••• “Why Is the World Trade Center Lit Up Red?” So the tourists can find it? In honor of Romney and Ryan? Because it’s a pop-up Target collaboration?  Seriously, I’ve been asked this many times lately, and I’ve asked everyone I can think of, and no one seems to officially know. The New York Observer gets as far as “it’s for the troops” but that’s it. (Photo by Matt Chaban courtesy New York Observer)

••• Or maybe the tower is lit red because Durst realized that it was too expensive to spring for the white and the blue, too? “Last year, in a move that saves $20 million in construction costs, the development team of the Durst Organization and the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey decided to take off the cladding [off 1WTC’s antenna], resulting in the narrow metallic mast visible in the recent renderings. If that spire is just a bolted-on antenna, rather than an architectural element, it would not count toward the building’s official height, according to the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, the organization recognized as the official score-keeper for towers across the globe. One World Trade would then clock in at just 1,368 feet, earning it second-tallest status behind Chicago’s 1,451-foot Willis Tower (formerly the Sears Tower).”  —Architectural Record

••• “Tony Upper West Side school Mandell—where tuition ranges from $12,400 to $21,750—will open a Lincoln Square preschool this fall and a Tribeca facility in 2013.” It’s actually at 30 Broad. —New York Post

••• New York Magazine profiles Jane Pratt, founder of Sassy, Jane, and xoJane, who lives in Tribeca. (I knew her father had died—he was a professor of mine in college—but I was disturbed to hear that “he was killed under mysterious circumstances officially described as a hit-and-run.”)

••• Love this: “The new 1 WTC is starting to show up on trucks in NYC, like the Twin Towers before it.” —The Retrologist (that’s his photo below)