Video: Mary Ann Tighe Predicts 2015 as the Year Everything Changes Downtown
Getting timing right is always a tricky proposition. But at Commercial Observer‘s breakfast panel discussion on development in Lower Manhattan in honor of the launch of CO‘s 2014 Owners Magazine, Mary Ann Tighe, CEO of CBRE (CBRE) decided to get specific about when Lower Manhattan was going to kick into gear.
“I remember a couple of years back someone saying, ‘What’s the year when it’s all going to turn around?'” Ms. Tighe said to the overflow audience of more than 200 of some of the city’s most prominent players in commercial real estate at 7 World Trade Center. “And I said, ‘ ’15.'”
Tighe cited the impending Fulton Center (which actually opened the week after the discussion), Santiago Calatrava’s transportation hub, “It’ll feel like a new city down here.”
But to a large extent the changes have already happened. Larry Silverstein, head of Silverstein Properties remarked on the neighborhood’s complete transformation. Of Wall Street’s bad old days, Silverstein said: “It was dark. It was dreary. At night, weekends, you could roll a bowling ball down the center of the street and you wouldn’t hit anything.”
