Here’s a zany twist in the enduring enigma of Three World Trade Center’s still-vacant retail floors:
An investor who claims to hold trademark rights to the “Windows on the World” name is steaming that landlord Westfield won’t let him tour the site where he hopes to open a Windows on the World Cafe — even though the valuable space has stood empty since two big restaurant deals fell through.
Matt Lechner said he was told by Westfield’s CBRE brokers that Westfield doesn’t want “food and beverage” uses at the long-vacant site. Did that mean that Westfield has given up on the idea of installing a restaurant there?
Whoever’s to blame, the tower podium remains dark — an embarrassing void in the heart of the World Trade complex across from the Century 21 store on Church Street.
Lechner is the CEO of a Connecticut company called Continental Illinois Holding Co., which is unrelated to the failed Midwestern bank. In a recent e-mail to CBRE, which Lechner shared with Realty Check, he wrote, “We are interested to open a Windows on the World Cafe at the new WTC” on the tower’s ground floor.
He claimed to own “trademark rights associated with the former Windows on the World® restaurant name.” However, the US Patent Office registry he sent us appears to apply to “packaged meals consisting primarily of meat, fish poultry or vegetables.”
Lechner said that after the brokers initially seemed open to showing him the World Trade space, Westfield said no because it did not want “food and beverage uses.”
But sources said the policy applied only to the street-level space that Lechner wanted, where Westfield hopes to sign up “dry-use” stores. Both of the restaurants that backed out of deals would have been on the second and third floors, according to an insider.
Westfield helpfully said, “We have nothing to report at this time,” and CBRE didn’t get back to us.
Westfield never explained that its strategy at Three World Trade was to market the sidewalk level for traditional retail and keep restaurants on the second and third floors. It wasn’t even made clear when the subsequently abandoned eatery deals were signed two years ago.
Westfield might have been put off by Lechner’s rambling e-mails. But we credit him for helping to cut through the fog.
Westfield has long refused to deal with the media in any meaningful way about its erratic management of the World Trade shopping areas, where numerous storefronts stand vacant. If Westfield wants only stores for the ground floor, it could have said so publicly years ago rather than confuse possible tenants and New Yorkers fed up with an empty retail box in the Trade Center’s heart.
In fact, the entire situation has been a muddle since even before the huge tower opened in spring of 2018.
Although Larry Silverstein owns the office floors, Westfield owns the retail floors along with the Oculus mall and other shopping areas in the World Trade Center complex.
Westfield supposedly leased nearly half of the tower podium’s 75,000 square feet to both British steakhouse Hawksmoor and Daniel Humm’s Eleven Madison Park restaurant group in 2017. Both deals collapsed early in 2018.
Now, it still isn’t clear whether the space is actually tenant-ready. Westfield, which was swallowed by Europe’s URW (Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield) in a 2018 merger and is said by sources to have shaken up its New York management team, blamed delays on the Port Authority for supposedly not turning over the keys to the three floors.
“The space hasn’t been handed over yet,” a URW rep told us in September. The PA declined to comment at the time — as it did on Monday.