The Only Man Who Could Build Oz

How STEPHEN ROSS outmaneuvered, outspent, out-leveraged, and out-sweet-talked his way into the LARGEST REAL- ESTATE-DEVELOPMENT DEAL in America.

- Carl Swanson

How do you get people to move to this wasteland?” asks Stephen Ross, speaking rhetorically in what I would come to think of as his PowerPoint mode. We’re on the 24th-floor sales office of 10 Hudson Yards, and I’m trying to not be too distractedly beguiled by the floor-to-ceiling view of this soon-to-open pop-up metropolis he’s building all around us in what was, not so long ago, a blustery infrastructural trainscape, a place you’d probably go only if you needed to catch a Bolt Bus to Boston.

Ross, the 78-year-old founder and chairman of the real-estate-development firm the Related Companies, is the man behind the curtain in this Oz. Hudson Yards is the largest and most expensive real-estate project in America—28 acres, at almost a billion dollars an acre. A strenuously engineered and resourcefully financed marvel, it was set in motion by the Bloomberg administration, which saw the northern terminus of the High Line as a good place for residential high-rises and office towers. But it was Ross who built it into what my colleague Justin Davidson refers to as a veritable nation-state, making Ross, just possibly and for this moment, the most powerful man in New York, a Robert Moses for our age of concierge mega-urbanism.

“Ross and Related were the only ones who could pull this off,” says Dan Doctor off, the former deputy mayor for economic development under Mayor Bloomberg, who helped negotiate the deal for the site. (Doctor off now runs the Google-owned technourbanism venture Sidewalk Labs, which happens to have its offices in 10 Hudson Yards.) He has his Ross theories. “Steve is a relentless optimist. He’s just building a new house for himself. He’s 78 years old. And he’ll enjoy it until he can’t.”