12/20/11 1:30pm

power broker

David E. Green

The Repositionist of 2 Park Avenue

Even in Manhattan, a building can go stale.

In Midtown South, for example, a commercial property can amass a litany of blue-chip legal practices and financial services firms in one decade, and then, 10 years later, watch as its tenant portfolio withers in prestige.

Take 2 Park Avenue. The building once served as the base of operations for Newsday and Times Mirror Inc. back in the 1980s and 1990s and more recently for The Hartford, the Connecticut-based insurance company. Read More

By Jotham Sederstrom 9/13/11 10:57am

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Mr. Lieber joined Silverstein in 2003.

Silverstein's Janno Lieber on the Progress at Ground Zero

Uniformed men milled about, waiting for Leon Panetta, the newly appointed Secretary of Defense, to embark on his morning tour of 7 World Trade Center. At the same time, the leader of one of the city’s most powerful trade unions was being greeted as he crossed from the building’s elevator bank to a floor model of the World Trade Center site. Heavyset and stoic, that labor leader was there to address the members of Helmets to Hardhats, an organization that assists soldiers in their transition from battlefields to construction sites.

A few hours earlier, Mayor Bloomberg had arrived in Lower Manhattan along with his own entourage, calling for the end to “Ground Zero” as the shorthand to describe what, over the course of a decade, has changed from a pile of smoldering ashes to the early metallic seeds of a transit hub, a memorial site and a massive complex of skyscrapers. Read More

By Jotham Sederstrom 9/06/11 9:36am

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Mr. Farkas started Metropolitan Realty Associates in 2001.

The Recycler

In its heyday, the manufacturing plant in Garden City, Long Island, housed laboratories for DuPont Pharmaceuticals before it went on to harbor chemists with a competing drug maker, Bristol Myers Squibb. But by 2004, the 188,500-square-foot complex of two buildings on Stewart Avenue and Endo Boulevard—a street named for the pharmaceutical firm that originally occupied the plant in 1964—had become a casualty of new compliancy standards by the F.D.A. In other words, the cost of upgrading the complex to conform was no longer in the best interest of the owner or even Bristol Myers Squibb, which relocated.

Enter Joe Farkas, a former CB Richard Ellis broker who, as president of the Jericho-based Metropolitan Realty Associates, has mined real estate gold from older assets, like the Garden City site, that have outlived their original use. Read More

By Jotham Sederstrom 8/23/11 10:13am

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Mr. Packman joined Trinity in November 2010.

The Hudson Square Crier

When Cushman & Wakefield accepted leasing duties at 1 Hudson Square in 2005, the building just north of Canal Street was still struggling to transcend its traffic-choked proximity to the Holland Tunnel and an address in a neighborhood nobody had really named (it’s called Hudson Square today).

Yet by seizing on a small but notable spurt in recent activity from a handful of tech firms and digital start-ups, the Cushman agents helped reposition the 1.1-million-square-foot building into a hub for the city’s creative underclass. Read More

By Jotham Sederstrom 8/16/11 9:12am

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Mr. Bernstein joined Colliers ABR, the precursor to Cassidy Turley, in 2007.

The Accidental Journeyman

When it was announced in early 2007 that the Empire State Building would undertake an ambitious, $550 million renovation—the first of such grandeur since it was erected 76 years earlier—real estate observers stood divided on whether the effort was long overdue or, considering the looming economic crises, an unnecessarily expensive bet.

Given the 102-story tower’s 2.5 million square feet—not to mention its aging infrastructure, elevators and lobby—naysayers had reason to doubt the logic behind such a costly affair. Add to those challenges a mandate to replace the building’s jigsaw puzzle of 550 fractious users with a collection of far more prestigious, full-floor tenants and the endeavor seemed positively Sisyphean to some. Read More

By Jotham Sederstrom 8/09/11 9:01am

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Mr. Sorin has been a partner at Fried Frank since 1997.

The Renaissance Lawyer

It was back in 2006, during a streak of economic buoyancy, that Google, then only eight years old, paid $319 million for an office complex on Amphitheatre Avenue in Mountain View, Calif., that would soon become known to all as the Googleplex.

Since then, the empire that Larry Page and Sergey Brin built has expanded to include 68 addresses in Canada, Asia, Europe, Latin America, the United States and even the Middle East. In 2010, the company reported that its total assets had reached a whopping $57.9 billion. So it wasn’t a surprise last December when Google signed a contract to buy 111 Eighth Avenue, one of New York City’s largest office buildings. Nor did anyone blanch when the closing price of $1.8 billion turned out to be the largest of the year—not just in Manhattan, but in the entire country.

But for Robert Sorin, an attorney with Fried Frank’s real estate practice who represented Google in that deal, what remains most surprising of all is that an outfit that shares a tax bracket with the most profitable companies in the world wound up applying for a loan. Read More

By Jotham Sederstrom 8/02/11 8:54am

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20110722_OBSERVER_IMG_6799

The Man They Love in Chicago

It was during the early mornings and late nights of cold, cold February that the black cars dispersed, hauling hefty stacks of leases through the Holland Tunnel, up the Henry Hudson Parkway, all the way across Interstate 495, to at least 12 insiders.

The drafts, updated three times and delivered in real time, were rushed with purpose to Bruce Mosler at his apartment building in Manhattan and to homes in Westchester, Long Island and New Jersey, where lawyers working for Vornado Realty Trust strained to keep eyelids from closing. Read More

By Jotham Sederstrom 7/26/11 8:49am

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Mr. Black was working for Reckson Associates when it was acquired by SL Green in 2007. (Credit: Jackie Snow)

SL Green’s Jason Black Is Commercial Real Estate’s Al Gore

It all began, modestly enough, with the relatively simple task of implementing an energy-savings plan across Reckson Associates’ portfolio of 32 buildings in Westchester and Fairfield counties.

A regional architect with Reckson named Jason Black orchestrated a portfolio-wide program that included the installation of L.E.D. exit signs and occupancy sensor devices in private offices. Read More

By Jotham Sederstrom 7/19/11 8:37am

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Mr. Gross joined Eastern Consolidated in 2002.

Eastern Consolidated's Stuart Gross, the Developer as Broker

It was shortly before the economic collapse that the owner of 116 John Street in the financial district turned to Stuart Gross for answers.

Long an office building with ground-floor retail, the roughly 80-year-old high-rise had slouched to such epic deterioration over the decades that it had been recategorized as Class B, or maybe even C—hardly a designation to brag about. With such a state of disrepair, the new owner, Hacienda Intercontinental Realty, had no sure opportunities for refinancing, nor did the firm want to sell the property outright, Mr. Gross recalled. Read More

By Jotham Sederstrom 7/12/11 8:44am

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Mr. Glickman worked on the deal that brought Ogilvy & Mather to 11th Avenue, a move that changed the far West Side.

Paul Glickman, Jones Lang LaSalle's Transformer

At first glance, the 11-story property on 11th Avenue near 47th Street hardly seemed the ideal candidate to become Manhattan’s next big office building.

Situated on the far West Side, the 98-year-old building at 636 11th Avenue was destined for a full-blown hotel or condominium conversion when the Hakimian Organization purchased a stake in it in 2005. Indeed, what corporate tenant in its right mind would willingly wander so far west? Or at least that’s what Ben Hakimian thought. Read More