What’s brewing in W.T.C. retail?
The old World Trade Center retail area was the most profitable per square foot in the country, and many Downtowners have been waiting for its return for over a decade.
We’re sorry to deliver bad news on that front. Even though part of the transit hub’s retail area is already open to the public, John Genovese, senior vice president of Westfield World Trade Center — the firm recruiting tenants for the mall — told us this week that the company will wait until the entire hub is open, and will not open any sections early.
That means the retail opening is over a year away, but given the well-chronicled delays at the $4 billion station designed by Santiago Calatrava, we conceivably could have a new president before anyone does any shopping there (and yes, we think it’s a safe bet that President Obama will not be impeached and removed from office before 2017).
Meanwhile it’s not just the residents who are anxious for stores. During his presentation to Community Board 1 on progress at 3 and 4 W.T.C., Malcolm Williams of Silverstein Properties included a slide of a New York Post clipping suggesting that Eataly would be opening at 4. Williams suggested it was much more than an idle rumor.
At the same meeting, Glen Guzi of the Port Authority, which is essentially Westfield’s landlord, claimed to have no inside info, but he also said, “I guarantee you’ll have a couple of options for Starbucks for sure.”
Genovese laughed when we told him of the guarantee, but made no promises there’d be any Venti Lattes at the W.T.C. The only bean he threw our way was that someone there would be selling coffee.
Tribeca drone report
If you live in New York City, chances are you’re not afraid of a drone strike as much as someone living in, say, Pakistan. Robert Gluckstadt at least wasn’t until last weekend, when he says he had his own encounter with one of the high-flying vessels that “could have killed him.”
He told us he was reading a book in the park in front of the Citibank building on Greenwich St. near his Independence Plaza apartment last Sunday morning. All of a sudden a drone “fell out of the sky,” he said.
He said the drone sounded like a lawnmower when it hit a nearby tree. “But it was not dead,” he added. “It made a tremendous racket on the ground trying to right itself like a wounded animal” for ten minutes.
Disturbed by the spectacle, he told a security guard for the nearby bank headquarters to call the police, which the guard and his supervisor refused to do even as the two pilots of the drone came running.
With the leverage of a little piece of the drone that he had picked up, Gluckstadt said he then convinced one of the two men to accompany him to the First Precinct, where the officer on duty simply told the drone’s owner to be more careful in the future and didn’t even take his ID.
“I was upset, as I usually am when I talk to the police,” he said. “Apparently the operators of the drone weren’t breaking any laws….
“If it was a Monday morning, somebody may have been hurt.”
It was not clear what the men were doing with the drone.
Street clicking man
Photographer Scot Surbeck, a regular contributor to Downtown Express, currently has an exhibition, “Street Seen,” on display until Oct. 2 at Soho Photo Gallery, which is actually in Tribeca at 15 White St. Gallery hours are 1 p.m.-6 p.m., Wed. – Sun.
