Hill, West and Goldstein, the architects you never knew you knew. (Peter Letre)

The sun was setting over New York harbor, and behind it, the coast of New Jersey. From the 17th floor of 11 Broadway, through the not-floor-to-ceiling, turn-of-the-last-century office windows, the Statue of Liberty was plainly visible. She appeared to be waving through the late-summer haze. Milling about and sipping champagne were some of the city’s biggest developers and their employees, names emblazoned upon apartment towers from this end of Manhattan to the other and beyond.

Silverstein, Ratner, Extell, Elad, Milstein, Glenwood, Trump. All the big firms were there, along with many other machers and dealmakers. It could have been a convention of The No Nonsense Apartment Builders Association of the Greater Five Boroughs. Instead it was the third anniversary party for Goldstein, Hill & West and the unveiling of their new downtown offices.

The foyer is painted a slick graphite gray, with a globular chandelier overhead, but beyond that, the designer pretense fades away. There are no amoebic benches, no plywood bookcases, no 3D printer for producing models of unusually torqued and cantilevered buildings. Little hangs on the walls besides drafting templates and zoning handbooks. It is this simplicity of design, aesthetic and attitude that draws the city’s biggest developers to the firm.

“I like them, they’re good guys, they’re rational, they understand the business” Extell founder Gary Barnett told The Observer recently. “They know how to get a project done, the know it has to make sense. You can’t just build any crazy old thing.”

Slideshow: The Works of Goldstein, Hill & West >>

It typically takes decades for an architect to reach any level of success, let alone work with the biggest names in New York City real estate. So how has an upstart firm managed to storm the city in just three years?

The designers have been doing it for decades, actually, albeit in the shadow of another architect who received the most of credit while Alan Goldstein, Stephen Hill and David West did the work. Before New York knew Richard Meier and Jean Nouvel, Frank Gehry and Christian de Portzemparc, Neil DeNari and Bjark Ingels, Herzog & de Meuron, the condo king was Costas Kondylis.

Born in Greece and trained in Switzerland, Mr. Kondylis came to New York four decades ago, and in that span of time he developed the pre-eminent residential architecture firm in the city. His most famous client is Donald Trump, for whom he designed one of his most recognizable buildings, the black obelisk looming over the U.N. known as Trump World Tower. For more than a decade it was the city’s tallest apartment building, and one of its most sought-after. Derek Jeter was among those calling it home. But The Trump World Tower, designed with Mr, Hill, is just one of the more than 70 projects Costas Kondylis & Partners created in New York in 21 years.

Map:The World of Goldstein, Hill & West >>

Nearly half of those are now Goldstein, Hill & West’s, or at least the partners lay claim to them, since they did the work while Mr. Kondylis was, they say, gallivanting around the globe. When his three partners decided to dissolve the old firm and start their own, it fell to them, not Mr. Kondylis, to finish the buildings, along with another 40 or so new projects they had since accumulated.
Not since McKim, Mead & White were at the height of their prewar powers have three architects played such a remarkable role in reshaping the city’s architectural landscape. The only thing more remarkable is how unremarkable many of these buildings are.

“We work with very conservative clients sometimes,” Stephen Hill said during a recent interview in a bright conference room inside the firm’s offices. “They want a building that works, a building they know they can sell. Those designer buildings are good for some people, but not everyone. We create buildings for everyone.”

“It’s not all about style,” David West concurred, “and I think there’s been a lot of that lately. It’s a trap. This shouldn’t all be about the ego of the creator.”

In a field with no shortage of egotism—call it the edifice complex—these three architects may be the least vainglorious guys in the business. They could even be called subservient, though proudly so, eagerly doing the work developers demand of them, rather than making demands of their clients. This is not haute couture but a custom-made suit from a reasonable tailor in some second-story Madison Avenue hole-in-the-wall. The buyer gets exactly what they want, no muss, no fuss, no commotion. It looks good, but it won’t turn any heads.

Indeed, you probably walk by at least one of Goldstein Hill & West’s buildings a week without even realizing it. Maybe a dozen, if you live uptown.

When the partners decided to split off from their mentor three years ago, there was some serious anxiety about whether they could keep the business afloat. For years, Mr. Kondylis had been chasing outsize projects, with limited return, in places like Shanghai and Dubai. “He had a real desire to make himself internationally famous,” Mr. Hill said. “It wasn’t sustainable. It became apparent the firm wasn’t going to survive.” (Mr. Kondylis did not return requests for comment.)

The partners bridled at the fact that their ongoing work in New York was essentially subsidizing a jet-setting lifestyle for the man whose name was on the front door. When Lehman Brothers collapsed, the real estate industry went into free-fall. No sector was harder hit than architecture, which lost more jobs in the U.S. than any other in 2009, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. All in all, it was not a great time to start an architecture firm.

“We knew a percentage of our clients would stick with us and give us new work,” Mr. Hill said. “When word got around, 100 percent of our clients are with us.” On a summer day three years ago, the three partners informed Mr. Kondylis of their decision to leave. When the separation was completed in August, they packed up and moved into a space a few floors down in the same building, at an engineering firm they had worked with previously.

“We came into work on Monday almost as though nothing had changed,” Mr. Goldstein said.

In many ways, it hasn’t.

Arrayed behind the three partners in the conference room were two dozen poster boards printed with the firm’s latest projects, a fantasy skyline of glass, steel and brick that was taking shape quickly on the streets outside. That they have so much work while the real estate industry has barely recovered is astounding, but when you are the most amicable—and affordable—firm in town, the surprise begins to fade. It is the speed, the intelligence and the reliability that the city’s biggest builders have long relied on these three men for.

“They try to sense your needs,” Larry Silverstein said. “They are very cooperative, they are very helpful, and their participation is full.” Translation: they are not obstinate or ostentatious, like the starchitects who have come to dominate the city over the past decade, if less in actuality than in perception and press clips. (Mr. Meier, a New Yorker, has three buildings. Mr. Gehry and Mr. Nouvel each have two. Messrs. Herzog & de Meuron have one.) Even Mr. Silverstein has fallen under the spell, hiring Norman Foster, Richard Rogers and Fumihiko Maki, all Pritzker Prize winners, to design his three World Trade Center office buildings along Greenwich Street.

Mr. Silverstein’s work is typical of what many developers have turned to these three architects for over the decades. He hired Mr. West back in his Kondylis & Partners days to design Riverwalk, a pair of 40-story brick rental towers on 42nd Street and 12th Avenue that opened in 1999. In an out of the way location, but with impressive views of the river and the West Side all the same, Mr. Goldstein came up with two stout crescents, offset just so to maximize visibility. Mr. Silverstein was ready to finish the project on the other half of the block when tragedy struck at what would become Ground Zero and he did not return the to the project until 2006.

In the meantime, glass was in while masonry, a mainstay in New York though little changed since the pyramids, was out. This was thanks in large part to Richard Meier’s sleek Perry Street lofts that opened in the Village in 2001. Mr. West was not enthralled with the style, but like all his partners, he was happy to oblige. “We are all susceptible to fashion,” he admitted. “Glass buildings may not be the most efficient or appropriate in New York, but we design what our clients want and what the market demands.”

The result is two 60-story towers, at once slender and gigantic, containing more than 2,000 apartments stretching across more than 1.2 million square feet. Mr. Silverstein was never going to rebuild the Twin Towers, so this is as close as New York will get.

Mr. Silverstein admits that with the few remaining parcels he controls in the area, he might turn to a flashier firm for his future projects, but he is also content to work with Goldstein Hill & West again. “They will shape it with you, and they will shape it for you, and they are very flexible,” he said. “With these guys, you always know what you’re gonna get, and you always get exactly what you want.”

In the world of New York City development, that can be an important thing. This is the most expensive city in the nation in which to build by a wide margin—many developers peg the price at twice what it would cost to build in Minneapolis, Tuscon, even Philly or Boston—because of land values and construction costs, be it materials or union contracts. The wonkier your building is, the more it is going to cost, and unless you think buyers will pay a considerable premium for some Pritzker poo, it is probably not worth it.

That is why from Riverside South to the Apthorp to the Plaza Hotel, up and down First, Second, Third avenues, Tribeca, both Villages, Brooklyn, even Jamaica, Queens, Goldstein Hill & West is there.

Many developers approach the firm even before they are ready to build or even buy a property. “David West is an architect, but he’s also probably the best zoning attorney in the city, one of the two or three best,” one developer who has called on the firm multiple times said. Mr. West analyzes every angle, every facet, every possible shape of a site in order to determine the biggest possible building that can rise on it. This can create a sense of gigantism, of bursting at the seams, but at 40 stories, in the home of the Empire State Building, who really notices?

“The truth is, many of these forms are not that flexible because there are so many constraints,” Mr. West said of building regulations and construction constraints—the more complex a building, the skilled the labor, the more it costs.

“Some architects have these randomized openings and windows, because it looks cool on the outside,” Mr. Goldstein pointed out. “You know what? You live inside the building.”

“Irrespective of style, there are certain things every building has to have,” Mr. Hill added. “Underneath it all, it's the same basic structure there, and that's what they rely on us for. Otherwise it's just a show piece.”

After Mr. West sets the parameters for the buildings, it falls to Messrs. Goldstein and Hill to design the skin and conceive of the interior layouts that encase Mr. West’s bounteous boxes. They are expert at arranging kitchens to make a galley feel like a chefs. A soffet here or a dropped living room there suddenly makes a home feel twice as big. "Even the right tread size for an emergency stair can make all the difference in a building, Mr. Goldstein said. “Five feet every fight, over the course of 40 stories, that can really add up."

"It’s like the recipe to McDonald’s special sauce," he added.

“It’s a special instinct,” Mr. Hill said. “We’ve been doing this long enough, we just know what works.”
The deferential approach may lead to plenty of commissions, but the awards, the press, the plaudits are less forthcoming. When The Observer mentioned the firm to one of the city’s mid-career hotshot designers, he responded, “Who?” We explained the Kondylis connection. “Oh, those guys. That stuff is just the worst.” In a word, boring.

But their clients do not see it that way. “Most architects, frankly, are assholes,” one developer said. “They couldn’t make your life more difficult. That is why we work with Goldstein Hill & West whenever we can.”

Even developers who have worked both sides of the field, like Mr. Silverstein or Izak Senbahar, president of Alexico Group, appreciate the Goldstein, Hill & West approach. Mr. Senbahar employed Richard Meier to build a third Perry Street-style tower at 165 Charles Street and hired French designer Jacque Grange for the Mark Hotel. But more often than not, he has worked with Mr. West on his residential buildings, including the Grand Beekman, the Elektra and the Laurel.

"They're a developer's architect, as we call them," Mr. Senbahar said. "They understand it's difficult to building in Manhattan, there are serious money concerns and they are very proactive." Mr. Senbahar even tapped the firm to help Herzog & de Meuron make their ambitious 57-story Tribeca tower work.

It is perhaps the perfect revenge for designers who have been ignored by the public that they are now playing savior to the starchitects, called in by developers to fix their long-suffering projects.

At 200 Chambers, Lord Norman Foster grew weary of pressure from the community board, so Mr. Hill was brought in to finish the condo for the Resnick family. Should Bruce Ratner decide to ditch modular construction at Atlantic Yards, SHoP will still design the façade, but the interiors will be Goldstein, Hill & West’s. That is already the case at Herzog & de Meuron’s 56 Leonard Street.

And in perhaps the firm’s greatest coup, the city’s biggest and grandest, apartment tower (for the moment), One57, is also a Goldstein, Hill & West production, according to two separate sources. French Pritzker Prize winner Christian de Portzamparc had been working on the building, but like so many other developers, Mr. Barnett turned the designs over to Mr. Hill to make them work.

When Kondylis & Partners dissolved, Mr. Barnett, and more specifically his bankers, were anxious about leaving Extell’s biggest project to date in the hands of an untested firm, no matter how experienced the partners. Mr. de Portzamparc was brought back on to reconceptualize the 1,005-foot tower, and he has gotten all the credit ever since. When asked about the switch, Mr. Hill said he still sees his design, its familiar bends and curves. “I feel like Christian put his skin over the building that we formed and shaped,” Mr. Hill said.

Mr. Barnett bristled at the assertion. “They were doing some work on it for a time, and we decided to go in a different direction,” he said. “Everything—the layouts, the plans—is different. That is an ugly thing for anybody to have said. It is untrue.”

Still, it would not be the first—or probably the last—time Goldstein, Hill & West is brought on to pinch hit. “These are very expensive projects; they have to work,” Mr. Goldstein said. “Star architects, it’s not for the style. It’s merely a name—it’s marketing.” Well, it works, as One57 just sold that $90 million apartment, and more may be on the way.

Still, New York is a big city, with millions of people, but only so many billionaires to house. “I think we’re starting to get away from that,” Mr. Goldstein said of the starchitect craze.

“A couple of the developers have told me,” Mr. Hill interjected, “if I just pronounced my name Stefan, maybe changed my last name to something French or added an ‘e’ onto the end, we would get all the work in the world.”

mchaban@observer.com

On Friday, the developer opened the construction gates to cameramen and reporters, photographers and radio producers from across Europe, Asia, South America and Africa. They got likely their first look inside the recently topped-out tower, which is about a year from completion (last year, the anniversary events were held inside 7 World Trade Center, with the mayor in attendance). While being led around by Silverstein Senior Vice-President Dara McQuillan, The Observer got a glimpse of something we had yet to see: the swanky new elevators and minimalist bathrooms.

They are part of the lower floors set to be turned over to the Port Authority, part of a 2006 deal to finance and begin construction on the site. Silverstein Properties hopes to hand them off by the end of the month, Mr. McQuillan said, when the Port will bring in its own designers and engineers to fit out the space for thousands of office workers on more than 30 trapezoidal floors.

"It all fits with Maki's super minimal style," Mr. McQuillan said, taking us inside one of the elevators. He explained that the marble on the floor was selected and cut especially because of its similarity to wood grain. In the bathroom, the corner guards wear designed to lay flush with the tiles, instead of on top of them. The paper towel dispensers are hidden under the mirrors. Everything is clean, unobtrusive, almost perfect.

How do you make an office building, one of the biggest and newest in the city, disappear? It's the little things that count.

Midtown, 2025? (Photo composite: Ed Johnson/NYO; Photos: Getty)

It was but one line in Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s State of the City address in January, but it could prove to be one of the biggest of his dozen years in office.

“In the area around Grand Central, we’ll work with the City Council on a package of regulatory changes and incentives that will attract new investment, new companies and new jobs,” the mayor said from the stage inside Morris High School in the Bronx.

Hizzoner spent more time talking about Cornell’s Roosevelt Island tech campus, keeping the Hunt’s Point Produce Market from moving across the Hudson to Jersey and efforts to further expand the blue-collar workforce on the waterfront. Even the redevelopment of nearby East Fordham Road and Webster Avenue got equal billing with these vague pronouncements about “the area around Grand Central.”

Despite the scant mention, it turns out that for an administration that has never shied away from big plans, this may be one of the biggest projects yet.

In what is likely to be the latest, greatest and last of the grand Bloomberg rezonings, City Hall has turned its focus to Midtown East. Under the direction of City Planning Commissioner Amanda Burden, the administration has undertaken 115 rezonings in almost every corner of the city, remaking nearly a quarter of its landmass.

Now, it is time to remake the middle of Manhattan, to redevelop one of the most developed swathes of land in the world.

Midtown, 2000. (Getty)

It was not the first time Robert Steel, the deputy mayor for economic development, had considered the plight of Midtown East, but he recalled it as the moment everything came into focus. Around this time last year, the former Goldman exec and Wachovia chief was standing on the roof of the Hearst Tower two blocks south of Columbus Circle, gazing out at the city surrounding him.

The Hearst building itself is an apt metaphor for the plans the city is currently contemplating. Originally built by William Randolph Hearst in 1928, the Art Deco dandy rose to six stories, with plans for a tower to rise above. Those were waylaid, for nearly eight decades, courtesy the Great Depression. But it would take another great boom to see the project through, and in 2006, the new Hearst Tower opened, with its faceted obsidian exterior, a gem of modern office life.

It was created by the high-tech practitioner and Pritzker Prize-winner Sir Norman Foster and received a LEED Gold rating for sustainability, the first office tower in the city to do so. The base of the tower remains, a nod to history, but it was gutted to make way for a soaring lobby, complete with a waterfall that recycles rainwater, helping to cool the space and cut down on A/C costs.

This is precisely the sort of building that Mr. Steel wants to see more of in Midtown, still the heart of the city’s commercial core.

“Think about what Midtown was historically, the Pantheon for corporate America,” he said during a recent phone interview. “It was lots of jobs, but also a symbol for all the Fortune 500 companies.”

But it was not so much the Hearst Tower as the ones surrounding it that got Mr. Steel concerned. A few blocks south, Mort Zuckerman was getting underway on 250 West 55th Street. In the distance stood the new Times headquarters, and across the street the still mostly-empty 11 Times Square. To the north was the Time Warner Center, and most telling of all, 3 Columbus Circle--another 1920s beauty built for General Motors, shoddily reclad in glass during the last boom by Joe Moinian, an effort to modernize the building.

Were Mr. Steel standing on the other side of Midtown, say atop the Bloomberg Building, he could point to almost no new development whatsoever besides the tower his boss and Vornado’s Steve Ross had built in 2004. And even then, the top half of that building, like the Time Warner Center, is filled with apartments for the likes of Jay-Z (Time Warner) and his wife Beyonce (Bloomberg). What new development there might be is much closer to 3 Columbus, buildings that have been “refreshed,” than anything built new, from the ground up.

The city wishes this were not the case, but given the vagaries of Manhattan development, from the challenges of clearing out tenants to the cost of construction, the status quo is often the easiest choice for a landlord to make. Developers argue that they need incentives, namely air rights, to do anything more. The number of new buildings could be counted on one hand.

“While new windows and HVAC systems can be installed, the fundamentals of ceiling heights and column configurations are fixed,” Mr. Zucckerman, chairman of Boston Properties and owner of a number of buildings in the area, including the iconic Citicorp Tower, said in an email. “To incentivize owners to empty leased office buildings and replace them simply requires that a much higher density be allowed.”

When the city began to look at solutions, the administration was struck by just how severe the situation in Midtown east had gotten. “We did an audit, and we found that 80 percent of buildings were more than 50 years old,” Mr. Steel said of Midtown East, roughly 39th Street to 57th Street, east of Fifth Avenue. “Basically it feels like the 1940s in a lot of places. We just think this should be a showcase place for the city, especially around Grand Central.”

But the city is focusing on much more than just Grand Central, based on a preliminary presentation it gave to community boards earlier this month, with the potential upzoning of the entire area. Still, there is a special focus on the blocks around the train station, as well as along Park Avenue, seen as especially valuable as well as especially outdated.

The entire rezoning might not cover the largest footprint of any the administration has undertaken, but it could well have the largest impact. Stretching to Second Avenue in the 40s and Third Avenue in the 50s, the current study area measures 85 square blocks, roughly 250 acres of the most densely developed property on earth. It is equivalent to about 10 Hudson Yards.

Yet compared to a place like Hong Kong or Singapore, the densities are piddling. “On a macro level, we have to remain competitive on a global basis in terms of creating modern office space,” real estate scion and Association of Better New York chairman Bill Rudin told The Observer. “Back in the ’80s, they shifted the zoning from the East Side to the West Side, and it kept going out to Hudson Yards. But Park Avenue is still very desirous.”

Steven Spinola, executive director of the Real Estate Board of New York, put it in even more stark terms. “Right now, our buildings top out around 50 stories,” he said. “Why shouldn’t they top out around 80 stories? They do in a lot of other great cities.” According to one much-discussed proposal, they could, with air rights jumping as much as 50 percent in certain areas.

An initial proposal is to be released on July 11, and the city hopes to begin the arduous public review process by the first quarter of next year—just before the notorious countdown clock at City Hall blinks off.

It all starts with Grand Central. (Getty)

There are those who fear that the city is putting the cart before the conductor. One of the big arguments for rezoning Midtown East is the arrival of East Side Access, which will usher the Long Island Railroad into Grand Central by the end of the decade (assuming no further delays). The Second Avenue subway might someday reach the area as well. But at the same time, the city has made massive infrastructure investments in areas like Hudson Yards and the World Trade Center site, where the Related Companies and Silverstein Properties struggle to find tenants. These expenditures, for expanding the 7 train and rebuilding ground zero, were partly based on the argument that Midtown had seen its day.

The case for reviving it is good, but not at the cost of these other areas, the thinking goes.

“The public is spending billions of dollars at Hudson Yards and ground zero, and for good reason,” Raju Mann, a former city planner and member of Community Board 5, said a recent meeting of the board. “We haven’t even seen what these projects have produced yet, so how can we be sure what’s appropriate for Midtown East?”

And yet developers outside of Midtown East areas are not worried, pointing out that the city’s proposal could take years, if not decades, to come to fruition.

“My first reaction was to be concerned about it, but the more I thought about it, it’s a really long-term proposition,” Jay Cross, president of Related Hudson Yards, told The Observer. He said the proposal could even be self-defeating. “It will also make these buildings more valuable, just perceptually, which will drive up the building cost,” he said. “That means they cost more to trade and assemble the sites, and by the time you’ve done all that, you may not be able to afford to replace the buildings.

Larry Silverstein shared this sentiment at the topping out of 4 World Trade Center on Monday, his shiny new office building that remains half empty. “My hunch is, we’re going to do fine,” he said, pointing to the drift of New Yorkers to both live and work in Downtown and Brooklyn.

There are other demographic shifts afoot, as well, though, that could undermine the success of the city’s plan. If one area has flourished during the past few years it is not Midtown East or Hudson Yards but Midtown South. As financial firms, with their love of shiny buildings and vast trading floors, have retrenched, the city’s tech sector has flourished, and it largely prefers old buildings to new. Even those firms moving to Midtown, like Facebook and Twitter, are setting up shop on Madison Avenue, filling spaces that are more Mad Men than Blade Runner. “We don’t know what the office of the future will look like yet,” Mr. Mann said.

Mr. Rudin pointed out that the two do not have to be mutually exclusive. “We need office space of all types for all types of tenants,” he said. “The important thing is that we plan for the future.”

The past is an issue, as well, as some preservationists worry about taking a full accounting of Midtown’s historic fabric before we begin bulldozing it. “I’ll be the first to admit that just because a building is X years old doesn’t mean it’s worth saving and reusing,” said Peg Breen, president of the Landmarks Conservancy. “But we can’t just plow it all under and build Midtown anew. Why bulldoze the place without seeing what’s there first.”

Vishaan Chakrabarti, director of Columbia University's real estate development program and former head of the Department of City Planning's Manhattan office, warned against knee-jerk preservation in the heart of Midtown. "This is the engine for the entire city," he said. "We cannot freeze it in amber. If we do, we'll end up like Paris, a museum and nothing else." Pro-development types love invoking Paris. It is the bête noire of businessmen the world over, apparently.

Still, the city argues that it is not obsessing over Midtown but instead finally giving it the attention it was used to in the past after a fair amount of neglect. “Really, this is a response to the five borough economic plan, which has focused outside of Midtown more than any administration ever has, I think,” Mr. Steel said.

This could be the case in more ways than one, as some traditional Midtown heavyweights, like SL Green, have felt neglected amidst the city’s westward expansion. Earlier this month, The Journal revealed that the city’s largest commercial landlord had teamed up with Hines, another player who has mostly developed along Third and Lex, to replace a clutch of turn-of-the-century buildings immediately west of Grand Central, on 42^nd Street between Madison and Vanderbuilt avenues. The city freely admits that it is working with local stakeholders to craft its plan but denies that they are the ones sketching it out.

"We will listen to what our partners in the private sector have to say, as well as the community, but this is definitely the mayor and his team's plan," Mr. Steel said. One City Hall source even called it "Bob Steel's baby," the marquee project of the deputy mayor since he joined the administration two years ago.

425 Park, in its prime. (Eral Soto)

One need look no further than 425 Park Avenue for proof of the problems with Midtown’s current zoning. One of those bland mid-century grandees, all flat glass planes, it was completed in 1958 and spans an entire block on Park. David Levinson, a partner at L&L Holdings, would tear down the 32-story behemoth if he could and replace it with something better. He is in the rare position of owning a building that will be empty of tenants coming 2015—normally a bad thing, were L&L not set on ridding itself of the low ceilings and column-choked spaces that fill the space.

“It’s an entire block-front on Park Avenue, and that opportunity hasn’t existed in my lifetime,” Mr. Levinson said with relish.

But he is confronted with the challenge of the zoning having changed three years after his tower was built, and were he to replace it, he would be left with a much smaller building. It is a problem faced by landlords all across Midtown East.

His clever real estate attorneys have determined that he could demolish all but the bottom quarter of the building and build up from there, getting as close to a new building as one could hope for. He has convened a private competition between 10 of the world’s top architects to solve this vexing problem.

Naturally, his fingers are also crossed that the city might solve this problem for him. “The zoning does not make this easy, but that’s the way it is, and we’re going to comply with that,” Mr Levinson said, “unless something changes.”

It might, and it might not. According to city planning sources, the proposal could get downsized to include only the immediate blocks surrounding Grand Central. There are almost 2 million square feet in development rights that once belonged to the Penn Central Railroad, currently owned by a little-known firm called Argent Ventures.

The city would add to that pot by a few million square feet, selling off the extra air rights, which would go to fund improvements to the surrounding streets and the spaces within Grand Central, particularly the local, and long-neglected, subway stations. This would benefit but a few developers owning surrounding properties. City Hall denied it has shrunk its scheme, but also admitted that it has yet to finalize the boundaries.

The administration is stuck between what it wants to build and what it has time to build. With thousands of constituents in Midtown, many with money to make and lose, it would be difficult to realize a sweeping plan within the next 18 months—public review alone takes seven. “I’m not even sure if there is unanimity at City Hall on what to do,” as one top land-use attorney put it. “I hope they can move quickly and not settle for the lowest common denominator.”

Even those critical or wary of the plan want to see it succeed, they just want to see it done right. The Municipal Art Society has long been a champion of Grand Central Terminal, helping to save it decades ago with Jacklyn Kennedy Onassis, and they have taken a keen interest in this project as well. Vin Cipolla, the group's president, hopes the mayor will take time in coming up with a plan, while realizing that if the administration puts it off, the next one might not take it up, either.

"Any plan for this area needs to be carefully balanced and worthy of Grand Central, the Chrysler Building and the Seagrams building," Mr. Cipolla said. "It’s a part of the city where the bar has to be very high."

And so do the buildings.

“Welcome to the first tower that will open for business here at the World Trade Center site,” Janno Lieber, right-hand man to Larry Silverstein at ground zero, boomed into a microphone from the podium. It was the only note of competition throughout the festivities, even though everyone knew the smaller tower, while started three years later, had beaten its sibling to the top by at least a few days.

To 1 World Trade Center’s credit, Barack Obama showed up two weeks ago, as did the mayor and governors Christie and Cuomo, all signing the ceremonial last column, still waiting somewhere to be hoisted into place. Four World Trade Center got state asssembly speaker and World Trade champion Shelly Silver, though he spoke from the heart.

“Despite the weather, today the sun is shining on Downtown Manhattan,” he intoned. “Having grown up in Lower Manhattan, living here all my life, having witnessed the September 11 attacks from my home, and having been here for the past decade, rebuilding, it is hard to adequately put into words just how wonderful it is to see this magnificent building coming to completion. To think, such a beautiful structure now stands where once such shocking ugliness and terrible pain is breathtaking and incredibly inspiring.”

As he spoke, iron workers were clambering over 3 World Trade Center in the background, hoisting a structural steel column into place, not unlike the one that would soon make the long journey to the top of this tower. Even on the most celebratory of days, work never stops on the site, at least as long as Larry Silverstein still holds out hope of finding a tenant for the building. “Many years from now,” Speaker Silver continued, “when the work is completed, and historians begin writing the story of Lower Manhattan’s rebirth, the greatest comeback story ever to be told, the name Larry Silverstein will figure prominently among its pages.”

When he took the stage, following the long applause that filled the 50-foot-high lobby, Mr. Silverstein’s voice was halting at first, caught up in the emotion of the moment. “With all we’ve been through these many years, it’s impossible to make progress without friends, supporters, people who really believe in what you’re doing as much as you do,” he said, opening his arms to the crowd.

This building was for them, it was for downtown, but also the city and the world.

“In a little over a year, 4 World Trade Center will be the newest addition to our neighborhood,” Mr. Silverstein said. “When we open the doors, it will not just be for our tenants, but for all New Yorkers”

And it already is. One World Trade Center had the president’s column, signed by some of the most powerful men in the western world, but 4 World Trade Center had the people’s column, signed by everyone in attendance (the press included). It is a ritual, as one attendee pointed out, that dates back to the time of the Vikings: “There’s a whole Wikipedia page about it,” under “topping out.” There you will find that it comes from an “ancient Scandinavian religious practice of placing a tree on the top of a new building to appease the tree-dwelling spirits of their ancestors that had been displaced.”

Silverstein Properties had arranged for a barbecue for workers on the site that day, and already the grill was going when everyone shuffled outside and the final beam was hoisted into place. R&B impresario BeBe Winans sang a rendition of “God Bless America” that soared as high as the tower and as slow as the beam crawling up its side.

With that charcoal smoke wafting through the air, it could have been ten years ago, or a thousand. Hopefully the spirits and the ancestors were appeased.

Larry Silverstein and a coterie of elected officials sign the final column. (Joe Woolhead/Silverstein Properties)

Two weeks ago, The Observer got a tour of 4 World Trade Center and called it the nicest building at ground zero, including videographic proof. The 72-story tower topped out today in a biggish ceremony (no presidents, governors or mayors were in attendance, though plenty of other local pols) led by the building's developer, Larry Silverstein. Here is a video of the final column rising, with a full report to come later today. (Apologies about the poor audio quality. Our camera died, so we had to use our cell phone.)

The new towers. (Wikimedia, TRD)

The boom is back on the Far West Side.

In addition to the Related Companies and Brookfield's work at Hudson Yards, and now Extell's reappearance on the scene, Larry Silverstein is moving forward with a new 60-story residential tower on West 40th Street, according to The Real Deal. It will be on the same block as Mr. Silverstein's twinned Silver Towers, which also rise to 60 stories, which should make for an interesting trio on the skyline.

The Real Deal takes a particular interest in the retail space:

The new project at 514 11th Avenue, between 40th and 41st streets, is in the early stages and has not been formally announced, a source familiar with the development said. While the overall size of the building has not been laid out, the retail portion of the project is expected to be between 150,000 and 250,000 square feet, a source familiar with the developer’s discussions said.

Those ground floors are important to driving development, apparently, because Mr. Silverstein is also eager to get his old friends at the Port Authority to take space in another neighboring tower project, where he hopes they would park their buses, and presumably provide some money to help get the project of the ground and persuade banks in making the necessary construction loans.

The project is also down the block from the 62-story MiMA, meaning things sure are getting crowded by the river. If only they could open that extra 7-Train stop.

Would you live here? (Bing Maps)

Correction: A reader points out that this is simply a bus garage, not a bus station, and the Port Authority Bus Terminal would remain in operation. The Observer regrets the error.

The Port Authority has been desperate to replace its eponymous bus terminal near Times Square for at least a decade now. Vornado Realty was supposed to build a new office tower atop the terminal, which it would rebuild in the process, but after years of planning, that proposal collapsed.

Now, it turns out Larry Silverstein has quietly floated a plan to build a new terminal on West 39th Street, according to Crain's, near the mouth of the Lincoln Tunnel, atop which Mr. Silversterin would build a new residential building.

A source said the idea, floated during last year's leadership transition at the Port Authority from Christopher Ward to Mr. Foye, involves developing a site on West 39th Street and Dyer Avenue used most recently by Mercedes-Benz by the service road that funnels traffic to and from the Lincoln Tunnel just southwest of the Port Authority Bus Terminal.

Mr. Silverstein, who has a long-term letter of intent with the owner to develop that building, proposed constructing a bus garage capped by a residential tower.

Unanswered questions include how big the tower would have to be to generate sufficient income to finance the construction of the garage, and whether anyone would want to live on top of a bus garage in the heavily trafficked area. It also remains to be seen how much the Port Authority would pay.

Also a problem? The terminal would not connect right to 11 different subway lines. But the fact remains, the bus terminal is an embarrassment to the city and needs to be fixed. The real question remains whether or not Larry Silverstein is the man to do it. On the one hand, he has had a rocky relationship with the Port in the past, but on the other, who knows the lumbering agency better?

Mr. Pinsky

Imagine, if you will, the landscape of New York City 15 years hence. A drive to Citi Field in Willets Point takes you past a pleasant if overpriced cluster of residential buildings, rather than seedy chop-shops. Roosevelt Island is home to a sprawling $2 billion applied-sciences campus spinning out an army of developers to populate ping-pong-table-clad start-up clusters from Dumbo to Union Square. On Manhattan’s far West Side, the rezoned stretch of Hudson Yards offers millions of square feet for office space, housing and retail and 14 acres of open public space. You can already see traces of a more built-up, scrubbed-down New York in Luna Park’s freshly-painted Scream Zone, the first new roller-coasters Coney Island has seen in 80 years, and the rapidly-metastasizing arena at Atlantic Yards, which will soon play home court to the rebranded Brooklyn Nets.

It’s hardly a scenario Seth Pinsky could have imagined in September 2008, when Lehman Brothers collapsed just seven months into his tenure as president of the New York City Economic Development Corporation (EDC), a not-for-profit arm of the Mayor's office charged with fostering economic growth across the five boroughs.

At the time, Mr. Pinsky was a 36-year-old former lawyer and investment analyst, only a few years removed from a private sector gig refinancing real estate deals for the big banks as an associate at Cleary Gottlieb. He had one big win under his belt—jump-starting the World Trade Center redevelopment project—but he didn’t have “a political bone in his body,” as one insider put it. “People kept saying to me, ‘Wow, you’re the head of the Economic Development Corporation? We’re in an economic meltdown!’’ Mr. Pinsky told The Observer.

“At the time it meant, ‘You must be really crazy.’”

Under Mr. Pinsky’s leadership, however, observers say the EDC has transformed itself from a real estate matchmaker for companies seeking office space into a policy-setting organization, spearheading diversification away from the finance, insurance, real estate economy (also known by the unofficial acronym, FIRE, which had rarely seemed more apt). Thanks to what one former employee called Mr. Pinsky’s “savant”-like facility with financing and structuring deals, a number of projects first proposed in the ambitious early years of the Bloomberg administration have begun making real progress. Some of the projects, like Willets Point, have “bedeviled administrations for decades,” noted Mr. Pinsky. And then there’s the EDC’s ultimate sleight of hand: convincing Cornell and Stanford to engage in a bitter rivalry to build a $2 billion tech campus, all by waving a $100 million grant and a swath of land on a sleepy East River isle.

All told, these projects will be the tent poles on which Mayor Bloomberg hangs the legacy of his 12 years in office. As careful chroniclers of the Bloomberg administration note, many of these large-scale development projects were first pitched by former deputy mayor for economic development Daniel Doctoroff as part of his grandiose PlaNYC bid for the 2012 Olympics, which drew comparisons to Robert Moses at the time, but didn’t come to fruition in the six years before he was tapped to lead Bloomberg LP.

“Dan in many ways set the agenda, set the vision,” said Robert Lieber, Mr. Doctoroff’s successor as deputy mayor. “And then Seth has been, in no small part, responsible for the execution and getting stuff done.”

In fact, Mr. Pinsky was a protégée of Mr. Doctoroff—part of a group of promising young civil servants he cultivated, which included Department of Transportation commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, Housing Preservation and Development commissioner Mathew Wambua, Andrew Kimball, head of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and Mr. Pinsky’s wife, Angela Pinsky (née Sung), now a senior vice president at the Real Estate Board of New York.

Mr. Pinsky’s successes have not come easily. Over the years, he has acquired a reputation in the city’s development community as a fearsome negotiator. Detractors complain about overzealous demands. “There’s a widespread belief that Seth tries to get every friggin’ nickel off ya,” said one source. You wouldn’t know it by looking at him. Narrowly built with a long face, Mr. Pinsky gives off something like a young Woody Allen vibe.

“When one says ‘tough guy,’ it’s not like he’s threatening or anything,” said James Whelan, senior vice president of public affairs for the Real Estate Board of New York, who worked under Mr. Doctoroff at the time. “He’s quite affable, nice guy and everything. Analytically, he's brilliant.”

“His personality can be a little grating on people sometimes,” noted Mr. Lieber. “He’s very picky and argumentative, but I think that has evolved as he’s been there.”

“There are no permanent obstacles with Seth,” said Mr. Doctoroff. Mr. Lieber put it more bluntly: “He wears the other guy out.”

Some blame that stance for the chaotic denouement of the tech campus competition. “There’s a line that Stanford left because Seth was too difficult to deal with,” the source said. Those privy to negotiations say Stanford was taken aback by the binding legal penalties involving factors outside of their control.

“I’m not sure anyone really knows what happened there,” Mr. Pinsky said. “I think developers are used to dealing with cities that just write a check and say, ‘Will you just swear on a Bible that you’ll do this?’”

Meanwhile, community advocates and urban planners decry the EDC’s corporate structure and lack of transparency. “They pass for being a government agency, and in fact they have more power than many of the line agencies under the mayor,” said Tom Angotti, director of the Center for Community Planning and Development at Hunter College and the author of New York for Sale, who noted that by the time neighborhoods are consulted, the EDC has typically already made up its mind.

“If [closing deals] is the only criterion, he’s been a success. But for me that’s not the only criteria, nor should it be for the public. The question is what’s the quality of the deals,” added Mr. Angotti, a technical advisor to the alternative plans for the arena at Atlantic Yards. He cited the Brooklyn stadium as an example of selecting a more suburbanized approach over a plan that would benefit locals. “It divides three neighborhoods instead of uniting them and it just creates another giant super block in the middle of Brooklyn."

*

“When I was in middle school I used to design cities,” Mr. Pinsky told The Observer. We were sitting down for lunch at the Stone Street Tavern, an old-school City Hall favorite, with shamrocks on the menu and Louie Prima in high rotation.

“I had a city that I designed on four big pieces of tag board, where I kind of mapped everything out,” he explained, removing his ’50s-style Browline glasses. The elaborate maps used color coding to show the business district, the residential districts, subway lines. “I made up the companies that were based there,” Mr. Pinsky added of his pre-SimCity urban dreamscapes.

Zoning fantasies don’t often rank among a 13-year-old boy’s after-school activities, but Mr. Pinsky, who tucked his diamond-patterned purple tie into his dress shirt once the food arrived, comes across as a guy who, even as a kid, was more comfortable around adults.

Which isn’t to say he’s without his youthful indulgences. “I have—this is an embarrassing admission—I eat American cheese almost every day,” he said admiringly of The Observer’s grilled cheese. “I actually think I’ve had American cheese for one meal almost every day since I was about six-years-old.” The routine involves some bread and often a condiment. “Not mayo, Miracle Whip. Big difference,” he elaborated.

Mr. Pinsky grew up in the suburbs of New York until he was 10, when his father, a Reform rabbi, moved the family to Minnesota. “I like to tell people I grew up in the New York area and I just lived in Minnesota,” he said. “I was fully formed by the time I moved there.”

After earning a history degree from Columbia, Mr. Pinsky took a job as a financial analyst in M&A at Wolfensohn Inc., the investment firm launched by former World Bank president James Wolfensohn, albeit with some reservations. He made a bargain with himself to take the LSATs to decrease the likelihood of “going into finance for the rest of my life.”

From there he went on to Harvard Law, eventually working as an associate at Cleary Gottlieb, where partners, aware of interest in New York, would try to steer local cases his way. The company’s office was at 1 Liberty Plaza, but the day the towers fell, Mr. Pinsky happened to be on a business trip in Washington, D.C. Months later, when employees were allowed back in the building, he would monitor the recovery and cleanup efforts, watching as workers searched for remains and stopped to salute as bodies were driven out of the site covered in an American flag.

As he gazed out from his office window, Mr. Pinsky thought, “If I’m ever going to do it, now is the time.”

On paper, Mr. Pinsky’s résumé doesn’t necessarily read like that of a closer. Indeed, his ascent still mystifies some City Hall insiders. One former official sent us snippets of Mr. Pinsky’s bio via instant message. “Like WTF,” the source commented, still baffled by Mr. Pinsky’s appointment. “There are 500 people in the NYC McKinsey office with more experience than that.”

After he was hired “sort of into the bowels of EDC,” as Mr. Doctoroff put it, Mr. Pinsky distinguished himself with uncommon financial prowess. “You know, in city government there is not a wide range of those sort of skills that are available, particularly when you’re dealing with commercial parties on the other side,” he said. In other words, you can’t go up against Larry Silverstein with a bleeding-heart nonprofit type. Thus, Mr. Doctoroff decided to appoint Mr. Pinsky the “quarterback” of WTC negotiations launched in 2005.

WTC site in 2006 (inset) and 2012.

“Seth was instrumental in helping break that Rubik’s Cube of what it was Larry really wanted,” Mr. Lieber recalled. The city offered Mr. Silverstein an ultimatum: Take $300 million for his interest in the site or sign an alternative deal that offered financing with Liberty Bonds while allowing the Port Authority to take back the Freedom Tower. The offer involved intense backroom finagling with Governor George Pataki and Port Authority chairman Anthony Coscia.

“Not a lot of people have ever focused on that deal,” said Mr. Doctoroff, but it “essentially unlocked the site and allowed it move forward, and Seth really did a lot of the work.”

Mr. Pinsky described his approach to dealmaking as “empathetic”—trying to get into the other party’s head. “I think most people would probably not agree with that,” he admitted. “But I mean it in a very specific way.”

After the WTC deal, Mr. Doctoroff said he saw to it that Mr. Pinsky was promoted to head the EDC’s Real Estate Transactional Group. He was tapped to lead the EDC in 2008.

When the housing bubble started to collapse, Mr. Pinsky was on vacation in Uzbekistan (hardly an unusual choice for someone who picked Sudan and Egypt as his honeymoon spot), keeping up with the news on his BlackBerry. Layoffs in FIRE were imminent, and the city needed to figure out a way to counter the loss.

Sometime that winter, Mr. Pinsky took a walk around Brooklyn and ended up in East New York. “Again, it’s a little bit embarrassing to admit, but what hit me was that we’re called ‘the Economic Development Corporation,’ but what we really are is the ‘real estate development corporation.’ And we really didn’t do that much with the underlying economy itself.” Spending months luring a company to Lower Manhattan with an incentive package to secure just 300 jobs wouldn't cut it.

Earlier that year, Mr. Pinsky had brought in more “strategically minded” hires from the private sector. “Nobody really knew what do with them and I’m not sure they knew what to do with themselves,” he recalled. That group became the Center for Economic Transformation, tasked with reaching out to individual industries, like the tech community—an approach that’s garnered copycat interest from London to Austin.

Mr. Doctoroff pointed out that the EDC has been behind big strides toward diversification before. Under interim president Andy Alper, for example, the EDC helped bring about the Alexandria Center for Life Sciences. There was also an effort to incentivize the film and television industries to shoot in New York.

Mr. Doctoroff characterized initiatives toward growing the tech sector as an unprecedented shift. “We really are on the cusp of a paradigm change. We can gain extraordinary leverage at a unique moment.”

Sources close to Mr. Pinsky insist he has no interest in parlaying his newfound visibility into public office, predicting instead a policy-related track in the real estate field. “I don’t like politics,” Mr. Pinsky concurred. “That’s not my thing.”

In the meantime, however, there’s a lot of work to be done before the mayor’s third term ends next year. “He has a countdown clock in the bullpen,” Mr. Pinsky said. “We’re all very conscious of the deadline. I don’t think he likes unfinished business.”

-ntiku@observer.com

New developments like 1 World Trade Center, 4 World Trade Center, and Edward Minskoff's 51 Astor Place, are all slated to hit the market in 2013. The last time NYC had this much new space becoming available was in 1989, said Cassidy Turley's Robert Sammons.

But this isn't giving developers like Mr. Minskoff a roaring case of agita and insomnia.

"I sleep well at night," Mr. Minskoff told The WSJ . 

Mr. Minskoff not pictured.

As WSJ (and Commercial Observer alumni Laura Kusisto) points out:

"... the bulge in the delivery pipeline comes at a time when demand in the New York office market is showing signs of flagging because of the contraction in the financial-services industry. Tenants with more than 5,000 square feet leased 5.9 million square feet in the fourth quarter, compared with 6 million square feet in the third quarter and 6.2 million square feet in the fourth quarter of 2010, according to Colliers International.

Also, financial-services firms are likely to pull back from more than 2 million square feet of space requirements in the next couple of years. That's going to put pressure on owners to possibly cut rents to fill space in their towers."

In short, there's going to be a whole lotta inventory, but not too many takers, some fear. Unveiling new space at a painful time in the market, much like the struggling 11 Times Square building (which was built during the downturn and is now roughly 60 percent vacant), can spell restless nights for owners, Ms. Kusisto reports.

"Manhattan development tends to run in cycles. There was an enormous surge of new construction in the late 1980s as developers scrambled to take advantage of expiring tax breaks.

The result: Many speculative buildings hit the market just as the national economy went into the recession of the early 1990s. Many of the developers wound up losing their buildings to banks and some of the projects sat empty for years."

Other possible concerns are tenants who are becoming more hip to smaller and more efficient office spaces. When the leases for these tenants come up, they are taking less, not more, space.

And if firms flock for the newer buildings, it will come at the expense of older ones.

"'What you end up with is a segmented marketplace, where certain buildings are going to lease and other buildings might just languish with empty space,'" says Paul Glickman, of Jones Lang LaSalle, who is on the team leasing 51 Astor."

But such concerns are not keeping Mr. Minskoff and World Trade Center developer Larry Silverstein up at night... at least, not in 2012.

drosen@observer.com 

Coming off of more than three years as its top New York executive, Mr. Ward has no illusions how the bi-state agency is run.

The audit last week cited mismanagement at the Port Authority and spiraling costs at the World Trade Center site, findings that aren’t exactly revelatory. Swelling budgets have been a long-running problem at the complex site and criticisms have been lobbed before at the sprawling agency’s byzantine structure.

Chris Ward.

To the politically cynical, the findings were a way for governors Andrew Cuomo and Chris Christie to distance themselves from the inevitable overruns at the World Trade Center site as well as the unpopular toll and fare hike last year by the agency early in their tenures.

One thing is immediately clear: It won’t impact the consensus on Mr. Ward’s time at the Port Authority, which is widely hailed as one of the key reasons behind the progress at the WTC site.

“Government has to reinvent itself all the time,” Mr. Ward said. “Good for them for raising questions about the Port Authority. All I can say is, imagine what the audit would be, what the conclusions would be if the world looked at the site on the 10th year anniversary and it wasn’t complete and President Obama was working his way through an incomplete site and the families were there and it’s been 10 years and the memorial was not done.”

Such is the contradictory and sometimes absurd nature of public service, where memory of the overwhelming mandates Mr. Ward and his colleagues at the authority faced when he stepped in as executive director in 2008 can give way to scrutiny over the evasive actions they were forced to take. Building in the expeditious manner that was required to get the memorial done in time for its big moment in the national eye was more expensive. But in the pressured years leading up to anniversary, who among both the government and public would have been willing to accept failure to meet the deadline in exchange for cost savings?

“The alternative was incredibly worse,” Mr. Ward said. “From 2008 to 2011 we completed the memorial, we solved the Larry Silverstein issues, we signed Condé and did a deal to have the Dursts invest $100 million into the building. And the site now has all of this progressive momentum. In 2008 people thought the project would never get built. Now it’s a done deal.

“I think you have to be a little perverse to enjoy major league public service,” Mr. Ward added with a smile.

And yet one can sense that Mr. Ward also misses the thrill of being one of the top transit and infrastructure officials in the country. During his time at the authority, Mr. Ward, wearing his trademark designer eyeglasses, excelled as a public speaker and face for the agency, always at ease in the limelight and a forceful presence during the authority’s tough talks at the WTC site that reassured the public its stake in the rebuilding effort would not be subjugated to Mr. Silverstein’s.

While perhaps out of the public eye, Mr. Ward’s new role places him closer to a pipeline of transit and infrastructure that is potentially bigger than the Port Authority’s. Last month, Mr. Ward took an executive level position in the U.S. operations of the large international construction company Dragados, and he has grand ambitions for the firm.

“It’s a big change,” said Mr. Ward. “Being executive director of the Port Authority is making 50 different public policy decisions every day; here the focus is bottom-line business development.”

In recent years, a pattern of ballooning construction costs has plagued more than just the Port Authority. The situation has transpired in so many instances, it has come to seem like an endemic outcome for public transit and infrastructure projects. It’s a story that Mr. Ward can tell more compellingly by virtue not only of his tenure at the Port Authority but, before that, his time at the New York City Department of Environmental Protection, where, as that agency’s commissioner, he presided over the planning and construction of a water filtration plant in Westchester County’s Croton, which also busted through preliminary cost estimates.

According to Mr. Ward, a new era could be dawning in the U.S. where government seeks to off load large civic construction projects onto private partners who take on not only oversight of the work but responsibility for its costs, guaranteeing that government is not on the hook for overruns. These public-private partnerships (PPP) have become popular in Europe but slower to catch on here. Mr. Ward has ambitious plans for Dragados. The company, he says, will be in contention for billions of dollars of construction work and has a war chest of billions more to invest alongside government partners who embrace the PPP concept.

“My job is to identify and then win some of these large public works projects that are on the planning boards or ready to go around the country,” Mr. Ward said, citing plans to replace the Tappan Zee Bridge as one among many potential jobs that will be up for bid in the coming years. “There are major highway projects down in Texas that we’re keen on, some tunnel projects out West that we’re looking at.

Hydro plants in Canada. There’s a good $35 billion of major public infrastructure that will need to get built in the next five years and we’d like to get a significant part of it.”

When Mr. Ward left the Port Authority late last year, he didn’t have his new position lined up yet. He said he went to the gym and caught up on reading. More than anything else, he said, he walked. As a high official, Mr. Ward said he was cloistered.

“Three and a half years at the Port Authority, you don’t have a lot of time to yourself,” Mr. Ward said. “I walked the Hudson River Park, which is so beautiful. I walked new neighborhoods that I hadn’t been to. I hadn’t really been over to Williamsburg and so I saw that part of the city, just walked the whole thing. I walked Madison Avenue one day, which is such an eye opener. With everything that is going on in the world there’s this one little place that remains protected from the economic recession.”

Mr. Ward went to Macalester College in Minnesota and when he graduated in the late 1970s, he said he went to work as a ranch hand in NewMexico, leaving to then do a stint on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico.

“We were about 150 miles offshore, out there for seven days on and then off for seven days,” Mr. Ward said. “There was every walk of life,

South Houston blacks, West Texas cowboys, Chicanos. At the time I had to be a working-class hero, I wanted to live the authentic life. I came to work for the city after graduate school at Harvard.”

One point that always stands out in his résumé is the focus of his studies. Mr. Ward has spent much of his career in public service roles involved with transit, infrastructure and construction, but in college he primarily studied theology.

“I always get questions about that,” Mr. Ward said. “All I can say is, it equipped me to ask critical questions and try to find answers to hard questions. Whether it’s an answer for a construction project or economics, it’s just a useful skill for problem solving.”

dgeiger@observer.com