Art has always played a big role in my personal and professional life. My family lived in a top-floor apartment of a six-story walk-up on Bedford Avenue in Brooklyn, which was always filled with music. As a teenager, I was a student at the city’s High School of Music and Art. My wife Klara and I always have classical music playing in our home and in our car.

Art adds an exciting dimension to our lives and everything we do. It expands our thinking and offers a glimpse into the creative minds of the artists. Great art in public spaces has the ability to elevate those spaces and make them sing. My passion for public space art happened quite accidentally.

As I was building the original Seven World Trade Center in the 1980s, I must confess that I fell in love with a stone from Finland called Carmen Red granite. I liked it so much that I put it on the exterior of the building, as well as in the lobby, the elevators, and anywhere else I could. On opening day in 1987, I walked around the lobby and said to myself, “Oh my God. What have I done? It’s awful!” I remember calling Klara and saying, “Sweetheart, you have to come down!” When she arrived, I said, “We’ve got to do something with this thing – give it some color and life. Because it’s a mausoleum!” She immediately agreed, and we decided to scour the city for some contemporary art to liven the place up.

We visited a number of art galleries, including André Emmerich’s gallery on 57th and Madison. We were mesmerized by a painting by Al Held, an American abstract expressionist painter. The colors were so vivid and bright with different lines and a lot of hard edges. It was exactly what we needed. So, I asked André, “What’s the biggest one you’ve got?” He told me 10 feet by 10 feet, and I shook my head and said, “That’s not big enough. I need a bigger one!” When I told him the wall was 16 feet high and over 25 feet in length, he suggested Klara and I check out Al Held’s huge painting on display at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, a spot chosen because it was one of the few places with a wall big enough to hang it. Klara and I went up to St. John the Divine, and sure enough, there was this massive painting by Al Held, called The Third Circle. It was colorful, vibrant, kinetic, and oh my, was it big! I immediately fell in love with it.

So we bought it and put it up in the lobby against the far wall. Klara and I looked at it and I exclaimed, “That’s terrific! Now what are we going to do with the opposite wall?” We proceeded to find a lovely Lichtenstein entablature, 14 feet in length by about 6 feet in height. It was one of a series of paintings inspired by the architectural façades and ornamental motifs Roy Lichtenstein observed on Wall Street buildings from the early 20th century.

Then we bought a wonderful construct called Cloud by the sculptor Louise Nevelson. It was an abstract assemblage made from street-salvaged remnants of wood. Unlike many of her other large sculptures, this one was painted white rather than matte black. Louise Nevelson passed away in 1988, just after we installed her work in the lobby. Interestingly, a decade earlier the Port Authority had commissioned a large wall piece by Nevelson called Sky Gate, New York and installed it in the mezzanine of the North Tower overlooking the plaza.

Klara and I also visited the studio of Frank Stella, the revered American painter, sculptor, and printmaker. I’ll never forget that day. He was kind enough to let us wander around his entire studio even though I told him I was there to admire his work, not purchase it. He had things in every state of completion and noncompletion. He had objects made out of Lucite, plastic, canvas, fiberglass, even aluminum! I spotted two big paintings, 10 feet by 10 feet each, called Laestrygonia I and Telepilus Laestrygonia II. They were amazing, so I said, “Mr. Stella, how much for one of those?” He informed me they were a diptych – which meant I would have to take both of them. So that’s exactly what we did, and we put them on yet another wall.

Next, we commissioned a work called Crusading Euphoria, by Ross Bleckner, an artist best known for his paintings dealing with loss and memory, particularly in relation to the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s. Then I got the Port Authority to loan us a 25-feet-tall Alexander Calder sculpture, made out of painted red steel. It was called WTC Stabile, and also known by other names like The Bent Propeller and Three Wings. The piece was originally commissioned for the entrance to 1 World Trade Center on West Street, but I convinced the Port that the elevated plaza in front of Seven World Trade Center would be a much better location. And sure enough, it was the perfect fit.

So we ended up with a lobby full of incredible works by first-class, American contemporary artists. Klara and I loved walking into the building and seeing it so full of life and creativity. The whole experience also taught me an invaluable lesson: I swore to myself that anything that I built from then on would be to the best of my ability in terms of design, craftsmanship, and artistry.

We renovated 140 Broadway in the 1980s, and I took great care to preserve and enhance Isamu Noguchi’s iconic red cube in front of the building. “The cube signifies chance, like the rolling of dice,” Noguchi explained. Given the arc of my career, that was really something I could relate to!

When we took ownership of the World Trade Center in July 2001, 15 of our “tenants” were artists working in studios on the 91st and 92nd floors of Tower 1. They were there as part of “World Views,” a residency program managed by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council that placed visual artists in donated office spaces. One of the artists was Jacqueline Gourevitch, a Tribeca resident who painted the city of New York looking down from those high windows. Another of the program artists was the Jamaican-born sculptor Michael Richards, who was working in the studio on 9/11. His project was a memorial to the Tuskegee Airmen, a segregated unit of African-American pilots in World War II. Tragically, Michael lost his life that morning, along with so many other incredibly talented and warm-hearted individuals.

After 9/11, we provided Jacqueline and the other displaced World Trade Center artists with a new home at 120 Broadway. For several years, they worked out of studio space on the eighth floor and performing arts space on the ground floor. Of course, all the art that Klara and I had collected over the years was destroyed on 9/11, but when we rebuilt 7 World Trade Center, I insisted that we bring in artists at the earliest possible stage of the design process. I felt it was important to embrace and incorporate art into the building’s structure.

My architect David Childs collaborated with Jamie Carpenter – who works out of a studio on Hudson Street – on the building’s stainless-steel façade, as well as its lobby. The base of 7 WTC actually houses a Con Edison substation. It was part of the original tower and needed to be replaced quickly after 9/11, as it feeds power directly to all of Lower Manhattan’s residences, offices, schools, cultural venues, and countless other facilities. There are a series of electricity transformers on the north and south sides of the lobby and a command center upstairs. One of the challenges we faced early on was how to build a skyscraper on top of a massive substation so that it was both safe and beautiful. To accomplish this, Jamie Carpenter designed a shimmering stainless-steel façade with 130,000 prisms that wrap around the entire base of the tower. The prism sections are angled at 15 degrees, to allow fresh air into the transformers inside, but also to reflect the sky in different directions outside.

At night, 220,000 blue and white LED lights illuminate the façade from within, reflecting off the prisms. The lights are connected to 12 motion sensors placed around the base of the building, so when you walk by, a column of blue light literally follows you down the sidewalk.

One of the defining features of the lobby is the 65 feet wide, 14 feet high fortified glass wall that separates its public and private sides. Although it was designed primarily as a security shield, we knew it could also serve as a visually stunning canvas for a high-profile art installation large enough to be viewed from the park across the street from the building’s entrance. For that installation, David Childs suggested the contemporary American artist Jenny Holzer, who is renowned for light projects featuring words projected onto buildings. Her work has been displayed all over the world, from the Guggenheim Museum in New York to the Reichstag in Berlin.

I was nervous at first, because Jenny’s work is often controversial and sometimes quite negative. I thought it was important to be positive and uplifting in this place that had seen so much grief. So Jenny sat down with Klara, and over the course of a year, they selected poetry and prose about New York from dozens of authors, including Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg, Langston Hughes, and Elizabeth Bishop. In many cases, the work spoke to those writers’ first impressions of Manhattan.

The installation was a tremendous success, and a few years ago, we updated the text to include poems from 18 New York City public school students ranging from 8-18 years old. The park outside was designed by Tribeca’s Ken Smith, and for many years hosted a Jeff Koons sculpture known as Balloon Flower, Red. In May 2006, we opened the building with a public concert in the park featuring seven New York bands including Lou Reed and Suzanne Vega. It was the first outdoor concert at the World Trade Center since August 2001. Klara and I have had a lot of pleasure since the opening, filling the lobby with wonderful art. Installations have included Everything and the Cosmos (2006) by Richard Jolley; Clarus (2012) by Nicole Chesney; Same (2014) by Andrew Kuo; Double Happiness (2015) by Greg Bogin; an untitled piece (2015) by Scott Reeder; and Mindscape 25 (2019) by Regina Sculley.

While visiting the Marlborough Gallery in Chelsea, we saw two metal sculptures – Easter Monday (1977) and Equilateral Quivering Tower (1973-92) – by Kenneth Snelson, an artist who collaborated early on with David Childs to design One World Trade Center’s massive spire. Both sculptures use rigid pipes and flexible cables to produce ‘tensegrity,’ a combination of ‘tension’ and ‘structural integrity.’ We loved the pieces and arranged to borrow them. It turns out that they were just tailor-made for the lobby, as the fit was physically and artistically perfect. They blended so well with Jamie Carpenter’s stainless-steel wall and Jenny Holzer’s installation. And so, after a while, we decided to buy and display them permanently.

A few years ago, Klara and I were dining at Le Bernadin on West 51st Street, and I spied a majestic and powerful painting of the ocean. Given my passion for the water, I asked Éric Ripert, the owner and chef, to give me the name of the artist. Shortly after, we visited Ran Ortner’s studio. And soon enough, we installed two large canvases, Element No. 1 and Element No. 31, which depict massive photorealistic paintings of frothy, rolling waves with glowing sunlight illuminating the water’s surface.

Kara and I get so much pleasure from meeting with artists, learning about their craft and what inspires them. It’s also a thrill to share their works with my employees, as well as with our tenants and their visitors. Art is such an important part of what makes New York the special place that it is and always will be.

As I set out to rebuild the rest of the World Trade Center, I felt it was important to document the massive rebuilding project through photography, film, timelapse photography, and art. This is not something you can do at the end of the project; it has to be from the beginning. Since 2004, Dara McQuillan has overseen this effort, and it has resulted in dozens of media stories, several books, films, and exhibits. Our photographer Joe Woolhead has shot over four million photographs of the rebuilding effort since 9/11. On the 20th anniversary, Simon & Schuster published a book of his work called Once More to the Sky. Mike Marcucci has been filming for us since 2004. In 2012, he produced the award-winning documentary, 16 Acres, and is currently working on a sequel.

When we opened 7 WTC, a handful of fine artists worked on high, empty floors to paint, photograph, and film the massive construction project outside the window. These included Diana Horowitz, Marcus Robinson, and Todd Stone, as well as Jacqueline Guorevitch, who had been an artist-in-residence in the Twin Towers. Together they have produced an incredible body of work that tells the story of our efforts to rebuild the Trade Center over the past two decades. The lobby of 4 WTC features several beautiful largescale works, including Sky Memory (2013) by Kozo Nishino; three video screens by Thinc with time-lapse film of sky, trees and water; and Untitled 2022 by Tara Donovan. One floor below is a neon sculpture of the building’s footprint by Iván Navarro.

We also had a little fun at 4 WTC before we fully leased the building up. We reached out to 60 of the city’s top street and graffiti artists and invited them to paint on the 69th floor. Well, they took it to heart, and painted the walls, floors, ceiling, corridors, elevators, and even the windows. I’ve always been passionate about public space art, and it was a treat to see what these incredibly talented artists did to this studio in the sky. Interestingly, when Spotify was looking for new office space in 2016, they initially sought a Google-style warehouse building for their headquarters and felt that our glass and steel building didn’t fit with their corporate image. I took them up to the 69th floor and Spotify’s executives fell in love with the art and realized the space would work beautifully for them. Ultimately, Spotify signed a long-term lease for 14 floors and is now the building’s anchor tenant, and one of the largest companies to make the new World Trade Center home.

The only problem was that it wasn’t open to the public– 4 WTC is a private office building. So a few years later, we partnered with the Port Authority and took the art outside. We commissioned some of those same artists – and some new ones – to paint large murals around the base of 2 World Trade Center. It was a lot of fun watching them paint, and seeing how people react to their work.

Next door, at 3 WTC, I installed a large painting by the American pop-artist James Rosenquist. Measuring 46 feet across and 17 feet high, spanning the length of the lobby’s north wall, the monumental Joystick (2002) is an ode to Rosenquist’s love of flying. Based on reflections from a mirrored cylinder, packed with gyrating forms that move at incredible speed, the space of Joystick is invented, abstract, and optical. Upstairs, a number of our long-term artists worked through the pandemic in raw space at the top of the building, including Kerry Irvine, an abstract impressionist painter who lost her sister on 9/11; Stickymonger, a Korean artist that has worked with Golden Goose, one of our tenants; and Lady Aiko, one of the world’s leading urban artists.

A few years ago, my grandson Cory and his friend Josh Pulman launched Silver Art Projects, a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting emerging artists. Every year, 25 incredibly talented artists work out of a studio on the 28th floor of 4 WTC. The residency space is dedicated to art-making: providing artists with customized studios and the tools, platform, and resources to expand their practices and further their careers. The floor also features community spaces for study and dialogue, and allows artists to collaborate while enjoying sweeping, 360-degree views of the New York City skyline.

The residency’s artists have included transgender filmmaker, photographer, and activist Tourmaline; Iraqi- American sculptor Maryam Turkey; Native-American painter Athena LaTocha; Mexican-American multidisciplinary artist Mario Navarro; and New York artist Jared Owens, who taught himself to paint while serving 18 years in prison on drug-related charges, and now advocates for the rights of prisoners to have access to art supplies. This initiative, and the many others we support, extend our company’s history of supporting art and artists, and ensures they remain an integral part of the fabric of Downtown Manhattan.