As rumored/speculated, the NY Times reports that Condé Nast signed a tentative deal to moves its magazines to Freedom Tower One World Trade Center: "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."
Currently, 1WTC is at 32 floors—there will be 69 floors of office space total—and it's just one piece of the massive development. Apparently Condé Nast told its employees in a memo that it was working on the deal "but a final decision was several months away." A few months ago, the Observer spoke to some insiders at Condé Nast magazines who were not excited about moving to Ground Zero: "The place is a cemetery. It's creepy," and "There's not one person from editors on down who wants to move down there. Even people who could walk there don't want to move there."
However, Carl Weisbrod, who was the founding president of the Alliance for Downtown New York and is currently the President of Trinity (Church) Real Estate, tells the Times, "It would provide sorely needed diversity to Lower Manhattan’s economy and would be the vanguard of a broader shift of creative companies from Midtown to the south." Hey, remember when Vanity Fair (a Condé Nast magazine) editor Graydon Carter declared that "Irony is dead" (video) after the September 11, 2001 attacks?
