Some New York families buy buildings, and some collect them. The Speyers seem to have found a third option: buying the same building twice.
On October 7, Tishman Speyer and The Cooper Union announced that they had finalized a 150-year ground lease and a “revitalization plan” for the Chrysler Building, the 77-story, 1.3-million-square-foot Art Deco tower at 405 Lexington Avenue. According to the announcement, the firm will invest $235 million in the property on top of ground-lease payments to the college, which owns the land under the tower. PSP Investments, the Canadian public-pension investor, is the lead investor in a group of institutional partners, and the deal is financed entirely with equity. In this office market, that is a boast.
Cooper Union says it will use the proceeds to restore full-tuition scholarships. There are worse ways to spend rent from a skyline.
The first time around
Tishman Speyer knows the building. According to the building’s documented history, the firm and its partner Travelers took control in the late 1990s and carried out a renovation from 1998 to 2000, with the architects Beyer Blinder Belle. In 2001 a 75 percent stake went to TMW for a reported $300 million. In 2008 the Abu Dhabi Investment Council took 90 percent, and Tishman Speyer kept 10.
Older readers will remember another detail. The same history records that until 1998 the crown’s lights went dark at 2 a.m., and that Ron Rosenbaum, then a columnist at The New York Observer, persuaded Tishman Speyer to keep them on until 6. Few newspaper columns have changed a skyline. That one did.
The years since were less luminous. In 2019, according to the same account, the tower sold for $150 million to RFR Holding, the firm run by Aby Rosen, and its partner Signa. In September 2024 Cooper Union moved to terminate the lease. RFR went to court, and the lease was terminated in January 2025. Bloomberg Law described the new agreement on October 7 as the end of a chapter in which RFR lost control of the building to its landlord. RFR’s claims and the college’s position were matters for the courts, and nothing in the new deal settles who was right.
What the money buys
The plan follows Tishman Speyer’s usual pattern of capital first and amenities second. The firm says it will prebuild 75 percent of the tower’s vacant space, so tenants arrive to finished suites rather than raw floors. That is now the standard Midtown pitch to companies that would rather not hire their own architects.
The investors also say something about how the family does business now. Fifteen days after the ground-lease announcement, Commercial Observer reported that Tishman Speyer and Bouwinvest, the Dutch real estate investment manager, had formed a separately managed account for U.S. office investments, with the Chrysler Building as its first holding. “The Chrysler Building is a fitting first investment for this mandate,” Robert Wagenaar of Bouwinvest told the paper. Nate Shanok of Tishman Speyer said that, together, the partners “see attractive opportunities.”
Put plainly, a family firm founded on its own balance sheet now mostly manages other people’s long-term money: Canadian pensions, Dutch institutions and, from the 2008 deal, Abu Dhabi. The Speyer name stays on the door, and the capital comes in from around the world.
West Side story
Tishman Speyer is not only polishing old landmarks. On October 2, Commercial Observer’s Lois Weiss reported that Sony is in talks to anchor 99 Hudson Boulevard, a planned 48-story tower of about 1.256 million square feet. According to that report, public documents set a construction start of December 1, with occupancy around 2030. Nothing has been signed. Talks are talks, and the West Side has seen anchor tenants come and go before. Still, a family that is reworking a 1930 tower on Lexington and courting a Japanese conglomerate for a new one on the Hudson is making a clear bet on Manhattan offices.
The family firm
The firm was founded in 1978 by Jerry Speyer and Robert Tishman, and its holdings have since included Rockefeller Center. Rob Speyer is the son of Jerry Speyer and Lynn Tishman, so both founders are his family: one is his father and the other his maternal grandfather. He worked as a reporter at the Daily News before joining the firm in 1995, became sole president and chief executive in 2015 after sharing the role with his father, and since 2022 has been co-chairman of the Partnership for New York City. That role has lately put him in the political news. The New York Post reported on his donations to Governor Kathy Hochul and on a pointed letter to the Partnership from James Dolan, the Madison Square Garden owner who is backing the Republican nominee, Bruce Blakeman. We cover that in a separate dispatch this week.
At Lexington and 42nd, the story is simpler. The Speyers restored the crown once, let it go, and have now signed on until the 22nd century. The scholarship students at Cooper Union will benefit from that, and so will anyone who looks up after midnight and finds the lights still on.
Featured image: The Chrysler Building, seen from the Empire State Building in October 2023. Photo by Jakub Hałun via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0.
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