The Rising
The Twenty-Year Battle to Rebuild the World Trade Center
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4.6 • 8 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The never-before-told inside story of the rebuilding of the World Trade Center — an epic tale of business, politics, and engineering by the man who spent two decades working to make it happen
After the terrorist attacks of 9/11 destroyed the World Trade Center, New Yorkers and Americans faced a critical set of questions: What should be done with the site? Could the towers be replaced? And how best to memorialize those lost on that day? For Larry Silverstein, a lifelong New Yorker who had signed a lease for the properties just a few months before the attacks, the answer was clear: America had to rebuild as quickly as possible.
In The Rising, Silverstein recounts in vivid detail his long battle to construct a new World Trade Center complex and to revitalize the surrounding neighborhood while also memorializing the victims of the attacks. Silverstein made history in 2001 when he signed a 99-year lease on the 10.6-million-square-foot World Trade Center for $3.25 billion. For the next twenty years, he navigated warring political interests, byzantine city bureaucracies, and resistant insurance companies, as well as the many challenges of designing, engineering, and constructing several new towers in the heart of downtown Manhattan. More than once the entire project almost folded, but today the buildings are nearly complete and the neighborhood is once again a thriving hub that draws hundreds of thousands of people a day.
The Rising is a vibrant portrait of the inner workings of New York City in the wake of its most profound tragedy, but it is also a master class in how to succeed in business despite all odds. Full of outsize characters and relentless adversity, this is a riveting book about a remarkable feat of vision and determination.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this feisty debut memoir, Silverstein, the New York real estate developer who signed a 99-year lease on the World Trade Center two months before it was attacked on September 11, recaps his efforts to build new skyscrapers on the site. He recounts successfully lobbying Congress for legislation protecting him against wrongful-death lawsuits; suing insurance companies that initially refused to pay out the billions of dollars covered by his policies, which he augmented by claiming the two plane crashes counted as separate incidents; and tussling with architect Daniel Libeskind over the Freedom Tower's design. Silverstein's account never lacks for melodrama, as when he recalls feeling "like a jilted lover" after the Salomon Brothers investment bank backed out of a World Trade Center lease for a glitzier building uptown. Offering a spirited rebuttal to critics who accused him of overcommercializing the reboot out of mercenary motives, Silverstein insists his goal was to show "the terrorists that they had not won," even as he elsewhere makes clear that the project required obsessive calculation of costs and profit ("As someone who had actually put up commercial office towers, I knew you had to pay a great deal of attention to feasibility"). Though Silverstein's detractors will find much to dispute, this classic New York saga about the symbiosis of grand civic ambition and rugged pragmatism stands tall. Photos.
Customer Reviews
True Story
Great story about a lifelong New Yorker who battled endeavors, politics, financial problems, and design controversies.