Status of World Trade Center site, 11 years later

  Eyewitness NewsNEW YORK -- Eleven years after terrorists attacked the World Trade Center, the new multibillion-dollar World Trade Center once again dominates the lower Manhattan skyline. Hundreds of construction workers are at the 16-acre site every day, and tourists snap thousands of photos of the two towers that are nearing completion.

The status of the trade center's major components, according to developers:

- Most of the 8-acre memorial quadrangle at the World Trade Center opened last year on the 10th anniversary of the attacks. Since then, 4.5 million people have visited the memorial, with its twin reflecting pools where the towers stood. But a museum being built in a cavern beneath the plaza is still incomplete. Work all but stopped last fall because of a funding dispute between the memorial foundation and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, but on Monday the two parties announced an agreement that will pave the way for its eventual completion. Joseph Daniels, president of the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, said that once construction resumes it will take more than a year to finish the job, meaning the museum might not open until 2014.

- One World Trade Center, formerly known as the Freedom Tower, will open in 2014 on the northwest corner of the trade center site with 3 million square feet of office space. Tenants so far include magazine publisher Conde Nast and the federal government's General Services Administration. The spire atop the 104-story building will reach the symbolic height of 1,776 feet. There will be observation decks on the 100th, 101st and 102nd floors. The building without the spire has reached its full height of 1,368 feet. It is expected to cost $3.9 billion by the time it is finished.

- The first office building to open will be the 72-story 4 World Trade Center at the southeast corner of the site. It has reached its full height of 977 feet and is scheduled to open in October 2013. Tenants will include the Port Authority, the bistate agency that owns the trade center site and lost its headquarters when the twin towers were attacked.

- Just north of 4 World Trade Center is 3 World Trade Center, which is now an eight-story stub but will reach 80 stories and 1,150 feet when it's complete. Developer Larry Silverstein is required to lease at least 400,000 square feet of space before finishing the building. Silverstein's team is projecting a completion date of 2015 or 2016.

- At the site's northeast corner, 2 World Trade Center is up only to street level. The building is planned as an 88-story skyscraper but will not be built until the commercial real estate market picks up enough to fill it.

- The new transportation hub at the trade center will connect 13 subway lines and PATH trains to New Jersey when it opens in 2015. It will replace the temporary PATH station that was built after the Sept. 11 attacks. Designed by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, the station will serve 250,000 travelers a day. There will be two levels of retail space. None of the tenants has been announced yet. The cost of the transportation hub, originally pegged at $2.2 billion, is now expected to exceed $3.5 billion.

- A performing arts center planned for the site has been in limbo for years. A board of directors was named this year and was given the task of raising money to build the center, which is to include a 1,000-seat theater.

- An underground vehicle security center and bus parking facility just south of the main trade center site will open in 2013.

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Small fire at World Trade Center

  Eyewitness NewsLOWER MANHATTAN -- Firefighters responded to the 89th floor of One World Trade Center to help construction workers put out a small fire in some wooden decking.

The Fire Department says it got the call for help at 7:15 a.m. Saturday. Workers at the unfinished tower extinguished most of the burning wood themselves, but firefighters were still on the scene wetting down the area an hour later.

The skyscraper is already over 1,200 feet high, with a few hundred feet more to go until it reaches its full height.

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Man accused of trying to trade pills for sex with girl

  Eyewitness NewsHICKSVILLE (WABC) -- A Long Island man is facing charges after police say he tried to trade prescription pills for sex with a young girl.

Police say 57-year-old Walter Hurst, of Bay Shore, made arrangements to trade 10 oxycodone pills with the 12-year-old victim. That girl, however, was actually undercover police officer.

The deal was supposed to go down at 6:25 p.m. Thursday in Hicksville.

Authorities say Hurst arrived at a hotel to meet with the girl for a criminal sex act. He was arrested by detectives and was reportedly found to be in possession of the 10 pills. In addition to the drugs, police say Hurst also had Gummy Bears, lollipops and chocolate milk in the room.

He is charged with drug sale and possession, as well as and criminal solicitation.

Even detectives say they were disturbed by what Hurst was saying during course of the undercover operation, which started as a narcotics investigation. They say he went into graphic detail.

Police are appealing to people to come forward if they think their children may have come in contact with him. They do no know if there are any other victims.

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World Trade Center is back on top in New York City

  Eyewitness NewsNEW YORK (WABC) -- One World Trade Center, the giant monolith being built to replace the twin towers destroyed in the Sept. 11 attacks, will lay claim to the title of New York City's tallest skyscraper on Monday

CLICK HERE TO SEE 31 PHOTOS OF ONE WORLD TRADE CENTER

Workers will erect steel columns that will make its unfinished skeleton a little over 1,250 feet high, just enough to peak over the roof of the observation deck on the Empire State Building.

The milestone is a preliminary one. Workers are still adding floors to the so-called "Freedom Tower" and it isn't expected to reach its full height for at least another year, at which point it is likely to be declared the tallest building in the U.S., and third tallest in the world. Those bragging rights, though, will carry an asterisk.

Crowning the world's tallest buildings is a little like picking the heavyweight champion in boxing. There is often disagreement about who deserves the belt.

In this case, the issue involves the 408-foot-tall needle that will sit on the tower's roof.

Count it, and the World Trade Center is back on top. Otherwise, it will have to settle for No. 2, after the Willis Tower in Chicago.

"Height is complicated," said Nathaniel Hollister, a spokesman for The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitats, a Chicago-based organization considered an authority on such records.

Experts and architects have long disagreed about where to stop measuring super-tall buildings outfitted with masts, spires and antennas that extend far above the roof.

Consider the case of the Empire State Building: Measured from the sidewalk to the tip of its needle-like antenna, the granddaddy of all super-tall skyscrapers actually stands 1,454 feet high, well above the mark being surpassed by One World Trade Center on Monday.

Purists, though, say antennas shouldn't count when determining building height.

An antenna, they say, is more like furniture than a piece of architecture. Like a chair sitting on a rooftop, an antenna can be attached or removed. The Empire State Building didn't even get its distinctive antenna until 1952. The record books, as the argument goes, shouldn't change every time someone installs a new satellite dish.

Excluding the antenna brings the Empire State Building's total height to 1,250 feet. That was still high enough to make the skyscraper the world's tallest from 1931 until 1972.

From that height, the Empire State seems to tower over the second tallest completed building in New York, the Bank of America Tower.

Yet, in many record books, the two skyscrapers are separated by just 50 feet.

That's because the tall, thin mast on top of the Bank of America building isn't an antenna, but a decorative spire.

Unlike antennas, record-keepers like spires. It's a tradition that harkens back to a time when the tallest buildings in many European cities were cathedrals. Groups like the Council on Tall Buildings, and Emporis, a building data provider in Germany, both count spires when measuring the total height of a building, even if that spire happens to look exactly like an antenna.

This quirk in the record books has benefited buildings like Chicago's recently opened Trump International Hotel and Tower. It is routinely listed as being between 119 to 139 feet taller than the Empire State Building, thanks to the antenna-like mast that sits on its roof, even though the average person, looking at the two buildings side by side, would probably judge the New York skyscraper to be taller.

The same factors apply to measuring the height of One World Trade Center.

Designs call for the tower's roof to stand at 1,368 feet - the same height as the north tower of the original World Trade Center. The building's roof will be topped with a 408-foot, cable-stayed mast, making the total height of the structure a symbolic 1,776 feet.

So is that needle an antenna or a spire?

"Not sure," wrote Steve Coleman, a spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the building.

The needle will, indeed, function as a broadcast antenna. It is described on the Port Authority's website as an antenna. On the other hand, the structure will have more meat to it than your average antenna, with external cladding encasing the broadcast mast.

Without that spire, One World Trade Center would still be smaller than the Willis Tower in Chicago, formerly known as the Sears Tower, which tops out at 1,451 feet (not including its own antennas).

Debate over which of those buildings can truly claim to be the tallest in the U.S. has been raging for years on Internet message boards frequented by skyscraper enthusiasts.

As for the Council on Tall Buildings, it is leaning toward giving One World Trade the benefit of the doubt.

"This is something we have discussed with the architect," Hollister said. "As we understand it, the needle is an architectural spire which happens to enclose an antenna. We would thus count it as part of the architectural height."

But, he noted, the organization has also chosen to sidestep these types of disputes, somewhat, by recognizing three types of height records: tallest occupied floor, architectural top, and height to the tip.

Hollister also pointed out that, technically speaking, One World Trade Center isn't a record-holder in any category yet, as it is still unfinished.

"A project is not considered a building until it is topped out, fully clad, and open for business or at least occupiable," he said.

The debate doesn't quite end there.

Neither of the Willis Tower nor One World Trade are as high as the CN Tower, in Toronto, which stands at 1,815 feet. That structure, however, isn't considered a building at all by most record-keepers, because it is predominantly a television broadcast antenna and observation platform with very little interior space. The tallest manmade structure in the Western Hemisphere will continue to be the 2,063-foot-tall KVLY-TV antenna in Blanchard, N.D.

As for the world's tallest building, the undisputed champion is the Burj Khalifa, in Dubai, which opened in 2010 and reaches 2,717 feet.

Not counting about 5 feet of aircraft lights and other equipment perched on top, of course.

Some information from ABC News.

See the full time-lapse video on ABCNews.com

CLICK HERE TO SEE 31 PHOTOS OF ONE WORLD TRADE CENTER

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