Midtown Is Still Empty, and Landlords Are Sounding the Alarm

The 61st-floor terrace of the Chrysler Building, the Jazz Age wonder of the New York skyline, is studded with massive steel eagles. On a misty October night, Aby Rosen, the German-born investor who’s redeveloping the building, leans against a railing beside one of the birds. It’s beginning to drizzle, but Rosen, who has long white hair and alert blue eyes, is in an ebullient mood.

He points out the other landmarks near his own landmarked building, which his company, RFR Holding LLC, purchased last year with Signa Group, an Austrian real estate investor, for $151 million. There’s the statue of Mercury in his winged helmet welcoming travelers to Grand Central Terminal, the Beaux Arts gateway to the city for commuters from the northern suburbs. Rosen gestures to the jagged summit of One Vanderbilt, the neighborhood’s latest skyscraper, to be joined in a few years by JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s princely new headquarters, under construction nearby on Park Avenue.