There are multiple offers on several blocks of space.”
Silverstein's optimism reflects a broader shift in Lower Manhattan's office market. The neighborhood recorded 4.75 million square feet of leasing in 2025, more than double the prior year's total and its strongest performance since before the pandemic, according to the Alliance for Downtown New York.
Since 2022, Lower Manhattan has leased 15 million square feet of office space, the equivalent of more than five Empire State Buildings, according to CBRE. The neighborhood has also become increasingly diversified. Financial services firms accounted for 25% of occupied office space this year, down from roughly 46% in 2009. During the same period, technology, media and entertainment tenants expanded their footprints downtown.
That momentum continued this year, with Lower Manhattan posting Manhattan's strongest second-quarter leasing and asking-rent growth while top-tier rents reached a five-year high, Downtown Alliance said. Lower Manhattan recorded 2.16 million square feet of positive net absorption last quarter, meaning occupied space grew while available inventory declined.
Lower Manhattan's available office space has fallen to its lowest level since late 2020, real estate services firm Colliers said in a recent report.
Part of that momentum stems from constrained supply. Office inventory across Manhattan is shrinking as developers convert aging office buildings into apartments and condominiums, a trend that has been especially pronounced in Lower Manhattan.
In the second quarter, Class A space downtown still leased at roughly a 39% discount to comparable Midtown offices, according to the Downtown Alliance, which described the gap as a "pricing advantage."
Cody said that "due to the lack of inventory in Midtown and Midtown South ... coming to the World Trade Center is a strong, viable option."
Asking rents at Silverstein’s World Trade Center portfolio, including 3, 4 and 7 World Trade Center, have all hit record levels, Cody said. Tenants include Uber, Spotify and WPP Media, formerly known as GroupM.
Asking rents at 7 World Trade Center range from $100 to $150 per square foot, Cody said. The 52-story, 1.7 million-square-foot building recently secured its highest rent ever, after the building's first prebuilt office space sparked a bidding war among prospective tenants.
In contrast, rents at 7 WTC ranged between $50 and $60 among the first leases it signed in 2006, according to CoStar data.
Asking rents at Silverstein’s World Trade Center portfolio now average about $135 to $140 per square foot, CBRE's Tighe said.
“My only goal now is to bring the Trade Center to full pricing,” Tighe told CoStar News. “Now the Trade Center is getting re-leased and fully appreciated for what it is.”
When vacancy becomes opportunity
One World Trade Center, developed by the Durst Organization and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, is also posting record results as the tower reaches 97% occupancy.
It’s “the highest leased rate we’ve hit,” Karen Rose, managing director of commercial leasing for One World Trade Center, who has worked on leasing the building since before it opened in 2014, said in an interview.
When the tower opened, publishing giant Condé Nast served as its anchor tenant, leasing more than 1 million square feet.
“For a 3.1 million-square-foot building, it's quite an achievement," Rose said. "Some days it even surprises us.”
Condé Nast has subleased much of its space but remains the building's largest occupant, according to CoStar data.
Durst is also seeing record rent levels at the building. Penthouse space on the 89th floor and part of the 90th floor was brought to market for the first time this year — the highest leasable floors in the Western Hemisphere. Each space has asking rent of $160 per square foot which, if signed at that rate, would be “a record breaker for Lower Manhattan,” Rose said.
“We are getting a lot of interest,” she said, adding prospective tenants range from those in the financial services to artificial intelligence and other tech tenants. “You are not finding these double-height windows, these 22-foot ceilings anywhere, really.”
The performance of the building also carries personal significance for Rose.
“As a New Yorker myself, there's no greater privilege than to be a part of what this building stands for and what it means,” she said.
Rose wasn’t alone in having that sense of pride.
‘Best address in the world’
Greg Carafello, who operated a digital printing company in the World Trade Center, escaped from the South Tower's 18th floor, where his office was, after the first plane struck the North Tower on the morning of Sept. 11. After losing the office he had occupied since the mid-1990s, he relocated his business to New Jersey.
More than a decade later, however, Carafello found himself drawn back to Lower Manhattan after becoming a volunteer docent at the 9/11 Memorial & Museum in 2012 and watching the World Trade Center rise again.
"I started to see the rebuild occurring," he said. "It was something I wanted to be part of."
Carafello returned to the site when One World Trade Center opened in 2014 and has maintained office space on the building's 85th floor ever since. He said he has been told that of the 407 businesses displaced by the Sept. 11 attacks, his is the only one known to have returned to the Trade Center.
"I just wasn't done yet," said Carafello, president and principal broker of First Choice Business Brokers and a master franchisee. "It's the best address in the world."
Carafello said clients and colleagues often ask to visit the building and see his office, now overlooking the memorial pools and the rebuilt World Trade Center complex, when they are in town. Having an office at One World Trade Center also "lends a lot of credibility" and has helped attract business, he said.
He described returning to the site as "very cathartic."
Building for the next generation
Employers are increasingly examining commuting patterns and considering not only where their current workforce lives but also where future hires are likely to live as they refine return-to-office strategies, according to Dara McQuillan, Silverstein's chief marketing officer.
Many office workers now live in Brooklyn, Jersey City and Lower Manhattan, making the World Trade Center's transit connections especially attractive. Two decades ago, many recent college graduates were more likely to live on the Upper East Side, the Upper West Side or in suburbs near their parents, McQuillan said.
"For the companies who care about where their employees live, and therefore their commute, those companies are laser-like focused on downtown," McQuillan said.
A Downtown Alliance report in March found that roughly 970,000 college graduates ages 18 to 44 live within a 30-minute transit commute of Lower Manhattan, up by 182,000 since 2012. The increase outpaced growth in any other part of the New York metropolitan area, according to the business improvement district.
The vast majority of the World Trade Center workforce is under 40, Tighe said. “What the Condé Nast deal did was get people to focus on the fact that downtown actually was accessible by not only a young workforce … in Brooklyn, Queens, Hoboken and Jersey City, but also a creative community that lived in the Village and Tribeca."
The World Trade Center itself has become easier to market as the redevelopment has matured. When 7 World Trade Center opened in 2006, much of the surrounding site remained an active construction zone. Today the Oculus transit hub, shopping and dining options, public art, the Perelman Performing Arts Center and year-round programming have helped turn the district into a full-service neighborhood.
Meanwhile, American Express recently broke ground on 2 World Trade Center, the final office tower planned for the 16-acre redevelopment.
"For many years, particularly when this building first opened, this was a construction site," McQuillan said. "Now that dream is very much a reality."