How STEPHEN ROSS outmaneuvered, outspent, out-leveraged, and out-sweet-talked his way into the LARGEST REAL- ESTATE-DEVELOPMENT DEAL in America.
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.”
Bu hikaye New York magazine dergisinin February 18, 2019 sayısından alınmıştır.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber ? Giriş Yap
Bu hikaye New York magazine dergisinin February 18, 2019 sayısından alınmıştır.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Giriş Yap
What Did Brooklyn Bridge Park Get So Right?
Nearly 20 years after we broke ground, it's more impressive than ever.
No Man's Land
Rachel Cusk's gender fundamentalism fully surfaces in her latest novel, Parade.
Faust Goes to Fidi
The producers of Sleep No More are back with the whirlwind immersive-theater project Life and Trust.
The Renegade
June Squibb has the perfect first lead role: a granny gone rogue.
The Empty Seat
At Paris Couture Week, one question everyone's lips: Who will lead Chanel?
The Hidden Dutch Colonial
When Nicholas Howey and his late husband, Gerard Widdershoven, bought this 1925 house tucked away behind the hedges in Bridgehampton, they did little more than paint it-and fill it with art.
The Next Shishito?
Jimmy Nardello peppers, long beloved by chefs, are set to break out.
The Shrimp Show
San Sabino makes maximalist seafood for the social-media age.
The WEIGHT of a BOEING 787
Mitch Barnett spent years fighting one of the world's largest aircraft manufacturers. It cost him his life.
By age 43, I'd come up with many explanations for my perpetual strangeness with other people. - Then the autism diagnosis arrived.
SIX YEARS AGO, my now-husband, Sam, asked my father if he could marry me.