Larry Silverstein, Lisa Silverstein and Tal Kerret

Well, he did it.

Larry Silverstein began negotiating with American Express about five years ago to anchor his one unrealized dream for Lower Manhattan: 2 World Trade Center.

In February, Silverstein and AmEx crossed the finish line, and the details were one for the books: 55 stories. 2 million square feet. A completion date of 2031. A design by Lord Norman Foster. It was a thunderous cry of confidence in the city, the office sector and maybe the future itself.

But to say that Silverstein had been working on this for five years would be a laughable understatement. Ever since the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center, Silverstein has been ensconced in the rebuilding of the WTC site, and Tower 2 was the last unfinished piece of the puzzle. Plenty of the world’s starchitects had proffered designs (“I think it’s the 18th iteration of the design,” Silverstein said) and blue-chip tenants flirted with a lease. Back in 2016, media mogul Rupert Murdoch came tantalizingly close to signing on the dotted line.

“They spent a huge amount of time and money — on lawyers, on architectural fees — until on the 15th day of January of 2016, which was the last date on which Rupert Murdoch could have done it, he called me to cancel,” Silverstein told Commercial Observer. According to Silverstein, Murdoch said to him: “I don’t like what’s going on in the world. I look at the stock market and the American economy and I think we’re going back into the financial abyss. I think we’d be much smarter holding our cash and staying where we are.”

Silverstein took the call in stride.

“OK,” Silverstein said. “Are you sure?”

Yes, Murdoch was sure. But a decade later, all’s well that ends well, and Silverstein et al. are focused on the construction that is already underway below ground.

Even without this masterstroke, 2025 would have been a banner year. The firm owns approximately 7,000 apartments nationwide and some 50 million square feet of office. It’s also been doing healthy leasing at the World Trade Center (Uber expanded by 86,071 square feet at 3 WTC this March) and at 120 Broadway (just last month Adaptive Security took 51,220 square feet).

With Lisa Silverstein as CEO (or “Madame CEO” as Larry greets her daily) and her husband Tal Kerret as president, they’re finishing up the redevelopment and sale of 55 Broad Street, the 344,000-square-foot office they turned into multifamily with Metro Loft that is being shopped for a buyer (the price tag last we looked was above $500 million), and their rental/condo/retail project Brooklyn Tower should have its amenities finished by September or October.

“It’s so tall,” Silverstein said of Brooklyn Tower’s top floors, “you can almost see the curvature of the Earth.”

That’s not the first Silverstein property that could make a similar claim.