Yesterday at a New York Building Congress lunch at the Mandarin Oriental, Larry Silverstein said New Yorkers had achieved what people said couldn’t be done. The World Trade Center is open—and flourishing. 3,000 people raised 7 WTC, now fully leased. The 80-story 4 WTC opened in November with 200 feet of sidewalk on Greenwich Street for the first time since the ’60s. The Port Authority and Durst’s 1 WTC is almost complete and more than half leased. And yesterday, Sen. Chuck Schumer announced that $340M in Recovery Zone bonds from 9/11 can be used for 3 WTC. Now comes the time to lock in the rest of the financing and start the building. Good thing, since GroupM leased 516k SF there last month.

Larry has witnessed other hard times for the country, economy, and real estate industries, too: the ’50s, the oil crisis, the ’70s stagflation, the ’90s recession, the dot com bubble burst, the Great Recession, Sandy. Many people, he says, also think he was around for the Panic of 1837. He would neither confirm nor deny, but he did provide the above image.