Vornado

Despite the national housing market crisis and some serious global competition, Manhattan real estate moguls maintained a commanding presence in the billionaires club in 2008, according to Forbes’ annual list.

Donald Trump fell from No. 314 in 2007 to 368 this year with a net worth of $3 billion. The founder of Related Companies, Stephen Ross, jumped from No.  read more »

Lower Manhattan could still keep its hold on financial giant Merrill Lynch, the Wall Street Journal reports today (at bottom), as “Downtown forces” recently went back to the bank with a revised package.

Just weeks ago, Merrill was very close to moving its headquarters to the site of Vornado Realty Trust’s Hotel Pennsylvania in midtown, just across Seventh Avenue from Penn Station. However, the move never came up at a meeting of the financial firm’s board, the Journal reports, which was too preoccupied with a write-down of $8.4 billion.

Since then, Merrill CEO Stanley O’Neal went into retirement – chief executives tend to weigh in heavily in a company’s location decision, real estate experts say – leaving open once again the question of where the bank will go when its lease at Brookfield Properties’ World Financial Center, just west of Ground Zero, expires in 2013.

Brookfield is pushing to expand its existing facility to accommodate Merrill, while Larry Silverstein is eager to bring the bank to one of his new World Trade Center towers.

You knew it was over when several panelists started singing the old familiar melody to Glenn Miller's "Pennsylvania 6-5000."

A resolution to protect the historic Hotel Pennsylvania from demolition is on its way to the Landmarks Preservation Commission after local Community Board 5 voted 21 to 8 on Thursday night to preserve the circa-1919, 1,700-room hotel across from Madison Square Garden.  read more »

Both the Times and Post are following up today on financial giant Merrill Lynch's potential interest in moving to the current Hotel Pennsylvania site.

According to the Post's Lois Weiss: "Merrill Lynch execs would prefer to be at Vornado Realty Trust's [hotel site]" as opposed to Larry Silverstein's forthcoming World Trade Center redevelopment.

"What Larry [Silverstein] has decked up financially is not superior to [Vornado's] Hotel Pennsylvania, and it's not big enough," our source said.

That statement somewhat contradicts what Merrill Lynch sources told Ms. Weiss just a month ago, when they complained the hotel property was "not attractive enough to employees."

"They can't make up their minds," hotel preservationist Gregory Jones told The Observer.  read more »

Five developers have bid on the Western Rail Yards. The bids came into the yards' owner, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, by 5 p.m. on Thursday, and they include the usual heavyweights of New York City building.

1. Extell Development Company
2. Brookfield Properties Developer LLC
3. The Related Companies
4. TS West Side Holding, LLC (A Joint Venture of Tishman Speyer and Morgan Stanley)
5. Hudson Center East LLC and Hudson Center West LLC (A Joint Venture of Vornado Realty Trust and The Durst Organization, Inc.)

For the MTA's statement on the selection process, which should drag on toward at least spring, click here.

For earlier Observer coverage of the architects who could get to shape the yards, click here.  

America Online announced today that it will move its corporate headquarters from Dulles, Va., to 770 Broadway. A release on the company's Web site says that the firm has leased space at the Greenwich Village building owned by Vornado Realty Trust for its advertising and programming operations, which are already based in New York, as well as for additional operations.

AOL will lease 152,000 square feet on two floors, according to a spokeswoman, and the lease lasts until 2022. Other tenants in the building, according to Vornado's Web site, include J. Crew, Viacom International, and publisher VNU.

The corporate release can be read here.

The growing fears over the credit markets are affecting everyone, but it seems that Real Estate Investment Trusts are suffering the most.  read more »

Want to suck up to your landlord? Name a menu item in his honor.

Consider the "Vornado," the greasy, chewy, rather sauceless and entirely too cheesy 11-inch, thin-crust personal pizza served up at Joe O's--the hallowed Hotel Pennsylvania's downstairs bar and restaurant, located along West 33rd Street.

The entire building, built in 1919, is presently owned by real-estate behemoth Vornado Realty Trust.

How has Vornado responded to its $13 tomato, pepperoni and mozzarella memorial?  read more »