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

by Gross, Michael

  Asked, finally, how he would describe his own accomplishments, he replies briskly, “What I accomplished can be seen. The buildings are there.”

  * * *

  I Zeckendorf’s gambit had a precedent. A similar maneuver, twenty years earlier, had resulted in the development of Tudor City on slaughterhouse acreage assembled by the builder Fred F. French. Zeckendorf had worked for the broker who helped assemble the property.

  II In 1938, at age seventy-five and in deep financial distress, Hearst named Shearn his trustee, tasked with managing the gradual liquidation of his nonpublishing holdings, which included art, mines, ranches, and other real estate.

  III Readers interested in the full story of the Shearn-Rockefeller-Foy-Zeckendorf quadrille should refer to pages 216–63 of 740 Park.

  IV The Rockefeller family would eventually overrule Nelson, who was Zeckendorf’s champion, and disengage from most business dealings with him. But according to Cary Reich’s Rockefeller: The Life of Nelson A. Rockefeller, it was Zeckendorf, along with Tex McCrary, a debonair PR man, who first put the idea of running for governor of New York in Nelson’s head in 1954. He declined, but four years later, ran for the office and won. He was governor from 1959 to 1973.

  V A few years later, Zeckendorf would reestablish the tradition of fine dining in residential hotels when he lured Sirio Maccioni, the maître d’ of the Colony, a high-society watering hole, to the Mayfair House, to open the first of his famous Le Cirque restaurants.

  VI The boom was kicked off by a ten-year tax exemption put in place in 1975. It applied to any buildings that were begun prior to December 1985. Zoning regulations on the West Side had also been loosened in 1982 to nudge development pressure away from the East Side.

  VII That transaction “signaled the complete end of Rockefeller dominance in New York real estate,” Tom Shachtman wrote in Skyscraper Dreams. “What family or families would now be dominant?”

  VIII They’d inherited money from their grandmother. “It wasn’t a Rockefeller inheritance,” Arthur says, “but it was a respectable sum.”

  Part Three

  * * *

  CONDOMANIA

  “Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she

  With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,

  Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

  The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

  Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

  I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

  —EMMA LAZARUS, “THE NEW COLOSSUS,” 1883

  We ought to change the sign on the

  Statue of Liberty to read, “This time around,

  send us your rich.”

  —FELIX ROHATYN, 1977

  Just when Bill Zeckendorf Jr. stepped out of the big shadow cast by his father, a rival for the crown of New York’s next “Big Bill” crossed the East River and crowned himself the brash new king of Manhattan real estate. He, too, was a “son of,” only his name was Trump and his father, Fred Trump, got his start building small homes in New York City’s “outer boroughs”—only unlike Big Bill Zeckendorf, he never lost his fortune. As a boy, his son Donald began dreaming of crossing the river to Manhattan; like many ambitious young men, he wanted to outdo his successful father. And just like Bill Zeckendorf Jr., he was his father’s opposite, only in Trump’s case, the son was the boisterous, cocky, self-promoting dynamo and the father was quiet, careful, and undemonstrative. At age twenty-seven, in 1974, Trump started looking for the sort of bargains that are often available in a troubled economy—and New York’s, at that point, was catastrophic.

  His smartest early move was hiring Louise Sunshine, a former fund-raiser for New York’s governor Hugh Carey, as his in-house lobbyist. Sunshine recalls meeting Trump when he asked for help getting a Big Bill–Style license plate for his Cadillac limousine bearing his initials, DJT, from New York’s motor vehicle department. With Sunshine’s help, Trump next won the right to develop two freight yards (nine acres in midtown and seventy-six more on the West Side) owned by the bankrupt Penn Central railroad. He also briefly took over a bankrupt hotel Penn Central owned next to Grand Central Terminal. Those Zeckendorf-size deals put him on the map.

  Sunshine recalls driving down Fifth Avenue with Trump in 1975 when he pointed at the Bonwit Teller department store on the corner of Fifty-Sixth Street and asked her to find out who owned it. “That’s the site of our first residential building,” he declared. It belonged to Genesco, a conglomerate; in financial trouble, it was willing to sell Bonwit Teller. Genesco also owned the lease on the ground beneath the store, which had twenty-nine years left to run, and the air rights—the right to build higher than zoning would normally allow—attached to Tiffany & Co.’s next-door headquarters on the corner of Fifty-Seventh Street. Equitable Life Assurance Society, which had helped finance Trump’s Penn Central properties, owned the land beneath Bonwit Teller and was willing to sell it—and provide financing for a new building, too—but only if it could find a partner with a compelling vision of what could be built there.

  “Donald was perceived as a brash young kid with a lot of nerve and boldness but little substance,” says Sunshine. “I thought he was brilliant, a marketing genius, the best teacher I ever had.” Once the deal to buy Bonwit was made, she continues, “we were out to make Trump a brand and begin an empire; we were not just building a building. We were about getting more per square foot than the guy next door.” Or rather, the guy six blocks south. The model for the glitzy condominium he would call Trump Tower was the Greek shipowner Aristotle Onassis’s Olympic Tower, itself built on the grave of a dowager department store.

  Olympic Tower and Trump Tower were both products of a special zoning district created in 1971 to keep the famous Fifth Avenue shopping strip from becoming another Avenue of the Americas, lined with boring, boxy office blocks. The new rules allowed developers to build higher if they included ground-floor retail spaces and pedestrian arcades and to cover a larger percentage of their plots if they included residences above. The technical term for the latter calculation was FAR (floor area ratio), the ratio of the size of a buildable lot—its footprint—to the amount of floor space a developer could erect there. Air rights like Tiffany’s and those of other low, small buildings could be bought and added to the allowable FAR on a neighboring lot. The higher the FAR, the bigger a developer could build and then sell or rent for the greatest return on his (for developers were and are generally men) investment in land and construction.

  Onassis and his partners used the new FAR incentives to put up the first building in New York ever to combine homes, stores, and offices under one roof: twenty-nine floors of condos atop two levels of retail spaces with nineteen floors of offices in between. But more important, it was the city’s first luxury condominium. Even before their formal offering plan was approved by New York State, Olympic was expected to contain the most expensive apartments in the city.

  In mid-1974, Olympic Tower apartments went on sale. Among their unusual amenities were a staff of three dozen multilingual security people, intrusion alarms linked to a central monitoring system, concierges lured from the world’s best hotels capable of booking yachts and jets on a moment’s notice, a business center with telex service and news and stock tickers, when-you-need-it secretarial services, a health club, an international newsstand, twenty-four-hour valet and dry cleaning, a barbershop, short-term office rentals, a three-story-high waterfall in the atrium, and then-uncommon bidets in most bathrooms. With all these tricks up its sleeve, Olympic Tower and the luxury condos that sprang up in its wake were throwbacks to the residential hotels of the late nineteenth century, service-rich establishments where transients might well outnumber full-time residents. Something old had been made new again.

  Prices ranged from $40,000 for a one-room studio to $650,000 for a nine-room duplex penthouse, and many of the most expensive apartments were snapped up before the building was even topped off and formally dedicated
that September. The buyers were three-quarters foreign, which was what Onassis wanted. He’d launched the sales effort with a multilingual marketing campaign. But combining luxe condos, high prices, and foreign buyers was a risky new idea, and the global economic crisis set off by rising oil prices in late 1973 slowed Olympic sales considerably. It didn’t stop them, though. Foreign corporations had already bought a third of the apartments sold; one had taken three. Corporate ownership was generally barred in co-ops. Brokers were agog. They “had no idea what condominiums were,” admits Elizabeth Stribling, then a vice president of a carriage-trade brokerage. “I thought, this rich Greek is crazy. But he thought he could sell them to his jet-set, moneyed international friends, Greeks, Swiss, and South Americans.”

  It turned out he could. All it took was patience. In December 1974, five of six penthouse duplexes had already been sold, four of them for $1.8 million to Adnan Khashoggi, a Saudi middleman often described as an arms dealer. Khashoggi had the designer Adam Tihany cut them up into a master duplex and several guest apartments. The $2 million decorating budget included the installation of a skyhigh swimming pool in Khashoggi’s own pad. “It is a palace in glazed walnut fit for Kubla Khan, lush with vegetation including orchids and roses with no thorns, littered with silver, gold and marble knick-knacks, with ivory tusks, dragons, statues and bronzes, tables inlaid with lapis lazuli,” gushed England’s Observer. The building beneath it was similarly described as a “pleasure dome” and compared to the hanging gardens of Babylon. The Olympic message was finally getting across.

  Not even Onassis’s death in March 1975 could slow the Olympic juggernaut once it gained momentum. A week after the tycoon died, his local partners reassured the market when they revealed that an American conglomerate, a law firm, a Dutch oil-trading company, and two Onassis-family companies had together leased two hundred thousand square feet of the office space in the nearly finished tower. The smaller, remaining spaces were sold or rented to tenants as diverse as a South American bank and the glam-rock star David Bowie.

  When it opened in summer 1975, Olympic Tower was a mini–United Nations with twenty-seven different nationalities represented among its owners; 180 apartments had been sold, a quarter to Latin Americans and only a fifth to Americans. Olympic was considered so successful it had already spawned an imitation, the Galleria on East Fifty-Seventh Street, where a General Motors heir, Stewart Mott, was designing a quadriplex penthouse for himself high above the Europeans who were buying the lower-floor apartments—only 10 percent of its 253 apartments were owned by Americans. What they all had in common was wealth. “People threw money around,” says a former Olympic concierge. “They had astronomical parties. There were no rules. Nobody cared. Look the other way. The rich were in total control.” At least in Manhattan condos.

  Beirut had collapsed, British taxes were rising, Swiss banks were failing, France was unstable, and kidnappings of the wealthy were a growing trend in Italy and Latin America. America beckoned. “To capitalize on the movement to New York,” the Los Angeles Times said, developers had begun “catering to multinationals” leading to the “conspicuous success” of Olympic Tower.

  Donald Trump was one of the few American residents at Olympic. “I lived there for three years,” he says, between 1980 and 1983, in an apartment rented from a foreign investor. “I liked it. It opened my eyes.” One night, he went to a party at Adnan Khashoggi’s apartment and afterward revised his plans for Trump Tower.

  In 1980, Trump had opened the Grand Hyatt Hotel on the site near Grand Central Terminal formerly owned by Penn Central and started demolishing Bonwit Teller. The Grand Hyatt’s style, conceived by his wife, Ivana, was disdained by one critic as overstated opulence. But it was just a dry run for the sixty-eight-story Trump Tower. Architect Der Scutt of Swanke Hayden Connell came up with a design of bronze-colored reflective glass with stepped setbacks starting on low floors near the building’s base, giving its southwestern corner a saw-toothed, ziggurat look. It was an immediate hit, if something jarringly new to New Yorkers, with its eighty-foot-high atrium containing a vertical shopping mall lined with pink marble, brass, and mirrors, filled with music from a piano player and strolling violinists, and guarded by uniformed doormen who resembled the offspring of Buckingham Palace beefeaters and the Wicked Witch’s Winkie Guards from The Wizard of Oz. To the grandees of upper Fifth and Park, Trump Tower was a house of horrors. Little did they know Trump had seen the future, and it wasn’t a Fifth Avenue co-op.

  Appropriately enough, Steven Spielberg, the movie director, was one of the first to move into Trump Tower when it opened in April 1983. His apartment was owned by Universal Pictures. Within three years, all but a few of the 268 condos had been sold for $277 million, more than enough to pay off Trump’s construction loans and generate the estimated $100 million profit he shared with Equitable. Their partnership was also expected to collect almost $30 million a year on rentals of the tower’s office and retail spaces. He’d achieved the highest new-construction prices ever in America: an average $700 per square foot.

  Then and since, the tower has attracted high-profile names: Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie Presley, Elton John, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Johnny Carson, Bruce Willis, Paul Anka, Liberace, Sophia Loren, Dick Clark, and Martina Navratilova. But Trump Tower had more than celebrity firepower. Beginning with the sultan of Brunei, Trump Tower has also housed the powerful, including the Greek billionaires Sokratis Kokkalis and Dakis Joannou; James Dolan, the chairman of Cablevision; the art dealers and collectors Jose Mugrabi and Hillel Nahmad (who owns four apartments); Sid Sheinberg, the former president of Universal Pictures; and banking, chemical, asset-management, and oil-and-gas moguls from the former Soviet Union, Canada, Germany, India, and Iran.

  Trump Tower was nonetheless considered the urban-planning equivalent of the maroon suit with matching shoes Donald had worn when he’d first crossed the river from Queens. Architecture critic Paul Goldberger called Olympic Tower “a huge, banal slab” in order to damn Trump Tower with the faint praise “better, but not by enough.” Both, he wrote, offered only “the glitter of the new.” But none of it bothered Donald. Disdain was already nothing more than confetti in the wind to him. At thirty-six years, his biggest worry was that he’d already peaked. Despite its distaste for his taste, even the New York Times was forced to admit that he’d pushed his way to the front of Manhattan’s sharp-elbowed real estate crowd and earned legitimate comparison to Big Bill Zeckendorf.

  Others soon jumped into the game of building luxury condos for the then-rare sort who wanted to own Manhattan real estate but wouldn’t play the co-op board game. As the Galleria had followed Olympic Tower, so Museum Tower followed Trump Tower. Foreigners “only knew condo living,” says Marilyn Kaye, who worked for her husband’s LBKaye brokerage. “It goes back to Christ.” But New York’s appeal was a large part of the equation, too. It was the post–Studio 54 era, and young Europeans were among the first to see that New York was undergoing a revival but was still inexpensive. Soon enough, locals would follow their lead into the condo market. “A lot of New Yorkers couldn’t get into co-ops,” says Lewis B. Kaye. Adds his wife, “As you got into the more expensive buildings, it got even harder to get in. Women always got turned down. Blacks got turned down. Intermarried couples got turned down. People would say, ‘Don’t even apply.’ It was pointless.”

  The lure of lucre and the success of Olympic Tower were surely behind the Museum of Modern Art’s decision, early in 1976, to erect a condo atop its building on West Fifty-Third Street, two blocks away from its inspiration. It hoped to generate income to erase its annual operating deficits and double its exhibition space. The Argentine-born architect César Pelli was selected to design the new tower, and in mid-1979, the $60 million, fifty-two-story project got a green light. Three years later, construction was ongoing when Museum Tower apartments were finally offered at prices ranging from $225,000 to $4.4 million for a penthouse.

  Before Museum Tower opened, apart
ments had been sold to buyers from twenty countries. “Foreigners above all want to be in the center of town,” observed Brewster Ives, an old-line broker. “They have no interest in going uptown to what you’d call a family neighborhood.” That Museum Tower apartments were relatively small compared to sprawling thirteen-room Park Avenue co-ops proved to be as much a selling point as the $250,000 in art that decorated its minimal marble lobby. These were grand apartments boiled down to essentials for wealthy transients passing through town. But Museum Tower never achieved the glitzy cachet or the high prices of Trump Tower. Initially, apartments there sold for only $450 a square foot.

  That was chump change to Donald Trump, who was doubling down all over Manhattan. When he started demolishing the site of Trump Plaza on Sixty-First Street and Third Avenue in 1981 while Trump Tower was still under construction, it was his first collaboration with the man who would emerge as the philosopher-king of condos, Constantine “Costas” Andrew Kondylis, the most prolific architect of his era in New York, with eighty-six city skyscrapers to his credit.

  Kondylis was born in the former Belgian Congo and studied architecture in Geneva and urban planning at New York’s Columbia University before spending ten years as a designer of housing projects. He emerged in the 1980s as the new fortunes generated by Wall Street during Ronald Reagan’s presidency washed away the last remains of the malaise of the seventies. “It used to be, if people came to the city, they rented apartments to see how they would do,” Kondylis says. If they were successful and started families, they would often move away to the suburbs and be replaced by other young people just starting out. “But suddenly, wealth was being created,” he continues, “the economy grew stronger and stronger, and people returned to the city from the suburbs and decided to buy apartments. They didn’t want to throw money away by renting. And to own a piece of Manhattan was an achievement. There was pent-up demand.” It wasn’t being satisfied by co-ops, which were still desirable but tended to reinforce the idea that Manhattan was a closed society or, as Kondylis puts it, “a WASP city.