PUBLISHER'S TRAVELOGUE

March 3, 2011 | 7:00 am ET Staff Reporter

Maybe they accidentally came to the wrong room yesterday in NYC, but this was the remarkable cast of celebrities we were proud to host for our Bisnow event on The Future of Times Square and the Far West Side: World Trade Center owner Larry Silverstein, with mic, and from left, New York retail king Robert Futterman, Related Companies Hudson Yards chief Jay Cross, CBRE head of global brokerage Steve Siegel, Proskauer Real Estate leader Ron Sernau, SJP founder Steve Pozycki, and, moderating for us, former Cushman & Wakefield CEO Bruce Mosler. Manhattan Borough president Scott Stringer opened the program. They agreed office leasing, retail, and, yes, even building are pretty much on fire againin the Big Apple.

We held the event on the vacant 34th floor of Steve Posycki’s new 1.1M SF tower at the corner of Eighth and 42nd right next to the “new” New York Times Building. It’s LEED Gold with floor-to-ceiling windows, state-of-the art air filtration, and the rest. Top buildings no longer seem to be called trophies in the Big Apple—the new nomenclature (to judge from marketing brochures) seems to be: “iconic.”

425 brokers and others were riveted as Larry, one of the earliest believers in the West Side, chronicled his journey from 1984, when he purchased the industrially zoned block of 42nd St between Eleventh and Twelfth for $20M. “For some reason, I saw opportunity,” he says, “and had belief that it would have success with rezoning.” Despite dubious government officials who had never seen such a commitment, lawsuits, and market downturns, his firm eventually built One River Place and Silver Towers, and now 2,200 familieslive in the one square block.

PUBLISHER'S TRAVELOGUE

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