Jonathan Green’68 Leads Rockefeller Group
Real Estate Firm
Contributes to Skylines
in New York City
and Shanghai.
By Rebecca Rhodin
Photography By David W. Coulter
Jonathan D. Green ’68 doesn’t have to go far in search of job satisfaction—he just takes a little detour past 
a skyscraper he helped build.
“You can drive by your building,” he says of his career detour
away from work as a real estate lawyer. “You can’t drive by your
bond offering.”
President and chief executive officer of the Rockefeller Group commercial real estate corporation, Green takes pride in contributing
to a city’s skyline.
“I liken building a 40-story skyscraper with planning a military maneuver,” says the former history major, Navy diver, and graduate of New York University Law School. “There’s the architecture, the engineering, the leasing, decorating, all the details. It’s very complicated, but intellectually stimulating.”
Rockefeller Group is perhaps best known as the onetime owner of Rockefeller Center in New York City, including Radio City Music Hall, which it sold to a group of investors in 1997.
Now a part of Mitsubishi Estate Co. Ltd. of Japan, the company owns nearby landmarks the Time-Life and McGraw-Hill buildings,
as well as properties in Florida, California, and New Jersey.
A Manhattan native, Green joined Rockefeller in 1980 as an
assistant vice president and real estate counsel.
Most exciting, he says, are Rockefeller’s prospects in China, where it is helping rehabilitate sections of the city of Shanghai and may eventually build “something on the skyline” of the scale of Rockefeller Center.
“You should see Shanghai—it’s bustling,” says Green. “They’re also building a whole new city across the river. Shanghai wants to be one of the cities you’d say in the same breath as London or New York, a really dynamic place.”
He finds both pressure and satisfaction in being beholden to shareholders and more than 10,000 employees.
“You feel that everything that happens is your responsibility, but
you have to get over it. It’s not good for your mental health!” he comments. “At the same time, it’s very rewarding. There’s a lot of
pride in accomplishment.”
One event he’s particularly proud to have been involved in is the merger of Rockefeller into Mitsubishi in 1997, which required the meshing of the Japanese consensus-based culture with the American spirit of risk and entrepreneurialism.
“We’ve created a wonderful rapport. If we hadn’t been financially successful, it would have been hard to come to a cultural success,” Green says. “But we shared a lot of ideas, shared people, and ways of doing things, and it was very exciting, this challenge of adopting to change.”
Other accomplishments loom as he looks out the car window at the octagonal office tower at 180 Maiden Lane in Lower Manhattan, for which he served as the developer’s lawyer, and at 745 Seventh Avenue, world headquarters for Lehman Brothers. Then, there’s 444 South Flower Street in Los Angeles, the setting for L.A. Law.
“When the kids were small, I used to try to impress them by
pointing out buildings I had been involved with,” says Green. “But
they were singularly unimpressed. On the other hand, Rockefeller used to own Radio City. Good seats at the Christmas show—they found
that impressive!”
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