The New 7 World Trade Center
May Get Its First Office Tenant

After more than two years of unsuccessfully courting tenants for 7 World Trade Center, developer Larry Silverstein is weighing a serious bid from a Chinese real-estate company to take about five floors of space in the 52-story glass tower. The company, Vantone, offered about $40 a square foot for a 10-year lease on 200,000 square feet of space in the nearly complete building.

"We submitted a substantial offer to Larry during the last week in September. We're waiting for his response," says Peter Riguardi, president of the New York region for real-estate services firm Jones Lang LaSalle Inc., which is representing Vantone.

The original 7 World Trade Center, which was adjacent to the main World Trade Center, was destroyed in the Sept 11, 2001, attacks. The new tower, which is expected to be ready for occupants in early 2006, will contain 1.7 million square feet of office space, enough to house roughly 6,000 workers.

Public officials have criticized the notoriously stubborn New York developer for demanding too much rent given the building's location. Mr. Silverstein is asking around $50 a square foot. But the developer, who is currently trying to build the Freedom Tower and other buildings on the Trade Center site, is in a bind because whatever rent he agrees to for the current building will be the starting point for tenants in the next wave of buildings. Mr. Silverstein declined to comment.

Sunset in Shanghai

The sun is setting on one of the more unusual sources of Sino-Japanese tension, a huge tower whose design evoked memories of the Japan's brutal 1937 occupation of Shanghai.

Tokyo builder Mori Building Co. agreed to replace the giant circular opening at the top of the Shanghai World Financial Center, which Shanghainese said symbolized the rising sun of Japan's national flag, with a trapezoid-shaped opening.

The new design for the tower, which was first proposed in the mid-1990s, is an even taller 1,500-foot building featuring a 100th-floor observation platform at its top and exhibition spaces. "We felt this was fresher" than the circle, plus cheaper and more efficient, Minoru Mori, president and chief executive officer of the development company, said yesterday.

The saga of the Mori building has followed the ups and downs of Shanghai's dynamic property market, and in particular the Pudong financial district. Mori's decision to dust off and revise the ambitious building -- which the company says will be the world's tallest when it is finished -- is testament to the property boom that is sweeping Shanghai and the rest of the country. Mr. Mori never got much further than the groundbreaking in 1998, before the "rising sun" controversy and signs of an overbuilt office market prompted him to freeze the project.

The Mori redesign has been announced amid growing tensions in Sino-Japanese relations, irritated most recently by Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's visit to a controversial Tokyo war shrine Monday.

Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates, the architecture firm hired by Mr. Mori to design the building, said the huge aperture at the building's top was designed to stabilize the structure on windy days and was never intended to symbolize Japan.

Grand Reopening

Seven weeks after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, its central-business district is returning to life. Two office towers, at 1515 and 1555 Poydras St., just across from the Superdome, are reopening to tenants after becoming the first damaged buildings downtown to be cleared by inspectors, says David Carroll, a senior vice president with Jones Lang LaSalle, which manages and leases the building for an institutional client.

Floodwater from the storm filled the first floors of both buildings, which have tenants such as Tulane University and the Internal Revenue Service, causing millions of dollars in damage. The water flooded the mechanical plants of the buildings and Jones Lang LaSalle had to bring in workers from outside the ravaged city to carry out repairs.

Being early has its rewards -- Mr. Carroll says interest in leasing space in the buildings, which are 22 and 29 stories, has already increased since reopening.

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