Conde Nast Inks WTC Deal

Aspirational magazine publisher Conde Nast has signed the long-awaited deal to assume over one million square feet of office space in One World Trade Center, which when completed will be the tallest skyscraper in the nation.

The lease marked the largest single tenant to be brought into Lower Manhattan in years. The project is being developed by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which sold an ownership stake to the Durst Organization. “We hope Condé Nast, at long last united into a single building, will be the catalyst for the rebirth of the downtown area,” Newhouse told a crowd of reporters and elected officials standing in the bare concrete, window-clad floor of the tower — one of the floors being leased by his company.

Such an act takes a major load off the back of the Port Authority, which is seeking to lease up a building that comes with a long list of challenges. One World Trade Center is surely worth far less that it costs to build (the tower was valued last year at $2 billion, while its construction price tag is over $3 billion). It undeniably causes anxiety over future terrorism among potential tenants. At present, there is just one other private tenant, for 190,000 square feet, signed on to the 2.6 million-square-foot building.

Thousands of clackers are surely sobbing in their Times Square cubes. Quick, somebody get three thousand feet of velvet rope to Ground Zero, stat!

And The Conde Nasties Weep

After weeks of rumors, today the New York Times confirms that Conde Nast is ready to ink a deal to move its fleet of aspirational magazines and their accompanying army of snooty clackers away from their present midtown location and into One World Trade Center. Where they will be miles away from anything remotely hip! Oh noes!

The deal to bring Condé Nast to the building once known as the Freedom Tower would signal a remarkable turnaround for a project that had been considered a marketing nightmare. The 1,776-foot-tall skyscraper will be the tallest building in New York when it is completed in 2013. If the deal goes through, employees of Condé Nast — publisher of Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Vogue and 15 other magazines — would move in 2014 from their current home in Times Square. The company, which currently occupies 800,000 square feet at 4 Times Square, notified its employees in a memo Tuesday morning that it was in “active negotiations” to move to 1 World Trade Center but a final decision was several months away. After years of delay, the steel latticework for the $3.2 billion building is rising hundreds of feet into the skyline. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the building, recently renamed it 1 World Trade Center. The authority is hoping that Condé Nast will bring the same kind of cachet to a rebuilt trade center that the publisher brought to a dowdy Times Square in the late 1990s.

Conde Nast would occupy more than one-third of the massive tower. Quick, somebody get three thousand feet of velvet rope to Ground Zero, stat!