Can Larry Silverstein’s Heir Apparent, Marty Burger, Rise to the Occasion?

Mr. Silverstein envisions a future in which Mr. Burger will oversee the company’s overall operations while Mr. Lieber will focus on particular projects, including, perhaps, large-scale developments that the firm is planning in China.

And so late in 2011, after two years with the company, Mr. Burger was promoted to co-chief executive of Silverstein Properties, a title he now shares with Mr. Silverstein. It is expected that in a little more than a year, Mr. Silverstein will shift to the role of chairman, handing the top spot in the firm solely to Mr. Burger. The move will cap Mr. Burger’s ascension to power at one of the city’s top real estate companies, but it will be poignant, too, marking what is perhaps the end of one of the great careers in New York City real estate.

“Larry is 150 percent aware of everything that we’re doing,” Mr. Burger said. “But he does like to spend time on his boat and with his grandkids, and I think there’s a certain point we reach where any of us would want to focus on those things.”

The challenge left for Mr. Burger is how much and also how fast he can put his own mark on a company whose business has been tended for so long solely by the hand of its founder. For now, Mr. Burger is focused on a pipeline of projects he inherited from Mr. Silverstein: finding financing for a large Four Seasons Hotel and residential tower that the company wants to build in Lower Manhattan, more residential development on the West Side and lending the company’s construction expertise to various projects around the world.

Though he rose through the ranks of the real estate business at big-name firms, Mr. Burger is not a man without a sense of individuality and vision. In Las Vegas he founded and ran his own real estate company after leaving Related, a firm called Artisan Real Estate Ventures. But his plans to develop were stymied there by the recession.

“He had his own firm and he thought long and hard about stepping away from that,” Mr. Fascitelli said.

China would appear to be key to his ambition. There, he says, he is working on developing a project that will be twice the size of the Time Warner Center, the large mixed-use tower he helped finance and build in the early 2000s when he was at Related.

“It will be Time Warner’s five million square feet times two, with a seven-level retail base in a city that has 33 million people,” Mr. Burger said. “Whatever is happening there in terms of an economic slowdown, it’s still a train that’s moving. They have 1.4 billion and there’s tremendous demand, there is a growing middle class that is so brand conscious and wants American and European products. Silverstein Properties is a name there that has been well received.”