“My biggest problem was to call my wife,” Lurie says, returning to that moment in the sales office. “I didn’t intend to buy it, but when I saw, I knew, it had to be a wonderful investment.” Tamara said he was out of his mind for spending $14.2 million on real estate in a few hours. “I’d stormed Arab legionnaires. I’d trained Idi Amin. My parachute burned in midair. I’m used to living dangerously. But this was such a good cause, I knew I couldn’t go wrong.” Time has borne out his wisdom, as the apartments have soared in value. “It has a momentum all its own.” But he has no interest in selling. “Today, never!” he says emphatically. “Tomorrow? Maybe. The time to sell will be dictated by circumstance. But right now, I can think of nothing better than this.”
Fifteen’s Israeli, Arab, and Muslim population is fascinating, but what’s more noteworthy is how many Jewish households the building contains. It marks a significant moment in New York’s social history—the first time a self-selected Jewish building has become the city’s most desirable. That more than anything else makes Fifteen Central Park West a symbol of America at its most inclusive, even if it’s been half a century since “polite” anti-Semitism fell beyond the nation’s pale.
At this writing, in fall 2013, several new buildings are rising in Manhattan, some containing apartments that have reportedly gone into contract at $95 million. But none is likely to surpass another of Fifteen’s achievements, its masterful conjuring of the illusion of a perfect convergence of international wealth leading to ever-increasing resale value. “It is what it is,” says the émigrés’ lawyer Edward Mermelstein. “New York is an anomaly. Fifteen is an anomaly.” As opposed to an anathema.
Within those Jewish 15CPW households, there is the Israeli cluster, a neocon cluster, a hedgie cluster. There is also a cluster of initial purchasers who left the Soviet Union in the 1970s and came to America in flight from religious discrimination, long before oligarchs such as Dmitry Rybolovlev and Valery Kogan flew in for the sake of their capital. Hedgies may be Fifteen’s most powerful tribe, but that first wave of Russians may be its most admirable.
“We all came with nothing, with zero,” says Dr. Alex Mikhailov, owner of a chain of dental clinics, who paid $7.9 million for the most expensive of the Russian Jewish apartments, unit 34C. “This is the land of opportunity.” Refugees from Soviet Russia—a spectacularly crumbling, bumbling, oppressive country—choose condos because co-op boards “are like party leaders,” says Alexander Rabey, a retired manufacturer of complex computer controllers, who left Moscow in 1973 and bought unit 15G for $4.725 million. “If you want to learn what socialism is, buy a co-op.”
They can laugh now, but their stories aren’t funny. “It’s not easy when you come with nothing,” says Faina Bitelman, who bought 27B with her husband, Leon, for $5.7 million. “We were running away.” Owners of an online diamond retailer that grew out of a jewelry shop they opened in 1980, soon after arriving, they had to rent the apartment out to afford it, but Faina was determined to own it. She’s wanted to live on Central Park since the day she arrived in Manhattan.
“What I do, I do the math,” she says. “I have researched real estate all my life. I knew that when we closed, the value would double. It’s an American dream and I pray to God every day for this country, honestly. People think people got lucky, but we didn’t have days off for years and years to come to the point we were able to buy stuff for ourselves. Looking back, I don’t know how it happened. It’s a miracle. I understand we are not like everyone else in the building. Some people make much more money. I didn’t buy there to pretend to be wealthy. It was my dream, to come to that place. And I made it, yeah.” In 2013, she and Leon even started renovating, preparatory to finally moving in themselves.
Mike Tsinberg, who lives with his wife, Faina, in the $2.5 million apartment 7L, was born in Ukraine and studied electrical engineering in a Moscow suburb. He filed for an exit visa (“the only way out if you were Jewish”) while still in college, but since he’d been exposed to military technology, it was denied. “Which meant my career was finished,” he says, because he could no longer be trusted. “There’s only one company—the government.” Still, he reapplied every six months, nine times in all.
Unable to secure legitimate employment, fearing the draft (military service would have set the immigration hurdle even higher), and without income, he formed a construction crew and went village to village seeking jobs for cash. “I had to learn quickly how to build gas stations.” In the cold Russian winter, when construction ceased, Tsinberg repaired TV sets.
Mike describes his Moscow-born wife as a socialite, but like him Faina “didn’t know anything about life in the US, in civilization,” she says. But a friend, a Bolshoi ballerina, “knew a little bit” and “always wanted to get out. So I thought about my children.” Mike had been lucky to go to school at all. “I got amazing results in physics,” he says. “You had to be many levels above average compared to non-Jews. I felt gifted but I knew I could not use it. I was set for mediocrity.” Their Soviet passports made their status clear. “They said nationality: Jewish.”
Semyon Friedman, who bought apartment 6G for almost $3.5 million, can still remember his evacuation to Kazakhstan in a cattle car during World War II. German planes attacked it. Afterward, he moved to Kiev, where Semyon’s extended family lived in a damp, two-chamber basement with holes cut in its wall for air, sleeping on the floor together.
In 1948, Friedman’s father was sent to the gulag, a Siberian labor camp, “for nothing,” as best as his son could tell, and his mother, a seamstress, supported the family, in part by doing “what was considered a crime,” he says, “buying kilos of black pepper, packaging it in the evenings, and selling it at a Sunday market.” That won her ten years in the gulag in southern Ukraine for the crime of speculation. So at age fourteen, Semyon had to get a job in an electrical shop by day, but he spent his nights in school. “Then, thank God, Stalin died,” he says. His parents returned, and miraculously, Semyon was allowed to enroll in a technical institute near Rostov-on-Don, where he studied chemical engineering. Graduating fourth in his class, he should have gone on to a PhD program, but as a Jew he was denied entry. Instead, he had to take a three-year job wherever the government sent him. He was glad to get an assignment to a chemical plant making synthetic fiber in a Moscow suburb.
His second year at the factory saw him elected chief of a group of young engineers, infuriating their boss, who expelled him, allowing a return to Kiev, where a friend arranged a similar job at another chemical factory, but the KGB man who ran its personnel department refused to hire him until the chief of engineers insisted—and then made him a manager. He met his wife, Janna, a professor of biology and chemistry, worked for his PhD at night, wrote a thesis on chemical filtration, was promoted to chief of the factory’s research lab, and finally, through Janna’s father, who had an influential job at a political institute, was appointed a professor at Kiev Polytechnic. “It was the time of the ’67 war [between Israel and its Arab neighbors], a bad time for Jews,” he says, “but I was accepted because I was a worker.”
Janna’s mother had been a music teacher in Kiev until 1953, when “the Jews were all fired from the school,” Janna says. Nonetheless, Janna followed in her mother’s footsteps. Only one Jew was allowed to study music each year at their local high school, and Janna won that slot, then another for the one Jew allowed into the best music conservatory in Ukraine. “I was very lucky,” she says. “A great Jewish conductor lived in Kiev and he got to choose one student.”
They know that under the circumstances, they had a charmed life. “We had respect,” says Janna, “we had a car.” But still, she wanted to leave. “We are good parents and everywhere it was ‘No Jews.’ ” Semyon disagreed, but Janna kept arguing they had to go. They had friends in Israel and arranged to be invited there, a necessary condition for an exit visa. But that invitation, though repeatedly sent to them, never arrived. Finally, a friend managed to slip it into a diplo
matic envelope. “We hid it until we started to breathe again,” Semyon recalls. “A couple of months.” His department head begged him to stay. “Guarantee my son can study here and I will,” Semyon replied. “Go,” his boss answered glumly.
Finally, the Friedmans got permission to leave—and followed a well-worn path. Semyon went first and Janna followed with their children. They took a train to the Ukraine border with what was then Czechoslovakia, where it was known that the midnight stop would last only fifteen minutes. So before reaching the border, the passengers organized teams to pull luggage out windows. Then, the departniks queued up in lines that lasted three days as all were carefully searched. “They were looking for gold,” says Semyon. From Bratislava they went to Vienna, where they were meant to continue to Israel, but that was only a pretense for many, who dreamed only of America. For the Freidmans, that meant a turn to Rome and then on to Baltimore, where they had relatives.
Mike and Faina Tsinberg followed a similar path, despite his fear that his scientific background would cause the Soviets to keep them imprisoned. Fortunately, Soviet computer systems were rudimentary at best and couldn’t talk to each other, or so Mike suspects. “Our file surfaced on some bureaucrat’s desk, and my wife has a lovely smile and she smiled and it worked,” he says. Next stop, Vienna, allegedly en route to Israel, but instead they spent a few weeks in Rome and arrived in New York with their ten-year-old and “not a word of English,” Mike says. “A Jewish agency supported us, but wanted us to work,” so he got a minimum-wage job repairing security cameras while learning English, commuting from Washington Heights atop Manhattan to far-off Princeton, New Jersey, and repairing TVs on the side. Their daughter’s first American birthday was celebrated on a table made of a door laid across two suitcases and covered with a bedsheet. But once he learned enough English to write a résumé, he got an $18,000-a-year engineering job. “I thought I was the richest man in the world!”
Janna and Semyon Friedman learned English, too; she opened a music school for the growing Russian Jewish community in Baltimore, and Semyon became the first Russian to teach at Johns Hopkins University. But just as the local Russian community had helped them, he felt drawn to help those who followed. “At the time, only one hospital in Baltimore would accept immigrants,” he says, “and nobody spoke Russian.” A Russian doctor who’d won a license to practice begged him to help her set up a clinic. A lawyer whose children studied music with Janna did the paperwork. The Friedmans’ children handled billing. By 1995, the clinic was so busy, Semyon quit teaching to run it and then opened more. Today, he owns a chain of fifty clinics in Maryland and Virginia.
After several years in the Connecticut suburbs, Mike and Faina Tsinberg set two new goals in 1983: to move to New York City and to find Mike a job with better opportunities. Philips Research offered him the latter, and they managed the former, barely, when they rented a house on the northernmost street in the Bronx neighborhood of Riverdale. Philips, the Dutch electronics company, was running scared; Japanese manufacturers dominated their field. Mike’s group was charged with inventing a new standard for better television. His suggestions led to a job as senior research manager, and for six years “I invented like no tomorrow,” he says, winning more than thirty patents as he, effectively, invented high-definition digital TV.
In 1990, he was poached by Toshiba, which had a joint venture with Warner Bros. and “had to invent something,” Tsinberg says, “to justify the investment.” A researcher in his new lab had found a replacement for the videotape, recording a two-hour movie on a CD-size disc. “It wasn’t totally my idea,” says Tsinberg. “I was part-engineer, part-businessman,” but he created and ran the research group that invented the DVD and DVD players, helped broker a deal with Sony and Philips to ensure a single standard, and launched what became the most successful new electronic format in history in 1993.
“I was forty-four, and I asked myself, ‘What next?’ ” says Tsinberg. “I’d made economic success for others. Maybe I could do it for myself. If I’d been born here, maybe I would have thought of that earlier.” While still working at Toshiba, he founded a new company, Key Digital, to create theatrical equipment for retailers, restaurants, and bars, digital signs for public spaces, home theaters, and, most recently, digital home-appliance-control centers.
Their successes led both the Tsinbergs and the Friedmans to the “open door” of Fifteen Central Park West, Mike says of his move to the heart of Manhattan. “We belong here, in this atmosphere,” says Faina, sitting in the lobby library one afternoon. “We adapted to this very quickly. Everyone says hello. You never see snobs. The people are very, very rich, but you never feel it. A lot of rich people don’t understand other people. Some Russians, they’re like princes, like gods. We came here with three hundred and fifty dollars, five suitcases, and a daughter, so I appreciate everything.”
“It’s difficult not to lose your humanity, especially in Russia, where you can go from zero to billions in a short time,” says Mike, “and not always based on talent. We have an advantage. We understand every detail of what we have. We built it, brick by brick. We went from the Soviet Union to the most prominent building in New York, and it was all created by ourselves. Yes, we have talent. But America accepted us.”
Janna and Semyon Friedman improved their living standard, too, over their years in Baltimore, moving twice to better homes as their children went to college. After getting degrees in law and business, their son even went to work for Goldman Sachs and began to agitate for his parents to move to New York City. He sent them condo marketing brochures, but not until they walked by the 15CPW lot and saw the sign on the fence did they find what they were looking for. “It was the only two-bedroom with a terrace,” says Semyon. “We had no time to consider” and paid a deposit. Though they still commute to Baltimore for work, they began to split their time between the two cities.
Semyon enjoys the fact that, since they sold their penthouse, Sandy and Joan Weill often sleep next door in what had been their staff apartment. “I meet Lloyd Blankfein in the gym all the time,” he adds. After Blankfein’s appearance before a Senate committee, Friedman told the Goldman Sachs boss he worried for him. “Don’t worry,” Blankfein said, laughing.
Janna used to worry, but no longer. “I suffered here,” she says. “I couldn’t understand. I couldn’t drive. It made no sense for us but I thought differently for my children, and step by step, life changed. In the Soviet Union, I thought I had a life. Here is a richer life. I enjoy life more. When I left, I thought it was only for the children, but that wasn’t correct. I did it for myself, also. I was never religious, but when I see what happened, I think, there is a God.”
Some people think that at the right address confers prestige. Some would say Fifteen Central Park West is different, that it’s an address made by names—Sting and Denzel, Weill and Blankfein, Och and Loeb, Kogan and Rybolovlev—and the fame and giant bank accounts attached to them. But the Friedmans and the Tsinbergs, despite their patrimony, their relative anonymity, and the location of their apartments in the lower rear of Fifteen’s tower, may be the soul of the building. They are proof that you need neither billions nor a big name to make an apartment house a home. Proof, too, that New York remains America’s melting pot. And that America, for all its flaws, is still big enough to embrace the world.
* * *
I New York City’s Department of Law did not respond to repeated requests for confirmation that a “sensitive” designation exists.
II The public records of Schecter’s two 15CPW purchases in New York City’s online database are erroneous, he says through his broker, Emily Beare. They indicate that Schecter bought his A-line apartment first—and directly from the sponsors—for $10.5 million, and the B-line second for $8.5 million. In fact, all the principals in the transactions say Schecter bought the A-line unit second, from the Falcone brothers of Florida, after they closed on it. Schecter adds that he paid $18 million for that unit alone. None of the partie
s involved can explain the discrepancies.
III Several years after leaving 15CPW, Rodriguez would be taken down a notch when he was suspended by Major League Baseball over his use of performance-enhancing drugs.
IV Weill appears to have experienced a slow-motion Damascene conversion. In July 2012, he even went on CNBC to advocate the reinstatement of the very same Glass-Steagall-style restrictions on banks he’d once so proudly dismantled. And having done that, he disappeared from sight, making it clear that statement was a comment, not a crusade. In another downsizing twist, he sold his yacht to neighbor Dan Loeb for just over $50 million early in 2013.
V Schecter’s apartment would continue to bounce on and off the sales and rental market.
Epilogue
* * *
A PLACE OF ONE’S OWN
Money can’t buy happiness, but it can make you awfully comfortable while you’re being miserable.
—CLARE BOOTHE LUCE
Eyal Ofer and the Zeckendorf brothers announced their next project together late in 2012, a forty-four-story condo tower near the United Nations designed by Sir Norman Foster. The trio had recently begun selling condos on Gramercy Park and were proceeding with plans to build on the East Sixtieth Street property that drew them together. Goldman Sachs was no longer their partner.
Goldman’s Whitehall real estate funds hit a wall in the financial crisis of 2008, leading to billion-dollar losses—and their closure. But the long-simmering tension between the 15CPW partners came to a head two years earlier, just after Lloyd Blankfein took the top job at Goldman Sachs in spring 2006 and the house building, where he’d reserved a duplex, was topped off that summer. That’s when Lloyd and Laura Blankfein’s architect made a series of requests that led the Zeckendorfs to worry they might all end up in court.
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