Vornado CEO Steven Roth told analysts on August 4 that the partnership behind 350 Park Avenue is close to a $3.3 billion construction loan, debt he said “would likely be the largest single-building construction loan in city history.”
What it funds is a 1,600-foot, 62-story, 1.9 million-square-foot tower designed by Foster + Partners. It will stand roughly 200 feet taller than the JPMorgan Chase tower, making it the tallest building in Midtown. Total project cost is $6 billion.
The ownership structure is the story
Ken Griffin’s Citadel will hold 60%. Vornado takes 36% by exercising its ownership option, expected to close in September. The Rudin family holds 4%, earned by contributing its existing Park Avenue building to the site.
Citadel and Citadel Securities have expanded their committed lease from 850,000 square feet to a full million. Griffin also personally extended a $400 million bridge loan to Vornado to keep the project moving. The partners are weighing a sale of a 25% stake to help cover the $6 billion, according to The Real Deal.
Strip away the names and this is a build-to-suit financed by its anchor tenant, at a scale the market hasn’t seen. The single largest risk in speculative office development is lease-up, and here the majority owner is also the tenant taking a million square feet. That’s how a $3.3 billion construction loan gets underwritten in 2026.
Why a lender says yes to this and not to the building next door
Roth gave the market case on the call. Vornado’s New York office occupancy climbed from 84.4% in the first quarter of 2025 to 92.2% at the end of June 2026, and Class A vacancy across New York now sits just over 6%.
That’s the bifurcation everyone in commercial real estate has been describing for four years, finally expressed as a number. There is no single office market. There’s a trophy market that’s tight and a commodity market that isn’t, and capital has stopped pretending they’re the same asset class. Top floors at 350 Park are expected to ask around $350 per square foot.
Demolition of the existing buildings on the site is already underway.
What it means for the trades
A 1.9 million-square-foot supertall on a constrained Midtown block is close to a decade of work for the New York building trades, and it lands alongside a run of Grand Central-area towers already in the ground, including BXP’s 343 Madison Avenue. Concrete, curtain wall, elevators and electrical capacity in that submarket are all being bid against each other right now.
There’s a political subplot too. Griffin previously threatened to move jobs to Miami after Mayor Zohran Mamdani publicly went after him over a pied-a-terre tax. Committing to the largest construction loan in the city’s history is a fairly unambiguous answer to that question.
The loan hasn’t closed. Roth said “near,” not “signed,” and $3.3 billion of construction debt has a way of taking longer than the last quarter of an earnings call suggests.