By Steve Cuozzo New York Post
What a typical office space would look like from the 63rd floor of 1 World Trade Center. Photo: Getty Images
While downtown detractors try to sell the lie that the district has too much empty space — especially at the World Trade Center — the skyscraper formerly known as the Freedom Tower just goes on making deals.
In the latest lease at the Port Authority and Durst Organization’s 1 WTC, location-based mobile advertising firm xAd has just taken the tower’s entire 60th floor with 43,849 square feet.
The news comes on the heels of last week’s signing of online gaming shop High 5 Games to 87,000 square feet on the 58th and 59th floors. That transaction was barely noticed on a day when 1 WTC coverage was dominated by the plight and rescue of window washers trapped on a suspended scaffold.
The two most recent transactions bring 1 WTC’s 3 million square feet to 62.8 percent leased, said Durst rep Jordan Barowitz.
And by our count, the tower has signed 235,000 square feet of deals over the past six months.
Durrst and the PA are building out the space for xAd, an expanding mobile ad startup that specializes in serving media specific to a user’s location. The firm recently received $50 million in funding.
It’s now based at 401 Park Ave. S., where it’s expected to remain after the expansion into 1 WTC. The asking rent was $69 a square foot.
The tenant was repped by Cushman & Wakefield’s Jon Mayeske and Jamie Katcher. A Cushman team led by Tara Stacom acted for the ownership, along with Eric Engelhardt and Karen Kuznick in-house for Durst
On a different WTC note:
Strolling through the complex’s new, underground West Gallery the other day to see the locations where Westfield has leased gourmet food shops, we passed a sign for One World Observatory, 1 WTC’s rooftop attraction, on the corridor’s second level (which is the first floor of the tower).
Maybe it was the sight of all that white marble — but it brought back a memory of the old WTC’s south tower lobby, where the elevator entrance to the observatory was.
Nothing about 1 WTC is anything like the Twin Towers, which were primitively engineered and inefficient compared with their successor. But for just a moment, I experienced a poignant rush of their undeniable monumentality and all the life they bore.
