Sure, the news was all but confirmed, but today the Port Authority made it official: The transit org announced that the World Trade Center Transportation Hub—anchored by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava's Oculus—will officially open in "the first week of March," per a press release. [...]

What that actually means for commuters: There will finally be a link between the World Trade Center PATH station and 11 NYC subway lines, along with the East River ferries. — ny.curbed.com

Rupert Murdoch has dropped his plans to relocate 21st Century Fox and News Corp. to 2 World Trade Center.

In a statement issued Friday afternoon, World Trade Center developer Larry Silverstein declared himself “disappointed” by the news. [...]

In June, the two media companies signed a letter of intent with Silverstein to occupy 1.5 million square feet for 30 years at a 2 World Trade Center designed by architect Bjarke Ingels. — capitalnewyork.com

"Concerned about illicit money flowing into luxury real estate, the Treasury Department said Wednesday that it would begin identifying and tracking secret buyers of high-end properties."

"The initiative is part of a broader federal effort to increase the focus on money laundering in real estate." — The New York Times

The project’s makeup is evidently still undergoing changes, as the developers have waffled between either hotel or office options in the base of the buildings...

Given the sky-high prices developers can obtain for office space in Meatpacking and surrounding blocks, office may indeed make more sense than hotel...

In any case, the buildings will become the most prominent in the neighborhood by a significant margin. The two towers will stand 28 and 38 floors apiece... — newyorkyimby.com

Governor Cuomo unveiled the sixth signature proposal of his 2016 agenda: transform Penn Station and the historic James A. Farley Post Office into a world-class transportation hub. The project, known as the Empire Station Complex.... is anticipated to cost $3 billion – will be expedited by a public-private partnership in order to break ground this year and complete substantial construction within the next three years. — State of New York

Amid contentious debate on rezonings across the city, the late 2013 hubbub around an upzoning proposal for East Midtown has, for the moment, abated — but hasn’t disappeared. In a bid to spur significant new development for the first time in decades, the de Blasio administration is currently retooling the Bloomberg-era plan to allow developers to construct much larger buildings [...]

Whether this rezoning eventually occurs or not, the buildings in Manhattan’s core aren’t getting any younger. — urbanomnibus.net

After years of noisy protests, the New York City Department of Sanitation’s new garage-and-salt-shed complex has opened in Hudson Square, on the northern edge of TriBeCa. [...] The garage and shed have ended up being not just two of the best examples of new public architecture in the city but a boon to the neighborhood, whether the wealthy neighbors have come around to it or not. I can’t think of a better public sculpture to land in New York than the shed. — nytimes.com

I hate this historical turn, which for me is contained most neatly in the High Line...The trend I mean is this: toward ersatz, privatized public spaces built by developers; sterile, user-friendly, cleansed adult playgrounds with generic environments that produce the innocuous stupor of elevator music; inane urban utopias with promenades, perches, pleasant embellishments, rest stops, refreshments, and compliance codes. — New York Magazine

Perkins Eastman is taking two of the best-loved urban land-use stories of the Bloomberg era—the High Line and Times Square—and combining them into one.

The Green Line extends the logic of changes that have already taken root along the limited stretch of Broadway running through Times Square. [...] proposal builds on the work of Jan Gehl and Snøhetta, the architects who pedestrianized Times Square. Yet it also echoes the High Line by James Corner Field Operations and Diller Scofidio + Renfro. — citylab.com

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey approved subsidies to help expedite the construction of lower Manhattan’s 2 World Trade Center [...].

Developer Silverstein Properties Inc., which leases the sites for 2 World Trade Center and two other towers from the Port Authority, would receive a rent break that amounts to $9 million over the life of the lease [...].

The agency had previously maintained that 2 World Trade would be built entirely without public assistance. — bloomberg.com

The digital production studio Visualhouse has released film and renderings of how SL Green’s One Vanderbilt will meet the street, and also remind us just how gargantuan the tower will be. According to the tower’s architects Kohn Pedersen Fox, the tower will rise 1,501 feet to its spire, making it the third tallest building in the city upon completion. — 6sqft.com

Here’s our first peek at Simon Baron Development, Quadrum Global and CRE Development’s three-tower Long Island City development slated to rise alongside the former Paragon Paint factory building at 45-40 Vernon Boulevard. Permits for the first tower were filed with the DOB back in June and detail a 28-story, 296-unit rental tower designed by SHoP Architects. — 6sqft.com

From farmland to stately brownstones to battleground for million-dollar bidding wars, Brooklyn’s transformation has fundamentally altered the city’s geography—and the way New York now thinks of itself. It has also altered the lives of the residents who call the borough home. To understand those changes, we dispatched a team of reporters to find a place where Brooklyn’s past and future are next-door neighbors. — nymag.com