Leonard Grunstein Works to Enable Sale of Hotel Pennsylvania

The Hotel Pennsylvania, located across the street from Pennsylvania Station and Madison Square Garden, opened in 1919. An immediate sensation, the Pennsylvania’s 2,200 rooms made it the “largest tavern in the world,” offering guests luxuries such as the “servidor” – a small compartment built into bedroom doors for deliveries; ice water in every room; and a number of private and public cafes, dining rooms and ballrooms.

The 27-story tower was designed by McKim, Mead and White as a complement to the original Pennsylvania Station, which stood across 7^th Avenue until 1963. The firm – established in 1879 by Charles Follen McKim, William Rutherford Mead and Stanford White – was essential in popularizing the Beaux-Arts aesthetic in New York, making its mark throughout the city with buildings such as Columbia University’s Low Library, the Brooklyn Museum and the Manhattan Municipal Building.

Statler Hotels, which had managed the Hotel Pennsylvania since its construction, acquired the property in 1948 and changed its name to The Hotel Statler. Over the years, as ownership changed, the hotel was renamed three more times, finally returning as the original Hotel Pennsylvania in 1992 when Penta Hotels, the owner at the time, filed for bankruptcy.

Six years later, Vornado Realty acquired the property in a $160 million joint venture with Planet Hollywood and Ong Beng Seng, a Singaporean hotel development and investment firm. Within two years, Vornado had purchased the remaining 60 percent stake from both partners, valuing the hotel at $210 million.

Over the years, as Vornado negotiated plans for redevelopment, the Hotel Pennsylvania fell into a state of disrepair. Following strong opposition from the community and local preservationists, the company abandoned plans to demolish the building and replace it with an office tower, choosing instead to renovate the existing structure and invest to make the hotel profitable again.

As a partner at Herrick, Feinstein, Leonard Grunstein helped create the unique financing and tax structures that enabled the sale of the Hotel, as noted above.

Two Park Avenue | Leonard Grunstein

Two Park Avenue is a colorful 29-story tower located between 32^nd and 33^rd streets at the former site of the Park Avenue Hotel. Designed by Ely Jacques Kahn, a prolific twentieth-century architect whose career spanned nearly half a century, the building showcases that era’s signature Art Deco style.

Kahn earned his degree from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1911 and returned to New York where he became a partner in the firm Buchman & Fox (subsequently named Buchman & Kahn) six years later. He specialized in commercial and retail construction, striving to infuse the simplified functionality of loft buildings with classically derived ornamentation.

The loft style, defined by its mix of factory and office functions, was traditionally reserved for garment-related tenants and disparaged by the industry as a basic form of architecture. But Kahn was interested in broadening the market for this type of building so he approached companies that would value form as well as function.

In 1928, he partnered with the artist and ceramicist Leon Victor Solon to create Two Park Avenue. Because the section of the avenue was in a period of transition, the developers asked Kahn to design a building that could be used for either office or manufacturing purposes. So Kahn proposed a building with wide, open floor plans that could be adapted depending on the needs of the business. Inside, it consisted of one million square feet of rentable space to help maximize returns for the developers, while outside, Solon’s decorative terracotta blocks set the structure apart aesthetically from other nearby buildings.

For 25 years, Two Park Avenue was owned by a real estate partnership controlled by Sheldon L. Breitbart, an attorney with offices in the building. Following Mr. Breitbart’s removal as general partner in 1986, the property was put up for sale in a closed-bid auction. The winning bid – $151 million – came from Bernie Mendick, a prominent real estate developer and former chairman of the Real Estate Board of New York. Leonard Grunstein, who was at the time a partner at Herrick, Feinstein, was involved in resolving the matter as a prelude to the sale of the building.