Governor Kathy Hochul announced yesterday that American Express will build a new global headquarters at 2 World Trade Center, completing the final commercial office building at the World Trade Center campus 25 years after 9/11.

Silverstein Properties will develop the building, which will be 55 stories with 2 million square feet of floor space. Foster + Partners, Norman Foster’s firm, is the design architect for the project. American Express will be the sole occupant of the new building, which is expected to be completed in 2031. The project will break ground this spring.

All renderings by Foster + Partners

This leaves #5, the former Deutsche Bank site, as the last empty parcel at the 16-acre World Trade Center campus. (As of 2024, that was scheduled to be a 900-foot residential building developed by Silverstein, Brookfield Properties, Omni New York and Dabar Development.)

The address will be 200 Greenwich Street, bordered by Vesey to the north and Church to the east — the Oculus Beer Garden and the northern most entrance to the Oculus is there now. The governor said the five years of construction will generate 2,000 union construction jobs and 3,200 total jobs with an estimated contribution of $5.9 billion to the city’s economy and $6.3 billion to the New York State economy.

The building will have capacity of 10,000 workers and feature an acre of outdoor space with several terraces and gardens. The developers are pursuing a LEED certification. American Express moved to its current headquarters at 200 Vesey in Battery Park City in 1986 and will stay there until this new headquarters is ready.