Larry Silverstein is not a man who likes to negotiate in public. With his project at ground zero under attack by the mayor, he stopped by the offices of The New York Sun on Wednesday and spent an hour in our editorial room. We don’t mind saying he made the Great Sphinx sound like Joan Rivers. When our editor, a man of nigh infinite patience, finally asked him to dig down deep for the best angle he could possibly give us on the record, you could hear a pin drop and then, nothing. That evening, while the mayor was supping with the governor, who is supposedly Mr. Silverstein’s ally, the mayor’s development tsar, Daniel Doctoroff, got on the blower with the Sun and lambasted Mr. Silverstein’s plan for ground zero, saying, as we reported in our editorial yesterday, that Mr. Silverstein was going to run out of money and ought to hand over the choicest sites at ground zero to the Port Authority for a discount on the rent.

Well, Mr. Silverstein has just found his voice. He released a statement yesterday rebutting the claims by City Hall that are contained in a written report by the city’s Economic Development Corporation and were summarized to us over the phone by Mr. Doctoroff on Wednesday evening. Mr. Silverstein’s statement makes for compelling reading for those following the drama over the city’s plans for the allotment of the remaining $1.7 billion in tax-favored Liberty Bonds, even if the city still disputes his calculations. He dismisses the city’s most significant claim – that he won’t have enough money to finish all the office towers he proposes to build at ground zero – as a problem caused by the city’s refusal, at least so far, to release to him the $1.7 billion in Liberty Bond financing he freely admits he needs to finish the project.

Mr. Silverstein insists, however, that he’ll have the financing if the city honors the intent of Congress in respect of the Liberty Bonds. He holds the proceeds from an insurance settlement worth more than $4.5 billion. He holds the state’s half of the remaining Liberty Bonds. Mr. Silverstein also, incidentally, notes that the city’s analysis disregards the state’s half of the remaining Liberty Bonds, which Governor Pataki has already committed to Mr. Silverstein. It seems disingenuous for the city to pillory Mr. Silverstein for not having money the city itself is trying to avoid giving to him.

The city claims that the commercial real estate market in lower Manhattan will not support the rents Mr. Silverstein would have to charge to make the development successful. An analysis prepared for Mr. Silverstein by Morgan Stanley has found that rents would have to reach only $50 a square foot in order to finance rebuilding on schedule, not the $66 the city estimates would be required. Yet as this fight has been brewing at ground zero, Mr. Silverstein is already nearly finished building 7 World Trade Center across the street and has been signing at least some tenants at rents above $50, suggesting that the market will bear that price.

The mayor’s most strident criticism of Mr. Silverstein has been that his rebuilding project will proceed too slowly. In his statement Mr. Silverstein contends that the delayed timetable for the two towers – three and four – along the eastern edge of ground zero result from the Port Authority’s own foot-dragging in respect of excavating the site deeply enough to lay the foundations for skyscrapers and constructing the “bathtub” to protect those foundations from the force of the Hudson.

Mr. Silverstein is at his most devastating, however, when he responds to Mayor Bloomberg’s preferred method for solving the problems the city purports to have discovered. The mayor has expressed a preference for muscling Mr. Silverstein off the site, especially in respect of the third and fourth towers, which would, in the mayor’s plan, be built either by the government or another developer, or both. Mr. Silverstein decries this as “Soviet-style confiscation.” We tend to be sympathetic to Mr. Silverstein on this point. He took the risk and he deserves the reward. But when the reward comprises, even if only in part, several billion dollars in debt subsidized by the taxpayers, well, don’t be surprised if Karl Marx – not to mention Mayor Bloomberg – shows up at your groundbreaking.

It is impossible to know what rents business will or won’t pay ten years from now, although, as a developer who has been in the commercial property business for half a century, Mr. Silverstein certainly is entitled to risk his fortune and standing. Mr. Silverstein blames the Port Authority for major construction delays, and we can see no angle on this from which the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey appears to be playing a benign role, and, from the point of view of New Yorkers, it can only have become worse with the accession in Trenton of Governor Corzine.

In the days before September 11, Mr. Silverstein was willing to take the risk of signing a 99-year lease on the World Trade Center, even though no one could have fathomed then what a risk that was. Since September 11, Mr. Silverstein has been making regular rent payments of $10 million a month to the Port Authority, living up to his end of the lease. The city and Port Authority now appear bent on reneging on their end of the deal, which would require them to let Mr. Silverstein build commercial space on the site. We have come to respect the standing of the mayor as a custodian of the taxpayers’ interest. But if all this is resolved in a way in which Mr. Silverstein’s property rights are taken for granted, it will inflict an enormous amount of damage on the city.