David Greenbaum, Dean of our faculty, operates our New York office business, where we own 13.4 million square feet of office space at an incredible average price of

$175 per square foot.⁽³⁾⁽⁴⁾ David has spent the last years harvesting values for us by growing rents, year in and year out:

The New York office division contains 800,000 square feet of street retail in the base of our office buildings. David shares responsibility for leasing this space with Sandeep Mathrani, who runs our retail business. Sandeep has responsibility for an additional 500,000 square feet of Manhattan street retail. In total, we own 1.3 million square feet of street retail in Manhattan (and that's not counting Alexander's square footage) which, considering our assets in Penn Plaza around Macy's, around 14th Street, around Bloomingdale's, on Madison and Fifth Avenues, and now in SoHo, may be our single best business.

David reports that the tide has definitely turned in New York. Tenants are once again expanding in the city, and in our buildings, i.e., Federated Department Stores added another floor to its New York headquarters space at Eleven Penn Plaza this year, as did Rainbow Media, and on and on. Another great moneymaker is dealing blocks of space that become surplus as a result of mergers, relocations, etc. For example, MONY merged with AXA, rendering 289,000 square feet at 1740 Broadway surplus. We will report in the Second Quarter the deal that David did: AXA will pay $52 million to cancel this lease that we believe is some $10 below market. Same story with Arista Records at 888 Seventh Avenue and Health Insurance Plan at 7 West 34th Street and on and on, year in and year out.