By Julie Shapiro
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
FINANCIAL DISTRICT — Capping a seven-year saga fraught with setbacks, a new hotel opened next to Ground Zero Wednesday, sporting double-paned windows to muffle the sound of pounding jackhammers.
The 169-room World Center Hotel is using its proximity to Ground Zero as a marketing technique, advertising the floor-to-ceiling windows from which guests can watch the cranes lift pieces of steel into place from their beds.
But that proximity also created the obstacles that doubled the project’s budget and nearly derailed it.
“We’ve had a lot of surprises,” said Ralph Bahna, president of Masterworks Development Corp. “We had no idea it would take us seven years. We couldn’t imagine the changes, the delays, the challenges."
In 2003, Bahna’s company bought a 12-story office building at Cedar and Washington Streets that was badly damaged on 9/11 by the collapse of the South Tower.
After stripping the building to its core and decontaminating it — a painstaking process that took three years — Masterworks then rebuilt the structure and added another eight floors.
Every step required a slew of government approvals and coordination with the adjacent World Trade Center rebuilding. Masterworks had to make major changes in the middle of construction — like moving the hotel’s entrance from Cedar Street to Washington Street — because Cedar Street can’t reopen until the Port Authority’s Vehicle Security Center is complete several yeas from now.
“We’ve been through quite a lot,” Bahna said Wednesday from the hotel’s private View of the World Terrace Club on the 20th floor. “It was hard to imagine a day like today.”
Sales have been "very strong" since it unofficially opened for business in March, according to a hotel spokesperson. The hotel charges $199 per night for a room.
In recognition of the developer’s perseverance on the project, Mayor Bloomberg issued Masterworks a proclamation declaring Wednesday World Center Hotel Day.
