Inside Oculus World Trade Center Mall on Opening Day

FINANCIAL DISTRICT, NY — You can see its tentacles pointing to the sky when you're coming out of the Chambers Street A, C, E train station, which is several blocks away. As you walk toward it, it only gets sharper and larger, and when you're up in front of it, it's a modern, white behemoth. The highly anticipated Oculus mall at the World Trade Center site opened Tuesday, and neither tourists nor jaded commuters could keep from stopping and catching a glance of it.

The new mall and transportation hub to more than 13 subway trains and river ferries boasts high-end stores like John Varvatos, Sam Edelman, and & Other Stories, a Madewell-esque fashion brand owned by H&M.

It feels shocking to be in a mall so modern and 2016 as most shopping venues were built in the mall heyday of the '90s and have barely outgrown their dimly lit food courts and sputtering fountain displays. The windowed structure that is Oculus lets the light in and knows exactly what it's doing with that light.

The building, which cost around $6 billion to build, was designed by Santiago Calatrava. The mall's real estate is owned by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and its retail space is owned by Westfield Properties. There are expected to be more than 100 stores in the 365,000-square-foot space; only about 60 have opened so far. It's right next to the newest Eataly, which has incredible views of the World Trade Center fountain site.

This is clearly a place that is meant to represent new hope for a city that suffered so much loss 15 years ago. Even if that new hope is literally just a mall, it is also an extremely important indicator of just how much the Financial District has grown since Sept. 11.

All images by Sarah Kaufman/Patch