The World Trade Center's Rocky Real Estate History

If the new One World Trade Center had trouble attracting tenants, no one would be terribly surprised. For starters, downtown is no midtown. Not to mention, leasing three million square feet of office space takes time. Then of course there is the psychological barrier of its tragic past. Real estate brokers struggle to rent apartments that have had bed bugs; the magnitude of the memory here is, let's say, considerably larger.

So it seems like an encouraging sign that 1 WTC, which is scheduled to open in 2014, passed the 50-percent occupancy mark earlier this summer. Much of that has gone to the publisher Conde Nast, which will leave Times Square to anchor the building, taking about a third of its office space for itself. The Durst Organization, a developer that has a stake in the building, recently told Bloomberg Businessweek that it expects to have it "fully rented by the date of 2017, 2018."