Olympia

Olympia & York Developments Ltd., the world's largest real estate development company, whose office towers have altered skylines in New York, London and throughout Canada, filed for the equivalent of bankruptcy protection in a Toronto court last night after three months of negotiations with lenders collapsed, bankers and other people close to the company said.Olympia & York would be the biggest company ever to file for bankruptcy protection in Canada. Analysts and bankers have long expressed a fear that if the company was forced to file for bankruptcy, the world's financial and property markets would be roiled.

TORONTO -- Embattled Olympia & York Developments Ltd., declaring itself cash-poor but asset-rich, called on its bankers yesterday to defer interest and principal payments on billions of dollars of debt over the next three months.It also chose Gerald Greenwald, a former Chrysler executive, as its new president to lead it through a restructuring.The highly secretive real estate company, the biggest commercial landlord in North America, held an unprecedented meeting with representatives from nearly 100 banks in a hotel ballroom here.

Olympia & York Developments Ltd., the debt-laden Canadian developer, failed yesterday in its attempt to get a syndicate of banks to agree to extend by one year a $450 million loan that comes due today.Olympia & York also indicated yesterday that it had enough cash on hand to retire the portion of a $300 million commercial-paper program that matures today. The $300 million program was used to finance the Exchange Tower in Toronto.The company had been trying to get the bank lenders of the $450 million loan to agree not to seize the loan's collateral, Scotia Plaza, a 68-story tower in Toronto's financial district.

TORONTO -- Representatives of Olympia & York Developments Ltd., the holding company for the financially troubled real estate empire of the Reichmann brothers, met with about 20 of the company's largest lenders yesterday and asked the banks to roll over the hundreds of millions of dollars of debt that will mature in the next 10 days, the company said.Olympia & York has been caught in a cash squeeze that has left it unable to repay or refinance enormous amounts of real estate debt coming due this year.

OLYMPIA, Wash. -- Oysters from the beds of Puget Sound have been an exalted Northwest delicacy since the 1850s, when San Francisco gourmets paid $20 a plate to eat them. The best-known ones are Olympic oysters, critters too small to be enjoyed on the half-shell, customarily served already shucked in a big glass bowl so that you can gobble up dozens at a time.One of the most famous ways to eat "Olys" is in an omelet called a Hangtown fry. Served up and down the West Coast, and even in some fancier kitchens in other parts of the country, a Hangtown fry enfolds a couple of handfuls of oysters that have been quickly fried to crusty succulence, and is usually garnished with a few strips of crisp bacon.