Vornado executive vice-president Glen Weiss told a Real Deal forum last week, “You should assume we’re in” — meaning his company’s planned 350 Park Ave. skyscraper to be anchored by Ken Griffin’s Citadel companies.
“We’ve started demolition and we’re ready to roll,” Weiss said, adding that media coverage suggesting otherwise was “not accurate.”
But of course the big question remains: Is GRIFFIN still in following Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s vicious video attack of him?
Griffin, a partner with Vornado and the Rudin organization at the site, said previously his commitment to the project was “under review” by himself and his partners.
If Griffin were to pull out, it might prompt Vornado to leave, too — as it has the right to do in mid-July, as the real estate trust revealed in many previous public SEC filings.
CBRE global brokerage chief Stephen B. Siegel, who was on the Real Deal panel, told the audience that, “Unfortunately, our mayor’s DNA is not to work with the elite or the rich or the successful.”
He later told Realty Check he regarded Mamdani as “dangerous” to the city. Even so, he downplayed the idea that Griffin’s intention to increase his amount of office space in Miami meant he would reduce it in New York necessarily.
“He was already planning” to enlarge the Florida office footprint before Mamdani went on the attack, Siegel said. “Let’s hope it’s all he does.”
