Ken Griffin, Vornado, and Rudin got the green light to build a new supertall office building at 350 Park Avenue.
Photo: Courtesy of DBOX
Ken Griffin loves a real-estate trophy. Over the last several years, the billionaire Citadel CEO set a nationwide price record with his purchase of an unfinished quadruplex penthouse at 220 Central Park South, bought a Georgian mansion overlooking London’s St. James’s Park for $122 million, and has so far spent at least $230 million in Palm Beach on what is poised to become the world’s most expensive home. (Apparently, his mother will live there.) And now, Griffin has a green light to build a supertall office tower at 350 Park Avenue that’s expected to rise 1,600 feet and cost $4.5 billion. Naturally, Griffin’s Citadel and Citadel Securities will serve as anchor tenants. Here’s everything else we know about the megaproject.
A supertall office tower that is, as its name suggests, located at 350 Park Avenue and will span a total of 1.7 million square feet. Griffin’s firms, the hedge fund Citadel and market-maker Citadel Securities, will occupy roughly half of the available space. Per Reuters, Griffin was bullish on the return-to-office mandate back in 2022 but had a problem: He couldn’t find somewhere large enough to store his growing ranks of employees. He apparently decided to resolve the issue by buying air rights from St. Patrick’s Cathedral and St. Bart’s Episcopal Church and building a new office tower that will remake the Manhattan skyline. Extreme? Perhaps, but what’s a billionaire hedge funder to do?
It looks like 350 Park will be a collaborative effort between financial and real-estate Goliaths: Griffin is partnering with Rudin Management and Vornado Realty Trust to develop the supertall. Whispers about the partnership first surfaced in 2019: Vornado and Rudin were in apparent talks to combine their land, with plans for a future tower that could, thanks to 2017’s Midtown East rezoning, reach nearly 1,500 feet. A trio of aging buildings will be sacrificed for the new tower: Vornado’s 30-story mid-century office building that currently occupies the 350 Park address (and where Citadel already leased space); Rudin’s 23-story office tower next door at 40 East 52nd Street, which was previously BlackRock’s headquarters; and a five-story Beaux-Arts building at 39 East 51st Street that Rudin and Vornado’s joint venture picked up in 2023.
Norman Foster’s Foster + Partners is handling the project, making it the third Park Avenue skyscraper the firm has designed in the past 15 years. (The other two projects — the dark, cantilevered 270 Park where JPMorgan is headquartered and the angular, steel-laced 425 Park — were described by my colleague Justin Davidson as “coolly sexy and seductively menacing, like Sharon Stone with an ice pick.”) As for 350 Park, Foster + Partners has kicked around a few different ideas: First, there was a series of sloping trapezoidal glass façades, then came the tower of gridded glass boxes. In 2024, they settled on what appears to be the current (and arguably blandest) design: a staircase of seven rounded glass flutes with landscaped terraces. Griffin is “kind of a perfectionist about beautifully laid-out floor plates,” Nigel Dancey, senior executive partner at Foster + Partners, told the New York Post.
It was a piecemeal process, mainly because the big to-do with this project was expanding the allowable floor-to-area ratio for the building. They accomplished this in part by purchasing the unused air rights from the landmarked St. Patrick’s Cathedral and St. Bart’s Episcopal Church for $150 million (a by-product of the 2017 rezoning). The developers also had to contribute more than $35 million to the East Midtown Public Realm Improvement Fund, and they secured an additional density bonus by guaranteeing some public amenities, including a 12,500-square-foot open plaza that was designed by Field Operations. The City Council unanimously approved the developers’ rezoning application in September, paving the way for construction that’s expected to cost roughly $4.5 billion. What else helped? Per Vornado executive vice-president for development and real estate Barry Langer: “The magic formula to get a tower off ground is to have an anchor tenant and equity partners, which we have in the form of ourselves, Rudin, and Ken Griffin.”
Nope, that title still goes to the One World Trade Center, which with its nearly 408-foot spire tops out at 1,776 feet. Once completed, it will be among the tallest on Park Avenue, though, towering over the newly opened 270 Park by more than 200 feet.
Foster + Partners is pushing the fact that 350 Park will be all electric and also have an “integrated biophilic design” (read: They’re incorporating greenery, so it won’t feel entirely like you’re in a glass cage), plus wellness and town-hall spaces. Also, the firm isn’t shy about touting the building’s neighbors: “350 Park Avenue will be part of a rich urban tapestry, standing alongside Modernist icons such as the Seagram Building and Lever House, Art Deco landmarks such as the Waldorf Astoria and the General Electric Building,” it noted in a news release. But will it have its own signature scent?
Demolition at the site is expected to begin in the second quarter of 2026, with an expected completion date in 2032. But stay tuned, obviously.