When you're operating in the biggest CRE market in the US, it takes a lot to stand out. Real estate acumen, farsighted vision and indefatigable energy are traits shared in common by the key owners and developers in New York City real estate. They also have an appetite for making civic-minded activity a priority. Here, Real Estate Forum takes a look at some icons who have shaped the landscape.

Topping out at just over 1,000 feet tall, Extell Development's One57 will have bragging rights as the tallest residential tower in town when it opens for occupancy. But Extell president Gary Barnett is far from done. He's planning an even taller apartment building, to include a Hyatt hotel and New York City's first Nordstrom department store, a block away. Across town from both projects, a vacant development site that once contained the Copacabana nightclub is now slated for a 56-story, 1.8-million-square-foot office tower to be called One Hudson affiliated with Related Cos.' 26-acre Hudson Yards, although it's not affiliated with Related Cos.' 26-acre Hudson Yards mega-project nearby. And let's not forget Riverside Center, a five-tower, 2,500-unit apartment and retail complex that is scheduled to begin construction this fall on Manhattan's Upper West Side.

Evidently a man who believes in the proverb popularized (or coined) more than a century ago by Theodore Roosevelt—"speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far"Albert Behler maintains a lower profile than, say, Steven Roth of Vornado Realty Trust. Yet since 1991, the German-born president and CEO of Paramount Group Inc. has presided over the acquisition of a trophy office portfolio in New York City and other gateway markets, that now exceeds 14 million square feet. Locally, that portfolio includes 1633 Broadway, one of the 10 largest office buildings in Manhattan; and 1301 Ave. of the Americas, a former Macklowe property acquired from Deutsche Bank in 2008 for $1.5 billion. Behler's profile is high when it comes to industry organizations: he's on the boards of AFIRE, the Real Estate Board of New York and Greenprint, among others.

The second of three generations in the apartment owner/developer company launched by Nathan Brodsky in 1951, Daniel Brodsky joined the Brodsky Organization in 1970. As its managing director, he has overseen a steady pipeline of multifamily developments that now number more than six dozen across Manhattan. The firm will be making its first foray into Brooklyn with Tower 2 of the second phase of the City Point mixed-use complex, even as it continues Manhattan developments in Chelsea and on the Upper East Side. Brodsky's industry leadership—including among other endeavors, his successful push for revision of the 80/20 Rental Housing Tax-Exempt Finance Program—earned him the Real Estate Board of New York's Bernard H. Mendik Lifetime Leadership in Real Estate Award in 2007. In 2011, he became chairman of the board at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, putting him in a tiny club of New York real estate icons who chair the boards of major museums.

"We're very active on Fifth Avenue and streets like that," Stanley Chera, chairman of Crown Acquisitions, told GlobeSt.com, sister organization to Real Estate Forum, in 2009. "The value will be irreplaceable five years from now. We're taking advantage of a very weak market, and we have the equity." The specific deal was the $117-million acquisition of the retail portion of the St. Regis Hotel by a partnership including Crown. However, Chera's forecast generally about Fifth Avenue proved accurate when, in two separate transactions in 2011 and 2012, Crown and partner Carlyle Group sold the retail portion of 666 Fifth Ave. to Spanish retailer Inditex and Vornado Realty Trust for a total of more than $1 billion, nearly double what the partnership paid for the space in 2008.

CEO of what is now Brookfield Office Properties since 2002, Ric Clark passed that title to Dennis Friedrich earlier this year and became chairman of the board. Simultaneously, he was also named CEO of Brookfield Property Partners, a planned spinoff from Brookfield Asset Management. It was under Clark's leadership that BOP, a descendant of Olympia & York USA, greatly enlarged its holdings with the $7.6-billion acquisition of Trizec Properties in 2006 and a $1.4-billion buy of 16 assets that marked its entry into the Australian market in 2010. That Australian acquisition from BOP's Toronto-based parent company, Brookfield Asset Management, also marked a major step in the transformation from Brookfield Properties Corp. into a pureplay office REIT. Locally, BOP is gearing up for Manhattan West, a 5.4-million-square-foot mixed-use project on land it's owned since the O&Y days.

He's frequently stated that his goal is to create "a fully diversified commercial real estate services company" in the manner of Insignia Financial Group, and Andrew Farkas is well on his way. Farkas did it in the 1990s with Insignia, which he founded in 1990 and built into one of the world's three largest CRE service firms by the time it merged with CBRE in 2003. Following the merger, Farkas then formed Island Capital Group, the controlling parent of C-III Capital Partners. C-III is now the proud owner of a group of businesses that extends its reach into commercial mortgage servicing, lending, property management and title insurance. This past January, Farkas and C-III added another arrow to their quiver when they closed on the acquisition of brokerage firm NAI Global.

In late 1996, Steven Roth hired Michael Fascitelli away from Goldman Sachs, where he was in charge of the investment bank's real estate practice. The then-CEO and chairman of Vornado Realty Trust brought Fascitelli on board to serve as the REIT's president and chief growth officer. Fascitelli, who at one time planned to become a civil engineer, has since taken on the CEO title as well. He got there in part by spearheading some of the firm's most ambitious and aggressive deals, including the $647-million purchase of a Midtown office portfolio from Bernard Mendik. Today Fascitelli and Vornado chairman Roth are focusing on making the REIT's portfolio better as opposed to bigger. "Most of our efforts will be directed internally, capitalizing on our non-incomeproducing assets, our redevelopment assets and our development opportunities," Fascitelli said in August during Vornado's quarterly earnings call.

On its website, the Feil Organization cites a core group of principles that are behind its success: diversity of holdings to weather fickle financial trends and climates; low debt to keep capital working for the company and its clients; and extensive expertise to manage and operate its own properties. The lowkey statement of purpose belies the fact that the company has a portfolio of more than 26 million square feet of commercial and retail space around the US. Similarly, CEO Jeffrey Feil has been a key player in some of the industry's biggest deals of the past several years—including the $590-million acquisition of Worldwide Plaza in 2009 and, in Chicago, the $835-million purchase of the Sears Tower in 2004—without making a big deal out of it.

Less prominent a media presence than chairman and CEO Stephen A. Schwarzman, the Blackstone Group's Jonathan D. Gray nonetheless looms large in the private equity giant's real estate operations. The global head of Blackstone's real estate business, Gray joined the firm in 1992 and since then, he's led the privatization of 11 public real estate companies. Valued at an aggregate $100 billion, those deals include Extended Stay America, Carr America, Equity Office Properties and Hilton Hotels. As of this past February, Gray also figures more prominently in the firm's governance, having joined the Blackstone board of directors. The announcement occurred a few weeks after the company reported a 60% year-over-year increase in real estate revenues as part of its 2011 results. At the time, Schwarzman said in a statement that Gray has been "an integral part of the Blackstone fabric for the past 20 years. He heads one of our largest and most successful businesses with the highest standards of excellence and integrity." He added that Gray's insights will be "invaluable as we set the strategic direction for the firm."

SL Green Realty Corp. credits the leadership of Marc Holliday, its CEO since 2004, with growing it into New York City's largest office landlord. The REIT, which Holliday joined as chief investment officer soon after its founding in 1998, holds about 29 million square feet of office space in Midtown Manhattan alone. A sizeable chunk of the firm's current holdings came into the portfolio through the $6-billion merger with Reckson Associates that Holliday sperheaded in 2006. In 2012, he managed one of the largest refinancings in recent Manhattan history as well as one of the biggest leases, both at 1515 Broadway: a $775-million refi through the Bank of China and a 1.4-millions-quare-foot renewal by Viacom that expands to 1.6 million square feet over the lifetime of the lease.

As part of its 65th-anniversary edition in 2011, Real Estate Forum profiled Samuel LeFrak, who developed the massive LeFrak City multifamily complex in Queens. His son, Richard LeFrak, has expanded the LeFrak Organization's portfolio in his own right. He joined the family firm in 1968 and became president seven years later, taking over as chairman and CEO after his father's death in 2003. Over the past 37 years, the younger LeFrak has "rebranded and changed the company," as he told the New York Times in 2009. "We were always known as a kind of provider of blue-collar, middle-income housing stock of New York, [but] we haven't built anything like that in 20-something years." As cases in point, Lefrak has spearheaded the ongoing development of the $10-billion Newport masterplanned community along the Jersey City waterfront, as well as the company's flagship office tower at 40 W. 57th St. in Midtown Manhattan.

At age 46, Leonard Litwin founded Glenwood Management Corp.; the year was 1961. Fifty-one years later, the president and CEO of the luxury apartment developer and manager remains actively involved on a day-to-day-basis in the business he launched, with final say on pretty much everything, Gary Jacob, Glenwood vice president, told the New York Times in 2011. Glenwood's 10 Liberty St. was the first residential building to rise in Lower Manhattan following 9/11, a time when many developers were reluctant to build there. Earlier this year, the Real Estate Board of New York—which has also named a classroom for him at its Bernard Mendik Education Center—honored Litwin as its first-ever Lifetime Honorary Chairman. "The work that he has done for his colleagues and for the city will remain a prime example of excellence and professionalism in the real estate industry for years to come," REBNY chairman Mary Ann Tighe said this past April.

The Empire State Building may have served as the backdrop for two King Kong movies filmed 72 years apart, but it's looking pretty contemporary these days, thanks to an ambitious repositioning campaign spearheaded by Malkin Holdings president Anthony Malkin, son of another icon of New York real estate, company chairman Peter L. Malkin. The iconic Fifth Avenue office tower is the highest profile of a collection of "prewar trophies" in the W&H portfolio supervised by Malkin Holdings, which underwent a makeover that resulted in brokerage firms bringing the company "higher-quality tenants with better credit looking for a well-priced, well-located alternative to class A glass-box office buildings," Malkin told Real Estate New York in 2009. The ESB is also the centerpiece of an energy-efficiency makeover designed to serve as a model for future retrofits—or, as the younger Malkin put it, "an open laboratory from which all can learn." Further, it's the focal point of a planned IPO to be known as Empire State Realty Trust.

Before launching Edward J. Minskoff Equities in 1987, Minskoff made the real estate record books as CEO of Olympia & York. The $350-million acquisition he arranged of eight Manhattan office properties from National Kinney in 1976 stands as the largest private real estate acquisition in US history in terms of present value—the portfolio today is worth 10 times what O&Y paid for it. In all, Minskoff built O&Y's North American office portfolio to more than 43 million square feet before leaving to start his own firm. Within that portfolio, Minskoff was responsible for 16 separate development projects totaling 23 million square feet. Among those was the 7.5-million-square-foot World Financial Center in Lower Manhattan, now part of the Brookfield Office Properties portfolio. Today, Edward J. Minskoff Equities owns and manages four million square feet of office space in Manhatttan. And its founder is aiming for distinction again with 51 Astor Pl., a mixed-use spec tower being developed on land leased from the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science & Art in Manhattan's Union Square submarket. He told a TV interviewer in 2011 that the 430,000-square-foot property "technologically will be the most advanced building built in New York City since the Bank of America headquarters on 42nd Street." It's slated to open in 2013.

A successful stint in the apparel industry led to an even more stellar one in commercial real estate. Joseph Moinian began buying loft buildings in Midtown South and the Flatiron District in 1990; today, the Moinian Group is one of the country's largest privately held owner/ development firms, with a portfolio of more than 20 million square feet across the US, valued at nearly $10 billion. It's also among the few national real estate entities to develop properties in all four of the major asset classes. Moinian saw the potential in Lower Manhattan and the Far West Side years before many of his contemporaries. In the case of the Far West Side, Moinian has been on the scene since 1996, developing a pair of apartment properties long before the Hudson Yards rezoning that made the area a magnet for developers.

What is now the Gotham Organization began strictly as a general contracting firm that was formally incorporated as Gotham Construction in 1931 by the second generation of Pickets. That began changing when Joel Picket took the reins as chairman in 1965; he led the firm's evolution into a full-service real estate firm active in general contracting, construction management and development management, on both its own and third-party properties. As a builder, Gotham Construction is one of the nation's largest privately held construction contractors; it has produced more than 30,000 residential units. Under Picket's leadership, Gotham served as both developer and builder on Harlem USA, a retail and entertainment complex that was the first to bring national retail tenants above 96th Street. Next up will be Gotham West, a four-building, 1,240-unit rental apartment complex on a Far West Side block formerly zoned for manufacturing.

The opening of the Barclays Center arena and the return of a major league sports franchise to Brooklyn—for the first time since Walter O'Malley took the Dodgers west in 1957—are only the beginning at Forest City Ratner Cos.' Atlantic Yards. Its construction long delayed by lawsuits, the mixed-use project is poised to mark another milestone for New York CRE: the large-scale introduction of modular construction to its housing component. Bruce Ratner founded FCRC in 1989 as a subsidiary of the family-owned Forest City Enterprises, developing MetroTech Center over a 15-year period. The 6.4-millions-quare-foot complex helped establish Downtown Brooklyn as the city's third significant CBD after Midtown and Lower Manhattan. In Manhattan, Ratner's projects have included the New York Times Co. headquarters at 620 Eighth Ave. and the Frank Gehrydesigned New York by Gehry apartment tower at 8 Spruce St.

As president and co-CEO of Reckson Associates, Scott Rechler oversaw acquisition and development activities that grew the firm's portfolio of managed properties to more than 20 million square feet across the New York tristate area. Following Reckson's $6-billion merger with SL Green Realty Corp. in 2006, Rechler started over with RXR Realty LLC. Currently its portfolio runs to more than 100 operating properties totaling about 18 million square feet. Since establishing a beachhead in 2009, RXR has grown its Manhattan presence significantly, paying $920 million in December 2011 for the behemoth Starrett-Lehigh Building. Earlier this month, RXR also added 450 Lexington Ave. to its portfolio. Rechler was appointed vice chairman of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey's board of commissioners a year ago.

Chairman and CEO since 1971 of the owner/development firm founded by his father Jack Resnick in 1928, Burton Resnick got into New York commercial real estate straight out of college in 1956. He's been an industry mainstay since then, bringing the office and residential portfolio of Jack Resnick & Sons Inc. to more than six million square feet. Along the way, he's been ahead of the pack on sustainability and the reinvention of Hudson Square—combining the two at 250 Hudson St., where a $40-million renovation of a former printing facility into a class A office building included a 10,000-square-foot green roof. But Resnick is also renowned for his civic-mindedness, a trait he's said has been passed down through generations of the Resnick family.

"Via Verde is a model for what affordable housing ought to be," HUD secretary Shaun Donovan said at the June opening of the South Bronx apartment complex developed by Jonathan Rose Cos. Donovan added that the project "represents architects re-engaging in the design of affordable housing, the best practices for environmentally friendly design as well as the wider concept of sustainability through community meetings where stakeholder voices were heard." His comments could well have been aimed more generally at the corporate philosophy of the green urban solutions firm launched in 1989 by Jonathan Rose. Its stated mission: "Creating green urban solutions as replicable models of environmentally, socially and economically responsible plans, communities, buildings and investments." In 2005, Jonathan Rose Cos. launched the Rose Smart Growth Investment Fund, reportedly the nation's first green transit-oriented acquisition and redevelopment fund. A third-generation developer, Rose is considered a thought leader in the smart growth, national infrastructure, green building and affordable housing movements.

With more than 30 million square feet of vacant office space, Lower Manhattan was at a low ebb when William Rudin was named president of Rudin Management in the early 1990s. He took the submarket—and the family firm, launched in the 1920s—in a new direction, establishing Downtown as a high-tech mecca by converting an outdated office property into the New York Information Technology Center at 55 Broad St. The repositioning spearheaded the Rudin family's role in revitalizing Lower Manhattan and also steered it toward emphasizing broadband connectivity. It's a focus that has since figured in the design of the Rudins' 3 Times Square and 32 Ave. of the Americas. Rudin oversees a portfolio of class A Manhattan office space that totals more than 10 million square feet, along with 20 luxury apartment buildings. Additionally, Rudin Management is gearing up for an ambitious redevelopment of the former St. Vincent's Hospital campus in Greenwich Village. Along with serving as vice chairman and CEO of Rudin Management, Rudin is also chairman of the Association for a Better New York, the civic organization founded in 1971 by his father, Lewis Rudin. His leadership of ABNY is just one aspect of an energetic advocacy of pro-business policy, which he pursues in Albany and Washington, DC as well as City Hall on behalf of groups that also include the Real Estate Board of New York, the Partnership for New York City and the Real Estate Roundtable.

Retail is where Joseph Sitt first established himself, founding the Ashley Stewart clothing chain in 1991 at age 27. The chain looked to serve the urban consumer, a market segment traditionally overlooked and underserved by many national retailers. Among the keys to Sitt's success in this venture was his talent for identifying and leveraging urban real estate opportunities for his stores. By the time Sitt divested his interest in Ashley Stewart and its parent company, Urban Brands, it had grown to more than 380 stores in 100 cities. Since 1998, he has focused his energies on development and acquisition across the major property sectors with Thor Equities. Its portfolio today spans more than 15 million square feet in New York and other gateway cities as well as Mexico City and London. Notable developments under Thor's umbrella include the restoration and redevelopment of the historic Palmer House Hilton in Chicago; London's oldest and most historic indoor shopping bazaar, the Burlington Arcade; and the recently acquired Takashimaya building on Fifth Avenue. Sitt also heads up Thor Urban Property Funds, the Town Residential brokerage service and, in a link to his beginnings, Thor High Street Advisors, which provides tenant representation to retailers seeking premier locations around the world.

Commercial real estate, and New York City in general, were headed for a rough patch when Norman Sturner and Neil Siderow convinced five highnet worth investors to each take a piece of a 31-unit apartment building selling for $140,000. Forty-one years and several real estate cycles later, the scale of the transactions consummated by Murray Hill Properties is considerably larger—reaching nine figures instead of six— but that first buy established a template of acquisitions through limited partnerships, which evolved into setting up LP funds. What did change after that apartment property deal was the firm's focus. Through over 150 transactions totaling more than $10 billion, it's been office all the way. "We like to tell people that at our age, what we've finally realized is that we know what we don't know," Sturner told Real Estate New York in 2008. "And we don't know residential hotels, condo conversions and all that. We know office buildings in New York." Sturner and the MHP team have also demonstrated that they know how to find properties that aren't on the public market and make pre-emptive bids. "A lot of our clients can buy every one of these buildings by themselves," he told RENY four years ago. "They don't need us. And yet they still invest with us, time and time again. We're very proud of that."

In the minds of many in the New York real estate community, Dumbo was just the name of a Disney cartoon elephant before David Walentas put the Brooklyn neighborhood on the map. "For 20 years, everybody thought I was the dumb in Dumbo; now they think I'm a genius," Walentas told the New York Times in 2010. While a good deal of Two Trees Management's development has focused on the Brooklyn waterfront—and will continue to do so, now that the company has moved to take over the stalled $1.4-billion redevelopment of the former Domino sugar factory in Williamsburg—Walentas and his son Jed have also planted projects on the Manhattan side of the East River. Arguably the most dramatic of these is Mercedes House, a ziggurat-shaped West Side apartment complex that will contain a Mercedes-Benz showroom on the ground floor when completed.