Steven Roth
Steven Roth · Economics & Business
Took control of the Vornado retail company in 1980 and transformed it into Vornado Realty Trust, a major owner of New York office buildings; co-founder of Interstate Properties
1941, New York, United States
New York · Hanover, New Hampshire · New Jersey
Vornado Realty Trust1980Steven Roth is recognized among Jewish contributors to Economics & Business — Took control of the Vornado retail company in 1980 and transformed it into Vornado Realty Trust, a major owner of New York office buildings; co-founder of Interstate Properties
Origins and early life
Steven Roth was born in New York in 1941 and graduated from Dartmouth College in 1962, taking a master's degree in business administration at its Tuck School of Business the following year.
Work and career
In the 1960s, with the New Jersey investor David Mandelbaum, he co-founded Interstate Properties, a partnership that bought, renovated and leased strip shopping centres, with himself as managing general partner. He did not found Vornado: the company grew out of Two Guys, a New Jersey discount chain opened by the Hubschman brothers in 1947, which took the Vornado name after buying a maker of electric fans in 1959. Interstate built up a stake of about seventeen per cent in the company by 1979, Roth won a proxy fight for control of it in 1980, and he became its chief executive in 1981.
Convinced that the value of Vornado lay in the land under its stores rather than in its retail trade, he liquidated the Two Guys chain and turned the company into an owner and developer of shopping centres. In 1993 the company was converted into a real estate investment trust, Vornado Realty Trust, and in 1997 it bought seven Midtown Manhattan office buildings from Bernard Mendik, the start of its move into New York office property.
He led Vornado as chief executive from 1981 to 2009 and again from 2013, and in 1995 he also became chief executive of Alexander's, the former department store company whose land included a full block on Lexington Avenue. Roth is Jewish and has long supported Jewish causes: he has served on the board of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, and his family was the principal donor to the Roth Center for Jewish Life at Dartmouth, opened in November 1997 with a Torah scroll given by the Roths.
He served as a trustee of Dartmouth from 2008, received an honorary doctorate from the college in 2012, and is married to the Broadway producer Daryl Roth.
Verify and go deeper with these external references.
Source: International Directory of Company Histories (Vornado Realty Trust); Dartmouth College, 2012; The Dartmouth, 1997; JTA, 2026
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Took control of the Vornado retail company in 1980 and transformed it into Vornado Realty Trust, a major owner of New York office buildings; co-founder of Interstate Properties
Source: International Directory of Company Histories (Vornado Realty Trust); Dartmouth College, 2012; The Dartmouth, 1997; JTA, 2026
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