http://www.nysun.com/article/54369
The City's Hottest Event Space? Try 7 World Trade Center
By GABRIELLE BIRKNER
May 14, 2007
Hundreds of gown- and tuxedo-clad partygoers, including Naomi Campbell and Donald Trump Jr., filtered into 7 World Trade Center Friday evening for a dinner and fashion show benefiting the charity Operation Smile. The guests made their way to the 52nd floor, which was painted black and adorned with large color photographs and gray floor-to-ceiling draperies for the occasion.
While the Grand Ballroom at the Plaza Hotel is closed for renovations, the top floors of 7 World Trade Center — a glass office tower rebuilt and reopened less than five years after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks reduced the original tower to rubble — are emerging as see-and-be-seen venues for fashion shows, charity lunches, and black-tie galas.
The building's chameleonlike spaces have been transformed into a Miami Beach-style nightclub with clusters of sleek, white couches and light installations for a Calvin Klein fashion show afterparty last fall, and into an urban garden filled with 5,000 red and pink roses for a Valentino fragrance launch in November. Tonight, an ornate runway will wrap around the 50th floor, custom-built for the Christian Dior Resort Fashion Show.
The editor of the event-planning magazine BiZBash, Chad Kaydo, has called 7 World Trade "the space of the year." A full floor there — the top three are the most often used for parties — rents for $25,000 a day, though Silverstein Properties, which owns the tower, has occasionally donated a space to schools and community groups to use for a meeting or a benefit. A fashion house, charity, corporation or school renting — or borrowing — the space is responsible for expenses such as food, beverages, lighting, music, and décor.
"This is a blank canvas, and you can just cater it to whatever you want to do," the events manager for 7 World Trade Center, Rebecca Shalomoff, said. "People say, all the time, ‘No one will ever be able to copy us.'"
Regardless of how the raw, airy spaces are dressed, their biggest draw, many say, is their sweeping 360-degree views of New York City and its surroundings.
The "mesmerizing" views were one of the things that pulled the spiritual leader of the SoHo Synagogue, Rabbi Dovi Scheiner, to the top-floor space, where the synagogue held its June 2006 fund-raising gala, which was attended by about 950 mostly young people. The venue's significance "in terms of the rebirth of downtown, which is what the SoHo Synagogue is all about" was another, Rabbi Scheiner said.
The rabbi, whose synagogue held its benefit at 7 World Trade Center just weeks after the tower reopened, said he was also attracted to the novelty of locale. "So many venues, they're beautiful spaces, but they're overused — everyone already has so many memories associated with them," Rabbi Scheiner said. "We wanted to set the trend instead."