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

by Gross, Michael

Seeing and raising Donald Trump, Related announced that the complex would have six restaurants, including a steak house by Jean-Georges Vongerichten, even though its building was still a hole in the ground. Though he would depart, as would others, two of the restaurants—Per Se by Thomas Keller and Masa Takayama’s Masa—would gain renown as much for their exorbitant prices as their food.

  The Coliseum started coming down early in 2000, and Time Warner apartment sales began in summer 2001, with penthouses priced from $25 million to $36 million. Related’s sales team touted a unique opportunity to buy new construction with park views, the advantages of hotel living, “and anonymity,” says Susan DeFranca, who ran Related’s sales effort.

  There were two hundred apartments between One Central Park (which has the address 25 Columbus Circle though its entrance was on the decidedly less chic Fifty-Eighth Street), the south tower, and the Residences at Mandarin Oriental (at 80 Columbus Circle) in the north tower. Residents all have access to a private fitness center and pool, and a chauffeurs’ lounge, a 1920s-style amenity. Floor-to-ceiling glass windows that are ten to twelve feet high offer spectacular views of the park and the city.

  All the requisite top-of-the-line finishes and appliances were included, which was no longer remarkable. The odd geometry of some rooms proved challenging, but these were status symbols so their deficiencies as homes weren’t much discussed. Another deficiency in the north tower didn’t become obvious until fall 2003, when it opened. SEE, YOUR VIEWS AREN’T SO GOOD, ARE THEY? read a sign hung from the top of the Trump International, right out the window of the newer building. WE HAVE THE REAL CENTRAL PARK VIEWS AND ADDRESS. BEST WISHES, THE DONALD.

  A dozen contracts to buy apartments in the south tower were signed in the first month; many more were said to have been issued. But then came the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack on another twin-towered New York building—and sales at Time Warner “stopped dead,” says Louise Sunshine, who’d been hired to market the building. “It was an interesting time to be selling a high-rise,” she adds, deadpan.

  Only a dozen more contracts would be signed for south-tower apartments that year, and another four in the hotel, where residents would get Mandarin Oriental services. One of the penthouses in the latter tower quietly went into contract for $29 million in December, sold to the cofounder of Nu Skin Enterprises, a cosmetics company sometimes criticized as essentially a pyramid scheme. That sale set a new Manhattan condominium record, but it went unnoticed in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Much noticed were improvements to the building’s security—including strengthened steel and backup generators for all the elevators.

  The next year, as the two towers approached their halfway point, sales picked up briefly. Twenty-seven south-tower contracts were signed between February and April, and the singer Ricky Martin, movie producer Arnold Kopelson, and Wynton Marsalis, the artistic director of Jazz, were reported among the buyers. But then sales dropped and stayed depressed until well into 2003, when apartments started selling at a regular clip again. “The international market went black in 2001,” says DeFranca. “It opened up again in 2003—one of the biggest votes of confidence in the United States. But the truth is, we had fewer foreign than domestic buyers.”

  An unprecedented publicity and marketing campaign had begun with a June 2000 press conference in a tent erected over Columbus Circle, with CNN’s anchor Bernard Shaw as master of ceremonies and a team of event planners behind the scenes. The terror attack slowed but didn’t stop that campaign. Even during the postattack lull, Related had reason to be cheerful. The building was achieving prices just under $2,000 per square foot for small units and over $3,000 per square foot for larger trophy homes. There could no longer be any doubt: the fortunes of Columbus Circle had changed—and a threshold had been crossed.

  The rebound in sales proved profitable for all concerned. Until it made back its initial investment, Apollo Real Estate Advisors took most of the proceeds, but as the apartments sold and other hurdles were crossed, Related’s share of the profits increased until it got half of every incoming dollar. Some of the profits were returned to the neighborhood: Related paid $1 million to renovate and relandscape Columbus Circle with a new fountain and paving. It was all in service of drawing the public to Time Warner’s commercial atrium, which by early 2003 had attracted a supermarket and more big brands, though not the sort of East Side luxury retailers the apartment owners upstairs might have preferred. Still, it was unprecedented, “the largest mixed-use development in Manhattan,” says Alan Segan, Rubenstein Public Relations’ front man on the project, “the first-ever combination of corporate, cultural, hotel, vertical retail, parking, and residential. The scale, 2.8 million square feet costing $2.1 billion, made it different.”

  More important, perhaps, in giving the complex cachet was the news in July 2003 that David Martinez, a reclusive Mexican-born sovereign-debt specialist, had purchased the largest home in the towers, or rather two homes he planned to combine into a twelve-thousand-square-foot duplex penthouse. It was reported that he’d spent $45 million (or $3,541 per square foot), setting a new record for a Manhattan apartment by topping Stephen Schwarzman’s 2000 purchase of the Rockefeller duplex at 740 Park Avenue for just under $30 million. It was an epochal moment, the first time in recorded history that a condominium had become New York City’s most expensive residence. Braden Keil, the New York Post real estate gossip columnist, who got the scoop, added that Martinez had bought raw space and would spend additional millions to finish it. In fact, he would buy another apartment as well, bringing his total paid to almost $54.8 million and giving him the entire seventy-sixth and seventy-seventh floors of the south tower.

  In fall 2003, the Time Warner Center began its yearlong opening in stages. Even after the February 2004 black-tie gala opening, there were more heavily promoted events to ensure the last apartments would sell. In November, the New York Times ran a story about Time Warner called “Who’s Who, and What They Paid,” revealing that buyers included the widow of the owner of Harrah’s Casino, bankers from Hong Kong and Kazakhstan, several medical entrepreneurs, a Colombian politician, the daughter of the richest man in Turkey, a Saudi royal, and the widow of the Atkins Diet doctor.

  The success of first Trump International and then Time Warner had another epochal effect. “There is still a significant group of Fifth and Park people,” says Pamela Liebman, CEO of Corcoran Group, a large real estate brokerage. “But there’s a limited number of apartments, and not everyone who likes them can pass the boards, so by natural selection some people are forced away and others have opened their minds. Ten years ago, condos were not well thought of. It wasn’t until those worldly towers that people took notice.”

  Sitting in a penthouse apartment at the Mayflower Hotel two blocks north of the Time Warner construction site and just across the street from Trump International, John J. Avlon, a courtly, preppy, horn-rimmed graduate of both Yale and Harvard, was watching the changes on Columbus Circle with particularly intense interest. A second-generation real estate man, he ran a company that bore his name, but a good portion of his and his father’s business lives had been spent tending to the real estate interests of one of the richest families in the world, the Goulandrises. Through Avlon and thanks to him, they owned that entire block, bounded by Central Park West and Broadway, and Sixty-First and Sixty-Second Streets. They’d been sitting on it for years, waiting for just such a moment.

  Born on the island of Corfu in Greece, Avlon’s father, John Avlon, was orphaned in the Spanish flu epidemic after World War I and was a nine-year-old loading baggage onto ships on the island’s docks in 1920, when an American suggested he should make his way to the United States. A few days later, according to his grandson, he stowed away on a ship and sailed to New York, where he was taken in by a Jewish family who ran an insurance agency. Nine years later, he founded a real estate firm, John Avlon, Inc. In 1943, he was the broker on a real estate deal that saw John P. Goulandris buy two buildings on Fifty-Seve
nth Street at (what was then still called) Sixth Avenue in midtown Manhattan, adjacent to another parcel he’d already purchased through Avlon. Today, the 1960s apartment building standing on that property is managed by the second John Avlon. John P. Goulandris was his godfather.

  Goulandris came from the island of Andros, where his family had been shipowners since 1850. Their sailing vessels plied the Mediterranean and Black Sea routes, and in the nineteenth century they were among the earliest Greeks to operate tramp steamships. In 1940, John P. moved the family’s operations to New York, where he founded more shipping lines and diversified into real estate. He was one of four cousins who had the same name and were differentiated by nicknames such as Strauss (that John loved music) and Hirohito (who had vaguely Japanese eyes).

  John P., the one known as Megaleas, Greek for “the big one,” was the eldest of his branch of the family and the founder of the Petros Goulandris Sons Group, which the Chicago Tribune once described as “the crown jewel of the Goulandris empire.” In 1975, it controlled about 130 ships and other holdings valued at $2 billion (the equivalent of $8.7 billion today). The main subsidiary of Megaleas’s company, Orion Shipping, owned almost half of those vessels. When he died of a heart attack in 1950 at age forty-three, his survivors included four brothers, a sister, who was married to another shipowner, and two children. His company is still going strong, run by two cousins, both named Peter, one a son of Megaleas.

  Notoriously private, the large, complex family has cloaked most of its subsequent dealings in anonymity. So the family members who owned what would become the Fifteen Central Park West site are unknown. The business activities of large, wealthy families like theirs tend to be amorphous, with different individuals participating in different deals. Often, their managers and operating partners are themselves unaware of whose money is in play. All that’s certain is that the Avlons have long represented the Goulandris real estate interests and done quite a remarkable job of it.

  In 1969, Avlon went to work as a vice president at his father’s company. New York was in a recession, the best time to buy distressed real estate, and he and his father were looking to do that. “I tend to look at real estate as a very long chess game, whereas most people see it as poker,” Avlon says. “We were always walking around looking for property to acquire. The Mayflower block,” where Fifteen now sits, “is a perfect example that attracted my attention at a very young age.” The block was smaller than most and, due to Broadway’s angle, not a perfect rectangle. And it was something rare, an entire block that fronted on Central Park. From property records, he’d learned that the land had only five parcels and four owners.

  The block had obvious advantages as a potential development site. Standing on Columbus Circle, Avlon looked at the six roads that converged there and felt the rumble of the subway lines beneath his feet. Then he looked up at the statue of the explorer on his column and followed his eyes down Eighth Avenue. In a flash, he realized that Columbus Circle was “the least prosperous” link in the chain of great intersections up and down Broadway. At Harvard, he’d learned that it can take a decade to revitalize a neighborhood. Lincoln Center was approaching its tenth birthday, but the development of its perimeter was still incomplete.

  “The Coliseum was vestigial, badly conceived, and clearly had a finite life,” he says. “Columbus Circle’s possibilities were so large, yet its present fact was so dismal.” He stood there, staring, weighing the possibilities, “knowing it would be a long time” before that changed. “But if you got enough land to develop and you were not in a disadvantageous position, the only risk was that the neighborhood was not so good. So we went for it.”

  Across town at the East Side stockyards, Big Bill Zeckendorf had once done something similar, but there was no secrecy, no ostentatious trip abroad, for Avlon. Within a year, he’d gained control of three of the five parcels. Fortunately for him, the first two of them were in the hands of a single owner. And in 1972, that owner’s world collapsed.

  Seventy-two years after its founding, the Shubert family lost control of the world’s largest theatrical-production company, the Shubert Organization, a collection of almost two dozen entities owned by the Shubert Foundation. It was handed over to three members of the foundation’s board, two of them law partners who’d represented the Shuberts, the third a friend of the family’s. Aside from its seventeen theaters, Shubert also owned a vast portfolio of real estate. But the company had lost money for the first time since the 1930s despite the profitability of that portfolio, and it had declined in value by more than 75 percent from its peak of $400 million.

  In August 1973, Shubert sold both 3 West Sixty-First Street and 1880 Broadway to John Avlon. Four months later, Avlon acquired the Mayflower Hotel from its second owner, the Sherman-Taylor Corp., a consortium of wealthy real estate operators that had owned and operated it since 1946. That sale passed unnoticed, which was lucky for Avlon, as he still needed to buy two more buildings to own the whole lot.

  Meantime, in fall 1977, he demolished 1880 Broadway. Next door, 3 West Sixty-First Street, a seven-story, block-through loft building, was home to Brooks Costume, which had rented theatrical costumes from there since 1952, the Tepper Auction Galleries, and the American Ballet Theater’s school and rehearsal spaces, where the likes of Mikhail Baryshnikov and Gelsey Kirkland still danced. It was emptied in 1979 and demolished the next year. By then, Avlon had acquired 9 West Sixty-First Street, buying the corporation that owned it from three brothers who’d come out of the automobile business and owned vast amounts of West Side real estate. Avlon leased the building for five years before taking possession in 1979 at the request of the sellers; the arrangement helped them avoid taxes.

  The final piece of the puzzle was 1860 Broadway, the big office building on the corner of Sixty-First Street, and it took seven years to get it. He’d been trying to buy it from Philip Lipton, the self-educated immigrant, for years, says Lipton’s daughter Barbara Agar, “but my father wouldn’t sell because at the time he would have had to pay a double tax on it.” She ended up running the building, and her father left it to her when he died in 1976. “I was instructed to sell it to Mr. Avlon,” she continues, “but I was having fun and I wasn’t in any hurry to sell and the price went up.”

  Many meetings ensued as Agar drove a hard bargain, finally giving in when Avlon pointed out to her that if his block was developed without her property, whoever did it could build “right up to our lot-line windows, and no one would want to rent those offices,” Agar says. Avlon was gentlemanly about it, “but he meant it. He backed me into a corner. I didn’t want to sell. But I got him to assume the remaining mortgage and he paid not a lot, but for those days it was as good as it could be.” The sale closed in November 1983, and Avlon finally owned the whole block. He left the Mayflower Hotel standing and operating because it remained a viable business and had tenants in residence who were protected by rent regulations. But in 1986, he took down the two other buildings on the block. He was a patient man with a patient family behind him, so despite the expense of holding on to idle properties, they would wait.

  In 1979, Alexander Godunov had defected to the United States while staying at the Mayflower with the Bolshoi Ballet troupe. That same year, a piece of masonry fell from a building owned by Columbia University on upper Broadway and killed a student. The next, Local Law 10 took effect, requiring that the owners of large, decorated buildings periodically inspect their façades and do so for the first time within two years. Some owners quickly stripped ornamentation from their buildings, which allowed them to avoid that deadline and the potential cost of repairs mandated by the inspections. John Avlon seemed to be one of those. “He did a little cosmetic work on the building,” Arthur Zeckendorf believes. “He’s a crafty, smart guy.”

  In fact, Avlon removed every bit of the terra-cotta ornamentation—pediments, pilasters, and angels—leading Paul Goldberger to joke that the Mayflower should be renamed the De-Flower. Some wondered if Avlon hadn’
t also stripped it to ensure that it would not be included in the Upper West Side/Central Park West Historic District, designated in spring 1990. Its southernmost boundary was set at Sixty-Second Street, just north of the Mayflower. In response to all the speculation, Avlon told the story of a red Volvo.

  Local Law 10 was already in effect when a huge dagger-shaped piece of terra-cotta fell from the Mayflower’s façade, smashing the window of the Volvo parked in front of the hotel. Avlon had the building inspected and found that the ornamentation was “all loose.” Terra-cotta was crumbling and falling off, too. The building was, in effect, exfoliating. So Avlon finished the job and predictable outrage ensued. Then, also predictably, it died down. Regardless of Avlon’s intentions, he no longer had to worry about Landmarks Preservation Commission oversight.

  Another potential hurdle to development was zoning. Under existing law, a new building on Central Park West would have had no height limitation but would have been required to have multiple setbacks and look like “a wedding cake with the mass forced back to Broadway,” Avlon recalls. He thought the prevailing zoning made a mockery of the Central Park West street wall—the harmonious backdrop to city life that architecture provides. There was talk in the real estate community about zoning changes; the first Millennium tower was rising along with unhappiness about its bulk. Avlon got word that New York’s City Planning Commission was considering wide-ranging changes to the prevailing zoning laws and brought the architect Rafael Pelli, César Pelli’s son and partner, into the conversation, arranging for him to meet with the planners to discuss what might be built on Avlon’s block. “He went into high gear to defend the parcel,” says someone close to Avlon.

  Pelli’s challenge was to work with community groups, city planners, and Landmarks all at once and come up with a way to meet a new demand that 60 percent of any future development’s floor area be located below the height of 150 feet. That was a direct response to Millennium’s movie-theater complex, with its high ceilings but low square footage. “Square footage is worth more high up,” where it is enhanced by views, says Pelli. So he suggested lowering the height of the portion of the building on Central Park “to preserve the ability to build taller on Broadway.”