REBNY’s Steve Spinola and Grand Central

Andrew Penson, the owner of the famed Grand Central Terminal, is pitching a fight against City Hall, claiming the Midtown East rezoning proposal undervalues air rights in the district, Crain’s reported.

Penson, who previously hoped on making a tidy profit by selling the transit hub’s 1 million-plus square feet of development rights, argued the targeted $250 per square foot price is too low for the city to raise enough money for infrastructure projects and neighborhood improvements. [more]

Tony Malkin and the Empire State Building

Andrew Penson, the owner of Grand Central Terminal, has teamed up with the group of Empire State Building investors seeking to block the settlement of a class-action suit against Malkin Holdings for their plan to include the iconic building in a public real estate investment trust, Bloomberg News reported. Penson has filed two affidavits in support of the group, which say the IPO would cause “vast harm” to the roughly 2,800 building co-investors. [more]

Grand Central Terminal

At Grand Central Terminal’s centennial celebrations on Friday night, a notable absence was Andrew Penson, the terminal’s landlord, who has remained under the radar despite mammoth investments in New York real estate, the City Room blog of the New York Times reported. Until Monday, Penson, who is known only to a small cadre of New York real estate insiders, hadn’t even been invited to the dinner. He told the Times that he shies away from the limelight. “I don’t look for publicity,” he said…. [more]

More details continue to emerge on the Bloomberg administration’s plan to rezone Midtown East and encourage new office development in the area. The New York Post explained the process developers must endure to unlock the increased floor-area-ratio, and therefore greater building heights, the city is permitting under the plan.

As previously reported, developers would be permitted to build to 24 FAR between Lexington and Madison avenues and 42nd and 46th streets, as of right, and to 18 FAR or 21.6 FAR along nearby swaths. While the “as of right” stipulation means they won’t have to go through the lengthy land-use review process, it does mean they’ll have to purchase each additional buildable square foot from the city.  [more]