Demolition Opens the Site
Crews have taken the 350 Park Avenue site in Midtown East. Scaffolding and blue netting cover three buildings: the 30-story midcentury tower at 350 Park Avenue, the 23-story building at 40 East 52nd Street, and the five-story structure at 39 East 51st Street. Many windows and facade panels have come off. New York YIMBY reported interior gutting likely well underway.
Site signage names Waldorf Demolition as general contractor. The signage lists an anticipated demolition completion around March 2027. Our Town photographed the block in July 2026 and reported nearly half the block scaffolded between East 51st and 52nd Streets. The property measures 53,000 square feet.
Vornado Realty Trust paid $1.2 billion for the three buildings, per the developer's City Council slide deck as read by Our Town.
Height, Area and Cost
The replacement tower reaches 1,414 feet across 64 stories. It yields 1.8 million square feet of Class A office space with capacity for 6,000 employees. Foster + Partners designed it. Vornado Realty Trust, Rudin and Ken Griffin are the development partners. Citadel and Citadel Securities take at least 850,000 square feet as anchor tenants. Griffin's Citadel bought a 60 percent stake in the project, Our Town reported.
Two story counts stand in print. New York YIMBY published 64 stories on July 7, 2026. Rudin's own project page describes a 62-story tower.
Cost lands at $4.5 billion. Completion is targeted for 2032.
Financing and Approvals
The project uses $150 million of air rights bought from St. Patrick's Cathedral and St. Bartholomew's Church. The cathedral sale closed at $98.4 million in December 2023. The church sale closed three months later at $53.3 million, per the same slide deck.
The developer also committed a contribution to the city's East Midtown Public Realm Improvement Fund. New York YIMBY reports more than $35 million. Our Town's reading of the slide deck states over $30 million.
The Uniform Land Use Review Procedure opened in mid-March 2025. The City Council approved the special permits on September 25, 2025, by a 48-0 vote.
The Design Programme
Seven rectangular, glass-clad volumes stack with rounded corners and step back toward the west. The lower four setbacks carry landscaped terraces. The final three form the tiered crown. The lobby rises 40 feet.
The ground plane carries 16,000 square feet of retail. A cafe sits along East 51st Street. A restaurant sits along East 52nd Street. Field Operations designed a 12,500-square-foot public plaza that runs the length of the property. Sidewalks on both cross streets widen by 5 feet. Our Town reports a public concourse along Park Avenue with open corners, seating areas and trees.
What the Build Means for Nearby Hotel Assets
Midtown East hotels enter the construction years from a soft position. PwC's Manhattan Lodging Index for January to June 2026 records Midtown East occupancy down 3.6 percent in the first half. Manhattan-wide occupancy averaged 80.7 percent, down 1.7 percent. Manhattan ADR rose 6.3 percent. RevPAR rose 4.5 percent.
Manhattan office leasing reached 17.7 million square feet in the first half of 2026, up 12.6 percent year over year. Office vacancy fell to its lowest level since the third quarter of 2021. PwC links office recovery to corporate travel and midweek hotel demand.
Four new hotels opened in Manhattan in the first half and added 1,328 rooms. The Kimpton Ashbel New York accounts for the Midtown East addition. IHG Hotels & Resorts opened it on April 30, 2026 at 70 Park Avenue, with 205 guestrooms in a Beaux-Arts landmark built in 1928 as the Doral Park Avenue Hotel.
A 1.8-million-square-foot office tower places 6,000 workers inside the Midtown East room market. Two effects follow for owners within walking distance. Weeknight corporate demand gains a tenancy base of 6,000 workers. Construction crews, consultants and demolition trades add interim room demand across the 2026 to 2032 window.
No source reviewed for this article quantifies either effect for a named property. Owners and operator groups hold the booking data that would.
PwC flags stricter zoning as a risk that carries delays and cancellations for the development pipeline. Its reading places supply growth behind demand growth. Hotel Post will report the steel start, the topping-out date and the occupancy date as the developers release them.