Property mogul Larry Silverstein looks back on the arduous rebuilding of Ground Zero

You didn’t have kind words for Steve Roth, another prominent New York real estate developer. You recalled helping him with his bid for the WTC site by connecting him with a financial partner of yours. After he abandoned the deal and you were selected, you later asked him for help, but he essentially rebuffed you.

I said, but Steve, I just voluntarily gave you my financing. He said, well, you are just a much more generous guy than I am. Steve is a brilliant guy. He’s done extraordinary things.

Did you go on after that to be friends, or have you had a frosty relationship?

Oh, sure. That lasted with me for about three minutes. Maybe five minutes.

Do you get to see the real sides of people in these dealmaking situations?

Usually the true nature of a person comes out when they’re under pressure.

You admit to being a control freak. How did you tolerate all the cooks in the kitchen during the rebuilding?

This became a personal challenge to accomplish this. Especially with the insurers telling me, you’ll never accomplish this. You’re wasting your time. Get lost. I remember looking at them and saying, I’m a New Yorker. You expect me to just walk away from this? I mean, this is my life.

If 9/11 never happened and the Twin Towers still stood, do you think they would still be successful today?

There were 40,000-square-foot floors. They were essentially column free. The views were spectacular. And so the basics were there. You also had a negative. You have to take two elevators to get to your floor. Most tenants today prefer going directly to their floor with one elevator. Everybody is always in a rush. Then again, we never had an opportunity to find out.

Your daughter Lisa is now CEO of your real estate company. How did your other two children, who are also in the business, feel about that?

Her instincts were excellent, she understood the business, and it became obvious to me that she was the logical successor for me. I sat down with her older sister and older brother, and they understood perfectly what I wanted to accomplish in terms of succession. And they both approved it fully and it just couldn’t have worked better or more smoothly.

How involved in the business are you these days?

Still involved in terms of Tower Two and also Tower Five and other new projects. It’s my life. I’ve been doing this for, I don’t know, 65, 70 years.

What do you attribute your success to, innate talent or hard work?

I’ve been an extraordinarily lucky individual. Enormous good fortune. Looking back, it all comes from hard work. I found the harder I worked, the luckier I got, and it’s been that way all my life.

How close are you to building Tower 2?

The only thing I could tell you is stay tuned because hopefully there will be development.

You lay out so many examples of how difficult the government was in the redevelopment.

I invited the Port Authority people to come into each of our construction meetings every week to join us so they’d have an understanding of what we were accomplishing.

They came to each construction meeting. And at five o’clock I’d watch and they’d suddenly start to pack up. And I said, where are you going? And they said, what? It’s five o’clock.

I looked at them and I said to myself, how could they leave? There’s still so much to do. We’re still so focused. It would drive me crazy.

Did you ever feel like you made a mistake embarking on the redevelopment?

Maybe I should have, but I didn’t because I felt I made a commitment.