Altitude sickness seems to be affecting the owners of some famous skyscrapers.

First the owners of the Sears Tower in Chicago - 233 S. Wacker Drive LLC, a real estate investment group that includes Joseph Chetrit and Joseph Moinian and Steve Biderman of the Moinian Group and Yisroel Gluck and John Huston of American Landmark Properties Ltd., of Skokie, Illinois - decided earlier this month to rename it the Willis Tower after an English firm called Willis Group Holdings, a global insurance broker, signed a lease for 140,000 square feet in the 3.9-million square foot office tower.

Now the Port Authority of New York and Jersey has renamed the Freedom Tower at Ground Zero as 1 World Trade Center, which prompted The New York Post to run a "Free Dumb Tower" headline on its front page today.

Yesterday, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey issued a press release that Vantone Industrial Co., a Chinese concern, had, at long last, signed a lease for space in the tallest building that will rise in the redevelopment of Ground Zero, a tower that had been named "Freedom Tower" by former Governor George Pataki in celebration of its height of 1,776 feet and the need for patriotism following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 that destroyed the twin towers of the World Trade Center at the site.

The press release referred to the tower as 1 World Trade Center and mentioned "Freedom Tower" only in parenthesis.

Anthony Coscia, the chairman of the Port Authority of New York and Jersey, announced that "One World Trade Center is its address," adding that "It's the address that we're using. It's the one that's easiest for people to identify with, and, frankly, we've gotten a very interested and warm reception to it."

In his article in The Post, Tom Topousis observed that "when pressed during the news conference on whether Freedom tower will appear anywhere on the building, Coscia replied, 'Next,' and turned to answer a question from another reporter."

An article by David W. Dunlap in today's on-line edition of The New York Times said that "For more than a year, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey had been quietly backing away from the name 'Freedom Tower' for 1 World Trade Center, not so much eliminating the coinage (by Gov. George E. Pataki) as lowering its profile."

"Although the authority would not say so," his article continued, "it is easy to imagine that prospective tenants - already worried about moving into a building that will almost certainly occupy some terrorists' cross hairs - could not have been comforted by a name with such potent political symbolism. Of course, that symbolism is exactly what appeals to those who favor the name....Mr. Pataki and a number of relatives of 9/11 victims - who often did not see eye to eye when he was governor - strongly criticized the idea of abandoning the name 'Freedom Tower'....By mid-morning, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg joined the debate during his weekly radio program with John Gambling on WOR-AM....'I would like to see it stay the Freedom Tower, but it's their building and they don't need me dumping on it. If they could rent the whole thing by changing the name, I guess they're going to do that and they probably, from a responsible point of view, should."

A separate press release yesterday from the Port Authority announced that its board of commissioners had awarded a contract for more than 22,000 tons of steel for the World Trade Center Transportation Hub - the largest contract awarded to date for the major transportation facility. The award covers steel to build the Transportation Hub to grade, including the Transit Hall, the permanent underpinning of the No. 1 subway box and Greenwich Street, and Hub-related pedestrian connections that link it to the other commercial components of the World Trade Center.