Stephen L. Green

Origins and early life

Stephen Lawrence Green was born on 28 January 1938 and lived in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, until he was ten, when his family moved to Nassau County on Long Island; his father was a lawyer and landlord, his mother a teacher, and his younger brother, Mark Green, became New York City's first public advocate.

Work and career

He is Jewish, and he played for the United States at the Maccabiah Games in Israel, which are open only to Jewish athletes, in 1985 and 1989, winning a bronze medal in squash in 1985. He graduated from Hartwick College in 1959 and from Boston College Law School in 1962, then spent five years as a trial lawyer, including at Vinson & Elkins in Houston. He then ran an import-export business, a travel company that chartered airliners for ski holidays, and waterfront development on Siesta Key in Florida, before coming back to New York.

In 1980 he founded SL Green Properties and began buying older, underperforming loft and office buildings in Manhattan, renovating their lobbies, facades and shared spaces to compete with newer towers. In 1997 he took the company public as SL Green Realty, the first real estate investment trust to focus solely on New York City offices, and he was both its chairman and its chief executive until 2004. He handed the chair to Marc Holliday in January 2019 and became chairman emeritus of the company that bears his name, whose buildings include the One Vanderbilt tower.

Recognition

A keen squash player since the nineteen-seventies, he has given since 1990 the prize money of the men's draw of the national singles championship, which carries his company's name. He also joined the board of StreetSquash, a youth programme in Harlem, and made the lead gift for its SL Green StreetSquash Center, which opened on 115th Street in November 2008. In April 2023 US Squash gave him its President's Cup for decades of support for the sport and its young players.