House of Outrageous Fortune: Fifteen Central Park West, the World’s Most Powerful Address

by Gross, Michael

  Somehow, despite its spectacular street wall, East Siders still managed to look down on the buildings they viewed across the park. Christopher Gray, the New York real estate historian, parodies their attitude while describing it. “I can’t look at the San Remo as anything other than a Central Park West building,” he says, “a little tacky, a little showy, a different sort of animal.” And the people who lived in those buildings? “I don’t see them as signatories to cotillion agreements. Schirmer? Steinway? A little thin. None of them are in the clubs. Just saying. Sorry!”

  Nonetheless, by 1930, the West Side had developed its own alternate society. “Many Jewish immigrants . . . had achieved prosperity in New York by the late 1920s, and looked from the Lower east side to the Upper west side as a cultural and architectural haven,” Nancy Goeschel wrote in a New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission report on the Beresford. “By the mid-1930s, more than half the residents of the Upper west side from 72nd to 96th Streets were Jewish, and more than a third of these families were headed by a parent born in Europe.”

  The crescendo of building that attracted them provided “a brilliant climax to the last great surge of development activity on the avenue,” the commission said in its report on the Central Park West Historic District. It had truly been a remarkable fifty-two years, from 1879, when Edward Clark dreamed up the Dakota, to the Century in 1931. A great new neighborhood had been created, a real alternative, if perhaps not really a rival, to Fifth Avenue and its younger sibling Park. Instead of denying the primacy of the East Side, Jewish developers and architects such as Roth, outsiders building homes for other outsiders, first affirmed it and then ignored it by creating their own Gold Coast.

  During this last spasm of building, “today’s Central Park West curtain wall developed,” says Andrew Alpern, “but then it stopped dead” as the Depression paralyzed the world economy. From 1931 to 1937 only seventeen new buildings rose in the West Side historic district, compared with thirty-three in the two years just before the stock market crash. Thereafter, development remained depressed. Though one last big apartment house was built just off Columbus Circle, the modernist 240 Central Park South, completed in 1941 just before civilian construction was halted by World War II, it was an exception that proved the rule that residential development after the Depression was mostly limited to the conversion of existing single-family houses into apartments.

  Only two new buildings would rise on Central Park West in the next twenty-five years. So everything stayed the same, including the neighborhood’s reputation as a place for those who were somehow “other” than the East Side’s white, gentile elite. Jewish immigrants, now fleeing Hitler instead of pogroms, continued to arrive, along with intellectuals, the artistic, and the cultured. But in years to come, the denizens of the Gilded Ghetto of the West Side, who mostly clustered on its fringes on Central Park West, West End Avenue, and Riverside Drive, and in a few apartment houses on Broadway and a few blocks of brownstones in between, would no longer set their neighborhood’s tone. The West Side would soon become far more like the Wild West than Edward Clark and his Dakota detractors imagined it to be.

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  I Despite pleas from regulators, the Chase, Chemical, J. P. Morgan, First National, and National City banks, among others, refused to help save the Bank of the United States, which had on its board of directors many of the leading Russian-Jewish developers of the time, including Irwin Chanin, David Tishman, and Joseph Durst. “Many people whispered that the Protestant bankers had deliberately withheld help from the biggest Jewish bank in the country,” Tom Schactman wrote in Skyscraper Dreams, his book about the city’s real estate dynasties dating back to the Astors, Goelets, and Beekmans. “The extent of the damage to the Jewish immigrant builder fraternity was considerable.”

  II In 1890, Eighth, Ninth, and Tenth Avenues would be respectively renamed Central Park West, Columbus Avenue, and Amsterdam Avenue.

  III The Edison Company made a famous film of the fire that can still be seen today on YouTube. That film was later marketed as Firemen Fighting the Flames at Paterson, a much bigger and more famous fire in New Jersey that wasn’t actually filmed.

  Part Two

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  OUT OF ARIZONA

  There has been no trader in real estate remotely comparable to Bill Zeckendorf. As a showman, he makes P. T. Barnum look like a piker.

  —ROBERT MOSES

  “I remember a little bit, during the glory days,” says Arthur Zeckendorf about visiting his grandfather Big Bill. “Going to White Plains, seeing the DC-3, probably one of the first private propeller planes. The Greenwich estate, seventy acres on Long Island Sound. There were peacocks, monkeys. He had a 1955 convertible Cadillac he would drive us around in. We’d stop at the oyster pond and go in and get oysters. It was Disneyland.”

  Arthur William Zeckendorf and William Lie Zeckendorf were hardly the first people to see their grandfather William Zeckendorf Sr. as larger-than-life. An avid self-promoter, “Big Bill” was also hugely accomplished. He left his mark on cities across North America, creating an empire with assets in excess of $200 million controlling real estate estimated to be worth $450 million. He then failed as spectacularly as he had once succeeded.

  In real estate circles, the Zeckendorf saga starts with him, passes through his son and namesake, Bill Jr., whose rise and fall runs eerily parallel to his father’s, before reaching the third Zeckendorf generation, the one that conceived and built Fifteen Central Park West. But the Zeckendorf story is a longer one. It is longer, too, than that of most of the other Jewish real estate dynasties of New York—the Dursts, LeFraks, Milsteins, Roses, Rudins, and Tishmans—all products of the Jewish ghettoes of eastern Europe.

  The family’s story starts earlier, long before 15CPW opened its doors, when Arthur and Will’s great-great-grandfather, another William Zeckendorf, journeyed from Missouri to what was then the Arizona Territory along the Santa Fe Trail, at the head of a train of twelve of the covered wagons known as prairie schooners, filled with supplies for a trading post serving the miners who’d made Tucson a boomtown.

  The Zeckendorfs had come from Hanover, Germany, where many Jews, legally barred from owning land or practicing professions, became merchants to make a living. In the 1850s, the first Zeckendorf came to America, one of the thousands of Jews who began crossing the Atlantic in search of freedom and opportunity. But unlike those who would work their way up and shortly populate New York’s West Side, Aaron Zeckendorf, one of that first William’s six siblings, made his way to Santa Fe to clerk in a store and then opened his own in Albuquerque and Santa Fe, as his brothers slowly emigrated from Germany to join him. William was fourteen when he reached New York in 1856 and, after a few months, joined that wagon train through Apache and Comanche country.

  At nineteen, William joined the Union Army as a lieutenant and fought in the Civil War under Kit Carson. Once he returned from the fighting, his brothers put him in charge of their Tucson outpost. He often had to arrange military escorts to protect their goods from Indian raids. A natural promoter, he publicized a shoot-out with robbers at his store and celebrated the arrival of his supply wagons, as well as weddings, birthdays, and holidays, with fireworks and orations that made him a local character. He was nicknamed Z by the Weekly Arizonan newspaper, which regularly covered his antics. His grandson and namesake would inherit his promotional skills and then pass them on to his grandsons.

  By 1870, William was rich, worth about $125,000 (the equivalent of almost $2 million today), and had added mining and politics to his résumé. His family grew, too. That same year, he had a son, Arthur William, who later gave one of his names to each of his great-grandsons. In 1885 William declared bankruptcy, but that didn’t stop him. He rebuilt his life as one of Tucson’s leading citizens. But his wife longed to return to New York, and in 1887 she and their children did, leaving William behind. After a four-year tug-of-war, William finally sold off all his stock and followed, settling his family
in Far Rockaway on Long Island, where William died in 1906, when Arthur was twenty-six years old. William lived long enough to meet his grandson, the future Big Bill, who’d just been born.

  Arthur William Zeckendorf and his family were among the original residents of the Belnord, the building with a courtyard at Broadway and Eighty-Sixth Street. But as he became a successful shoe manufacturer, he moved his family into a brand-new house in Cedarhurst, a bucolic suburb of New York. Seven years later, in 1917, the Zeckendorfs moved again, into the Dorilton at Broadway and West Seventy-First Street.

  “This was a section of town to which many Jewish families were then moving,” Big Bill, then twelve, later wrote. “The apartments were new, and there was a bake shop or candy store and a fancy delicatessen on every block. . . . An amazing number of people knew each other. On the Jewish New Year it was the custom for the gentlemen and their ladies, in their furs, to walk up and down that part of Broadway greeting their friends.” Though the Zeckendorfs wouldn’t always stay in the neighborhood, neither would they leave it behind.

  Big Bill, six feet tall and nearing his adult weight of 250 pounds, played football after entering New York University in 1922, but dropped out at age twenty to go to work for an uncle who’d become a millionaire in the real estate business. Young Zeckendorf initially managed properties, but wanted to be a real estate salesman and badgered his uncle into letting him rent out an office building he’d bought on lower Broadway near Wall Street. When Big Bill succeeded and his uncle proved unappreciative, he quit and got another job.

  In 1927, Big Bill, just twenty-two, met Otto Kahn, an investment banker, through Big Bill’s new wife, who came from a good Jewish family. Like William Randolph Hearst, Kahn had believed that Columbus Circle would be the next great entertainment hub of Manhattan, and he’d bought most of the block bounded by Fifty-Sixth and Fifty-Seventh Streets between Eighth and Ninth Avenues, just below the circle, hoping to donate it to the Metropolitan Opera for a new opera house. When his offer was refused due to opposition from older families who didn’t think the neighborhood was suitable, Big Bill suggested Kahn sell the plot to a developer who later erected the Parc Vendome, a large apartment house, there. Big Bill made $30,000, “the last big money I would see for some time,” Zeckendorf would later recall. “The Depression had arrived.”

  Zeckendorf and his wife lived in a full-floor apartment on Park Avenue, though he didn’t pay market rent for it; it was subsidized by another wealthy friend he’d helped out in business. The Zeckendorfs’ first child, William Jr., had been born the week the stock market crashed in 1929, and their daughter, Susan, followed in 1931. Through the long economic slump, Zeckendorf made a living as a middleman, renegotiating mortgages, selling off foreclosed properties, and assembling sites for development once the economy improved. But he also liked to live above his means and, as a result, was, as the author Cary Reich once put it, “chronically overextended.” Or as Zeckendorf himself put it, somewhat more colorfully, by the standards of the 1930s “we were affluent, even if often broke.”

  A few years later, Big Bill got his big break. Webb & Knapp, a real estate company, had been founded in 1922 to manage and develop property owned by the New York Central Railroad. Its patrician principals, a Vanderbilt heir named Webb, a real estate broker named Knapp, and the architects John and Eliot Cross, managed some of the best sites in Manhattan. But by 1936, Knapp, Webb, and one of the Cross brothers had died and the company needed new leadership. Zeckendorf had recently sold the firm an office building that needed tenants, and in 1938 it hired him for $9,000 a year to recruit some, and when he was successful, he was asked to become a partner. A lucky thing, since his taste for high living and gambling was costing him $20,000 a year. Then, in 1940, a cousin of the Crosses’ stepped in, too, bringing with him $400,000 in fresh capital, and Webb & Knapp quietly began buying buildings.

  During one such transaction, Zeckendorf had an epiphany: many of the best New York properties were owned by people who, battered by the Depression, were cash poor and would sell valuable real estate at low prices. Banks and insurance companies were simultaneously flush with cash they’d been afraid to invest and were desperate to find safe investments. By ferreting out buyers for cut-rate properties, Zeckendorf could make all three of the parties to transactions very happy.

  Still, the company lacked the funds needed to do big deals. That changed in 1942 when Vincent Astor, heir to the Astor fortune, was going off to war and looking for a company to reorganize his family’s $50 million worth of Manhattan real estate. Old school ties led him to Webb & Knapp, where Zeckendorf, the only partner who was too old to be drafted, was working alone. His proposals for reorganizing Astor’s holdings won Webb & Knapp the job.

  “Overnight,” Zeckendorf observed, it became “the most important real estate firm in America . . . and we immediately, and with a purpose, began moving and dealing in a dozen directions at once.” Three years later, the firm had done twenty-two big-money property deals, buying and selling airports, bus terminals, wharves, oil wells, railroads, golf courses, post offices, retail stores, movie theaters, the municipal jail in Boise, Idaho, and three-quarters of a mile of waterfront and piers in Hoboken, New Jersey. Its net assets climbed from less than zero to more than $2 million.

  By the time his partners came back from the war, Zeckendorf was firmly in charge. “We did it with mirrors,” Zeckendorf admitted, “contacts in proper places, lots of travel as well as travail, a pinch of ingenuity, careful study of the tax laws—and a crystal ball.” Webb & Knapp’s purchases were mostly outside the Manhattan market, which had been overbuilt in the 1920s. But Zeckendorf’s most famous deal of the postwar era sanctified the island’s new position as the capital of the world.

  In 1945, Big Bill was offered eight acres on the East River that had been occupied by a string of slaughterhouses since the nineteenth century. Due to the odors wafting from those cattle pens and meatpacking plants, the value of land around them was almost nil. But the meatpacking companies that owned the properties had banded together and were demanding three to four times the going price for nearby lots. Zeckendorf realized that if he quickly and quietly tied up the slaughterhouse properties, he could then buy up the surrounding real estate for a song, bringing down the average cost per square foot of the whole transaction.I He hopped a plane to South America and stayed there for a month while his minions secretly snapped up seventy-five properties on eight additional acres stretching from Forty-Second to Forty-Ninth Streets, from Second Avenue to the East River.

  As the secret land purchases were being made, Zeckendorf conjured up an extraordinary vision for the property. Inspired by the platform the New York Central had built over its tracks running up Park Avenue, which created not only a new residential zone, but also vast real estate fortunes, he envisioned a two-block-wide, seven-block-long platform upon which he would develop what he called X City. It would have office buildings, an airline terminal with a heliport on the roof, a six-thousand-room hotel, a series of apartment buildings, parking for five thousand cars and new homes for the Metropolitan Opera and Carnegie Hall, all suspended above a floating marina and nightclub and entertainment zone, connected with moving sidewalks and ringed with gardens. It was a quixotic notion, to say the least, but it got him the attention he obviously craved. Soon, Life magazine would describe him as a Falstaffian figure, exuding the scent of the Sen-Sen licorice he gobbled to avoid the big black cigars he preferred, “a big brash man of 41 with a baronial paunch and a temperamental disinclination to do business in amounts less than seven digits” and “a building program that makes Napoleon II seem niggardly and threatens to change the face of New York.”

  Just as Zeckendorf finished his assemblage, he learned the United Nations, then based in temporary quarters on Long Island, was looking for a permanent home and threatening to decamp to Philadelphia or, worse, San Francisco, if it couldn’t find land in New York City. Zeckendorf, knowing in his heart that his X City plan was a publ
icity stunt, saw a way to pull off the greatest of his interconnection tricks. “Marion,” he told his second wife, an actress, “I’m going to put those bastards on the platform,” and profit greatly from his ownership of all that surrounding land. He immediately offered to sell seventeen acres to the nascent UN. But it lacked the funds to pay for it—even at cost.

  Meantime, across town, John D. Rockefeller Jr., the Standard Oil heir, was sitting down for dinner at his home in the luxe apartment house 740 Park Avenue with one of his neighbors and a houseguest, a Belgian diplomat who was the UN’s treasurer. The diplomat told his wealthy dinner companion that if the UN couldn’t raise funds to buy Zeckendorf’s land in two days, it would surely leave town. Conveniently, the Rockefeller family’s favorite architect, Wallace Harrison, had done preliminary drawings of X City for Zeckendorf and was an admirer. So Junior surely knew about X City and that, if built, it would compete with his family’s Rockefeller Center office and entertainment complex in midtown Manhattan. And he objected to an alternative that had been proposed by his son Nelson (who was serving along with Harrison on the city’s UN site committee) to give the UN Pocantico Hills, his own family’s weekend property in Westchester. So Junior enlisted Harrison and Nelson to go to see Zeckendorf.