World Trade Center site

The World Trade Center site, formerly known as "Ground Zero" after the September 11 attacks, is a 14.6-acre (5.9 ha) area in Lower Manhattan in New York City. The previous World Trade Center complex stood on the site until it was destroyed in the September 11 attacks. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey (PANYNJ), Silverstein Properties, and the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC) oversee the reconstruction of the site according to a master plan by Studio Daniel Libeskind. The site is bounded by Vesey Street to the north, the West Side Highway to the west, Liberty Street to the south, and Church Street to the east. The Port Authority owns the site's land (except for 7 World Trade Center). Developer Larry Silverstein holds the lease to retail and office space in four of the site's buildings.

While the PANYNJ is often identified as the owner of the WTC site, the ownership situation is complex. The Port Authority indeed owns a "significant" internal portion of the site of 16 acres (6.5 ha) but has acknowledged "ambiguities over ownership of miscellaneous strips of property at the World Trade Center site" going back to the 1960s. It is unclear who owns 2.5 acres (1.0 ha) of the site, being land where streets had been before the World Trade Center was built.

The western portion of the World Trade Center site was originally under the Hudson River, with the shoreline in the vicinity of Greenwich Street. On this shoreline close to the intersection of Greenwich Street and the former Dey Street, Dutch explorer Adriaen Block's ship, the Tyger, burned to the waterline in November 1613, stranding Block and his crew and forcing them to overwinter on the island. They built the first European settlement in Manhattan. The remains of the ship were buried under landfill when the shoreline was extended starting in 1797, and were discovered during excavation work in 1916. The remains of a ship from the eighteenth century were found in 2010 during excavation work at the site. The ship, believed to be a Hudson River sloop, was found just south of where the Twin Towers used to stand, about 20 feet below the surface.

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