Old Westbury Gardens in Old Westbury, N.Y. (Source: Flavorwire)

JDS confirms West 57th Street project will be 900 feet tall, making it Manhattan’s third tallest residential tower. Shake Shack coming to Grand Central Terminal, after long struggle involving lawsuits and evictions. Donald Trump helps sets up crowdfunding website to compete with Kickstarter. Twenty mansions Jay Gatsby probably would have owned: PHOTOS. Prospect Lefferts Gardens brownstone in contract for $1.85M, which would be highest-record sale. Read these stories and more after the jump.

Commuters watch the launch of John Glenn’s Friendship 7 spacecraft, February 20, 1962. (Credit: NASA photo)

Grand Central Terminal, an icon that is as quintessentially New York as the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building, celebrated its centenary today. See photos after the jump.

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]

Marc Holliday

Office landlord SL Green has picked architecture firm Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates to design its forthcoming office tower project near Grand Central Terminal, the Wall Street Journal reported. The building is planned for a stretch of Madison Avenue between East 42nd and East 43rd streets. SL Green acquired the lot at 51 East 42nd Street last December.

SL Green and KPF officials declined to comment. Despite SL Green’s choice of an architect, the project may not break ground until years from now. A number of approvals await, and there may not be enough demand for the office space. [more]

A rezoning proposal from the Department of City Planning has architects and developers eager to make changes to Grand Central Station and its surrounding area, the Wall Street Journal reported. The DCP plan would rezone the Grand Central area to allow for new office towers, in exchange for a required donation from developers to make infrastructure upgrades that could include building additional access points to Grand Central’s subway platforms and a pedestrian mall on Vanderbilt Avenue.

Thus far, three architecture firms have been asked by the Municipal Art Society of New York to submit proposal to redesign the area — their designs will be unveiled at a conference tomorrow. [more]

From left: LPC Chairman Robert Tierney and Penn Station then and now.

Fifty years ago tomorrow, when Penn Station was heralded as an architectural masterpiece, a group of protestors who went by Agbany, or the Action Group for Better Architecture in New York, gathered outside the station’s entrance to protest plans for the new station, which New Yorkers use to this day. Both developer Irving Mitchell Felt and the Pennsylvania Railroad razed the structure the following year to replace it with Madison Square Garden, a hotel and an office tower. [more]

From left: Thomas DiNapoli and the Grand Central Apple store opening

State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli’s promised audit of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s lease agreement with Apple at Grand Central Terminal revealed the sweetheart deal he expected to find, according to the New York Post.

DiNapoli discovered that — after negotiating with Apple for more than two years — the MTA required that bidders for the former Metrazur restaurant space front $5 million to consummate the lease. That was a benefit to the cash-rich technology manufacturer, according to DiNapoli, who said in the report set to be released today that “the competitive process followed by MTA … was at a minimum severely slanted toward Apple.” [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]

While a new pedestrian plaza near Grand Central Terminal has grabbed the headlines this week, it’s really just a small aspect of a widespread rezoning of Midtown East to which Mayor Michael Bloomberg is reportedly pinning his legacy.

Bloomberg News reported that the Department of City Planning presented the mayor’s preliminary vision for the rezoning, which is aimed at encouraging modern office development in Midtown East, to Community Board 5 yesterday. [more]

The Apple store in Grand Central Terminal

The somewhat controversial Apple store in Grand Central Terminal is proving a wise decision, as revenue at other retailers in the station has been boosted, the New York Post reported.

Tenants have averaged 7.5 percent higher profits, the Post said. “I’ve yet to hear a negative [about Apple’s presence],” Nancy Marshall, Grand Central Terminal’s development director, told the Post. “The tenants couldn’t be happier.” [more]