The state, which spent more than $100 million assembling a site two-thirds the size of Manhattan and improving the little-used Orange County facility over the last 16 years, has now endorsed another amibitious idea.
Another Loews Theater, the once popular Baronet-Coronet on Third Avenue and 59th Street, was sold for about $15 million to a developer, Donald Zucker, who is assembling a site for a residential building.
Giving these reasons, the Empire State Development Corporation plans to assemble a site to which it could take title as early as February.
And Mr. Lichtenstein has assembled a site between Fulton and John Streets in Lower Manhattan for a 450,000-square-foot retail-and-residential tower.
James Austrian, the principal of Austrian Associates and a veteran of the property assembly wars, recalls that he once created a fictitious Korean company to conceal his efforts to assemble a site on Ninth Avenue in the vicinity of 30th Street.
But Denis Brodeur was also assembling a Web site about his goalkeeper brother, martinbrodeur30.com, which is scheduled to go live on Friday.
"The story ended up being fascinating to me because it had several different story lines," Carrier said last week in a phone interview from Montgomery, Ala., where he is assembling a Web site for the Southern Poverty Law Center.
"We are going to have the most innovative, most attractive, most interesting-looking building on Broadway," said Bruce Eichner, the head of Eichner Properties Inc., which is assembling a building site on the east side of Times Square between 45th and 46th Streets, where Loew's State Theater now stands.
Currently the company is assembling a web site, due for a test launch in a couple of weeks.
To the north, the Rudin Management Company has assembled a block site between 52d and 53d Streets, running from the Roseland Ballroom to Broadway for eventual use as either a commercial or a mixed-use tower.
Next to its welcome desk, it created a job-search desk, and it has recruited volunteer professionals to review résumés, set up a support and networking group for the unemployed, and assembled a Web site offering the best of its online resources.
