Steve Roth

Chairman and CEO of Vornado Realty Trust, chairman of JBG Smith Properties and board member of Urban Edge Properties.

Roth was born in New York and attended DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx. He graduated from Dartmouth College and the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth.

In the 1960s, Roth established Interstate Properties and purchased a discount retailer named Two Guys, the portfolio of which included a line of appliances called Vornado. Roth shut down Two Guys’s money-losing stores, repurposing their real estate into strip malls, but he kept the Vornado name.

Similarly, Roth became a major shareholder in Alexander’s, primarily for the real estate the department stores were situated on—which Roth wrested control from, among others, Donald Trump.

As of late 2020, Vornado owns or manages more than 19 million square feet of office space in Midtown Manhattan, and is the largest owner and manager of street retail in Manhattan with some 2.4 million square feet.

Nationally, Vornado’s headline office properties include the Bank of America Tower in San Francisco and the 4.2 million-square-foot Merchandise Mart—a.k.a. theMART—in Chicago.

Roth is married to Broadway producer Daryl Roth.