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

by Gross, Michael

  David Rozenholc can’t recall if the Zeckendorfs ever returned the $48 overpayment on the rent for the Essex House condo. But he spoke to Herb Sukenik several times before he died. “He seemed . . . ,” Rozenholc starts, then pauses. “He had no complaints, but he should have been happier. But some people who should be happy may not be.”

  For his part, Michael Grabow still bears a grudge: “He promised to take me for a drink, but he never called me again.”

  In summer 1999, the architecture critic Paul Goldberger, who’d taken his byline to the New Yorker two years earlier, penned a review of 515 Park. Under the headline “A Touch of Crass: The retro look gone wrong,” Goldberger castigated the building as “particularly ungainly . . . weirdly gangly . . . clunky” and “a pretentious muddle.” Whether the Zeckendorfs took his barbs seriously or not, the design of 15CPW seems to address each and every one of them. But the Zeckendorfs and many, if not all, of the architects they worked with on the building say they didn’t really create it. Its zoning did.

  That is false modesty. Even before the Zeckendorfs bought the block, SLCE’s Jim Davidson “personally built a little model just to show them” how he and Peter Claman had “jacked up the tower,” Davidson recalls. In their original conception, the tower and base on the Broadway side both followed that wide boulevard’s diagonal orientation. The developer-architect collaboration really began that day. Will Zeckendorf ripped the paper tower off the model and reoriented it parallel to Central Park West. “I understand why you want it that way,” Will said, “but your views are looking northwest into the Century.”

  “So I dutifully cobbled it back together,” Davidson continues; his client had a point. Meantime, Claman was at work on the interiors, a secret that would later cause bruised feelings at the firm. “Peter was responsible for the layouts, pre-Stern and prepurchase,” says a senior figure at SLCE. “He [Robert A. M. Stern] added a diddle here and a nuance there.” Davidson doesn’t exactly contradict that, but he offers a more generous perspective: “I am not a starchitect. I just design a building and go on to the next one. They needed a signature architect to help move the product.” So, as soon as they knew they owned their block, the Zeckendorfs set out to choose one.

  Even before closing on the purchase that August, the Zeckendorfs had launched an architectural bake-off to decide who their signature architect would be. They interviewed five: Robert Arthur Morton Stern, of course; Rafael Pelli, who’d done the earliest work on the site, and his father, César, who’d just completed One Beacon Court, a mixed-use luxury condominium in east midtown that contained the latest iteration of Le Cirque; Daniel Libeskind, who’d just gained worldwide notice for his design to replace the destroyed World Trade Center; Hugh Hardy, architect of the restorations of Radio City Music Hall, Bryant Park, and several Times Square theaters; and finally, a sentimental choice. James Polshek’s first job after graduating from Yale was working for I. M. Pei and Big Bill at Webb & Knapp. But Polshek suspects the Zeckendorfs included him only as a courtesy. At a meeting with Will and Arthur “it was obvious within ten minutes that the chemistry was no good,” he says. All were given SLCE’s massing design and told to stick to it, but elaborate upon it as they saw fit. And all were told “to be closer to classic,” says Arthur Zeckendorf, “to the Dakota, the San Remo, residential.”

  The Zeckendorfs were disappointed by Hardy, a classical architect they had high hopes for, whose ideas they deemed indifferent and uninspiring. Libeskind proved “too out there,” says Will, and it wasn’t easy to communicate with the architect, who was then struggling with the fraught politics of the World Trade Center site. So Stern and the Pellis were asked to prepare more elaborate proposals, for which they were paid. Arthur, who calls himself both an admirer and a friend of César Pelli’s, says his firm’s design was beautiful, “in the I. M. Pei category. But he had too much modern in it. It was a little too Time Warner. But Stern came up with an amazing scheme. They probably put the most time in on the project. We had never really used Bob before and we were dazzled, just dazzled.”

  Stern shared Arthur Zeckendorf’s passion for the great buildings of the golden age of New York apartments. “I’ve been studying New York apartment houses for a very long time,” says Stern, including all the buildings that obsessed the Zeckendorfs. “They are houses in the sky,” he says. “I like the term ‘apartment house.’ It gives it a more residential character.”

  But no one was building anything like the white-elephant co-ops of the golden age anymore. At least, not until the late 1990s when the Zeckendorfs were developing 515 Park and a competitor, Steve Ross of Related, hired Stern to do something similar, albeit at a less prominent address, Sixty-Fifth Street at Third Avenue. “It was not an important or desirable location,” says Stern. “But it was a Park Avenue–type building.” And, he says, it set a new price-per-square-foot record for apartments east of Park Avenue. Stern liked it so much, he bought and designed an apartment for himself there.

  When the Zeckendorfs called, Stern was already familiar with their site and had spoken to Edward Minskoff about it. “I knew what Pelli would do,” he says, “and I knew what I wanted to do—the kind of building it turned out to be. The Zeckendorfs wanted to do something exceptional. Their necks were stuck way out because they’d paid so much for the site.” Stern knew that Pelli’s office would offer serious competition, but he liked the direction in which the Zeckendorfs seemed to be going. “I’ve always argued you could go back to go forward,” he says. Using what architects call punched windows in a masonry building instead of a sheer glass-curtain wall, for instance, would seem to be retrograde. “But we were able to convince all concerned that a wall with punched windows could still provide a sense of openness to the park and enliven the façade,” Stern says.

  Stern’s presentation in the bake-off was close to the building that stands today, including its most notable features: the motor court to the south and the garden to the east between the two wings, the cupola atop the reception pavilion, and the asymmetrical roof line of the taller building. “Most buildings are remembered for their skyline features or their street-level features,” he says. Stern also rejected a notion floated by SLCE and Will Zeckendorf in their preclosing concept drawings: three separate lobbies, one each for the house, the tower, and the small number of comparatively budget-priced apartments on the lower floors of the Broadway building. He replaced them with two lobbies connected by a long corridor with one concierge stationed at Central Park West and another off the motor court, and thus solved one of the biggest challenges the Zeckendorfs faced, making the tower apartments seem as valuable as those on Central Park West, by making them all Central Park West apartments.

  Inadvertently, perhaps, this created something quite uncommon in luxury apartment houses. Most have a tightly defined population; they remain, to a great extent, the little clubs of the nineteenth-century creators of the first cooperatives. Unusually for one of the city’s most desirable buildings, 15CPW approaches a democracy, and not only because it holds two hundred apartments, but because of the wide range of their value. Its richest residents ride the four main elevator lines but get to push buttons set apart from the others beneath the engraved word PENTHOUSE. The poorest, in those inexpensive apartments on the Broadway base that lack Central Park views, have a separate elevator bank that serves only the “back of the bus.” But their segregation isn’t absolute; their owners and occupants get to share the lobby, the restaurant, the health club, and the screening room with the gods above. At Millennium Tower, the richest rode their own elevators from their own lobby. Intentionally or not, Stern and the Zeckendorfs chose more inclusive symbolism.

  Symbolism, too, was in the choice of material for 15CPW’s skin. Its limestone exterior was a rejection of the preceding decade’s paradigm of glass houses. Richard Meier’s towers in Greenwich Village—with their floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the much-traveled West Side Highway—suited a time when the rich and famous put themselves on d
isplay, saying, “Look up at me,” from their mountaintops. Stern’s 15CPW harkens back to the 1920s, when the wealthy lived in worlds of their own and developers built apartment towers on Manhattan’s Gold Coast that resembled block after block of impenetrable fortresses. After the stock market cratered in 1929, those limestone châteaus seemed remarkably prescient, as if their architects had foreseen the need to protect those who’d created the crisis and exploited it for their own gain, and even the ones who merely survived it intact. The message sent by 15CPW’s stony skin is “Look if you like, but you won’t see much.” Once again, the mountaintop is cloaked in a protective shroud.

  After rejecting a precast-stone façade like the one at 515 Park and flirting with the idea of a brick exterior during the bake-off, Stern proposed that the two wings instead be dressed from street to roof in limestone. Arthur Zeckendorf was pushing for limestone and had even compiled a book of photographs of all the important stone buildings in New York. That told Stern they were of like minds, though he was not seeking to make a sociocultural point. He saw limestone as the solution to the challenge of the “transitional” block: ignore the buildings to the immediate south. Just as Donald Trump had rejected a Columbus Circle address, Stern was convinced the new building had to reject any architectural or visual association with the roundabout and identify north, instead. Time Warner and the Trump International were “the glass world,” he says. “We were the stone world.” Although the Zeckendorfs had briefly considered a front building covered in masonry and a Broadway tower in glass, they couldn’t help but agree and abandoned that schizophrenic notion. Stern’s “design captured Will’s and my vision for the site,” says Arthur.

  By September 2004, the Zeckendorfs were meeting with Stern’s staff twice a week. “Monday and Friday or something like that, and if we left them on a Friday, they would do fifty versions of the cupola or the gate to the motor court by Monday,” says Will. Stern’s office would build and then rebuild models. Look-through models. Life-size models. “We’d walk through the lobby like it was Disneyland,” says Arthur, “and see the wood and the columns and the texture. By March of ’05, everything you now see was pretty well set. We didn’t change our minds. We made no changes. For developers, the kiss of death is changing your mind.” They were single-mindedly setting out to build the best building they could, one deserving of the site for which they’d spent a fortune.

  Unassuming as they appear, the Zeckendorfs harbored a huge ambition: to build the consummate residence of its era. That wasn’t the mind-set at Goldman Sachs, however. They wanted profit, that’s all, profit, profit, and more profit, to turn Big Bill Zeckendorf’s family phrase about real estate value: location, location, location. So Goldman wanted Will and Arthur to rethink the limestone, which was not only a symbol of the brothers’ ambitions, but also of how their interests sometimes diverged from those of their partners.

  Goldman’s jitters were evident moments after the purchase of the block, when it quietly sold off about half of its share of the deal. “It was a big check,” says Jerry Karr, “so we decided we would lay off part of the equity.” Hotel companies had called immediately, expressing interest in the site, as did one of the “travel clubs” that rent luxury residences to tourists. Goldman rejected their overtures, but they helped convince the development team to add hotel-style services to their building.

  Victor MacFarlane, the chairman and CEO of MacFarlane Partners, a real estate investment manager for institutional investors such as the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS), the largest pension fund in America, already had an interest in Columbus Circle, having bought just under half of the retail condo and a portion of the office section of the Time Warner Center from Related and Apollo Real Estate in 2003, when those developers were looking to reduce their postconstruction risk and refinance the property. “That was before everyone knew it would be a success,” says MacFarlane, who invests in urban centers. MacFarlane had been a silent partner in Related’s bid for the Mayflower block. “Steve [Ross] wouldn’t go beyond” a certain number “and got outbid,” MacFarlane says. “We provided most of the capital. We really liked the site, and in retrospect, we should have paid more.”

  Immediately after Avlon declared a winner, MacFarlane called Goldman Sachs. “I got the sense they’d always assumed they would sell down [their share of the deal],” he says. “They were prepared to go forward if no one showed up, but they were happy to sell it down.” He says he “paid what they paid” and also tried to buy some of Eyal Ofer’s share but was spurned. “Ofer proved to be right,” he adds, laughing. “It wasn’t like they needed us.”

  To Goldman’s Stuart Rothenberg, it was all about risk management. Everything is a gamble, and there is always an argument for taking your chips off the table. “At the end of the day, we created the right balance,” he says. He has no regrets. “I never regret anything that makes a profit.” All concerned agreed that MacFarlane and his backers at CalPERS would have no operating input. There were already enough cooks in the kitchen. But Goldman wasn’t finished with its sell-down.

  Goldman’s Justin Metz had approached Madison Capital, another real estate investment and operating company specializing in urban retail and mixed-use properties, before the sale and asked for an opinion on the retail component. In January 2005, in concert with one of its equity partners, Fortress Investment Group, Madison offered to buy the retail component, and Goldman sold them a 49.9 percent share for more than $50 million. Though the retail space was already effectively designed, Madison retained “major decision rights,” according to a principal, and oversaw leasing with Will Zeckendorf.

  Though they hoped to lease it all to a single entity and talked to both Nordstrom, the department store, and Topshop, the British fast-fashion chain, neither bit, so they quickly made a deal with Best Buy for a large store on the ground floor and two basement levels and slowly added other tenants, finally filling the majority of the retail spaces in late 2009. Despite the time it took to lease the retail stores, the Madison principal considers the decision by Goldman Sachs to downsize its risk “a smart strategic play.” He says, “They wanted the Zeckendorfs focused on selling apartments, not retail.” According to another party to those transactions, clauses in the deals with both MacFarlane and Madison gave Goldman Sachs a rising share of the realized profit if sales in the complex exceeded expectations. Profit, profit, profit.

  Unfortunately for the Goldman team, the Zeckendorfs’ laser focus on creating a building of great quality, aided and abetted by their chosen architect, meant still more, not less, investment. “An entire building of limestone?” asks Eyal Ofer. “Limestone is expensive, so the façade of the building [caused] great discussion. ‘Why are you putting limestone on a forty-three-story building when the visual effect on the driver or the walker is only up to the second floor?’ The limestone was adding a heavy toll.”

  With Ofer on their side, the Zeckendorfs “really pushed hard with the partners,” says Arthur. “Goldman was not that enthusiastic about spending the money, but Eyal certainly was a major supporter of the limestone.” Large buildings, they and Stern knew, are civic gestures as well as financial plays. When they occupy visible parcels and will be looked upon for decades by millions, the developers have a responsibility, albeit one rarely shouldered, to carefully consider the urban context. That is not easily quantified on a spreadsheet.

  Nonetheless, an economic, not an aesthetic, argument finally won the argument over the use of limestone. The Zeckendorfs showed Goldman that by constructing the exterior of two-inch-thick limestone attached to precast, eight-inch-thick concrete panels, as opposed to using standard concrete blocks covered with brick (with a gap in between), the building’s walls would be several inches thinner, so “you actually picked up square footage inside the apartments,” says Arthur. The panel system also costs far less time and money than hand-laying stone one piece at a time.

  Two quarries were capable of producing it. One was i
n Oolitic, Indiana, which most famously provided the stone used for the Empire State Building. The other, in Anamosa, Iowa, uses the local penitentiary as a sort of showroom (“the best-looking prison you’ve ever seen in your life,” says Arthur), but is better known for the Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. The quarried stone would have to be shipped to Canada to be embedded in the precast panels before another truck ride to 15CPW. Still, it surely wasn’t lost on Goldman Sachs that unionized New York City construction workers laying a block of stone at a time would be more expensive.

  Nonetheless, Goldman did not simply acquiesce. “Some people write a check and say, ‘Send returns,’ ” says Goldman’s Jerry Karr. “We’re involved day to day, in planning, in construction, and we do the financing. We’re very hands-on investors.” The limestone was “an eight-figure decision.” Even after Goldman’s two equity sell-downs, further expenditures required the approval of the bank’s investment committee, which has a fiduciary responsibility to safeguard client money by keeping a close eye on costs. Fifteen’s costs were setting records. So the tug-of-war over the limestone went on and on.

  It didn’t help that a faction on the investment committee hated the deal. “Nobody lived on the West Side,” says another Goldman executive, Alan Kava. “Nobody got the West Side.” They were convinced no one rich would want to live there. A London-based banker led the skeptics. “If you’re not living and breathing in New York City, you don’t get it,” Kava continues. “I pounded the table, and at the end of the day, we went along. I’m convinced it added to the building’s cachet.” Jerry Karr says the Whitehall team also advocated eliminating five thousand salable square feet on the second floor to enlarge the lobby for the same reason. But limestone wouldn’t be the last point of contention between Goldman and the Zeckendorfs.