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

by Gross, Michael

  “I think her architect set it off,” says someone inside Goldman Sachs. Alex Antonelli, that architect, rejected Robert A. M. Stern’s floor plan. “I was able to show the Blankfeins how much better it could be by rearranging the staircase, the dining room, and the living room,” he says. Blankfein didn’t like the idea, “but Laura agreed and she was the saving grace. I think she respected me for standing my ground.” So Antonelli met with the developers, who were “clearly giving my client more attention than they would have any other purchaser,” he says, but though the Zeckendorfs agreed to most of his requests, they said he couldn’t move a structural wall that separated the apartment entrance from the kitchen.

  “I don’t know that the Blankfeins expected that,” says the Goldman insider, “but when they were told the building wouldn’t let them do something, they probably asked why and said, ‘Push it.’ The Zeckendorfs got their backs up because the architect, in his zeal to get what he and the client wanted, played every card he could. Very early on, the Zeckendorfs got a chip on their shoulders with respect to that. They’re quirky little guys who want to feel like equals, and when they don’t feel they are, even if they are, it caused not a butting of heads, but a less-than-friendly demeanor.”

  The conversation around the partnership table took a bad turn. “They were all pains in the ass, between their wives and their lawyers,” says a Zeckendorf insider. “Every deal was tough. A lot of jockeying went on. But Lloyd’s apartment was a big to-do, a series of requests, each petty on its own, but cumulatively, they were enormous in number and scope.” Moving that wall “couldn’t be done without impacting other units and causing delays and possibly extra charges from the general contractor. They would have said ‘Screw you’ to anyone else but they tried to accommodate them.” Finally, the Zeckendorfs tried to contact the Blankfeins directly, but they were “walled off. It was frustrating, difficult, and driven by the wife.” Blankfein appeared to do nothing to curb her.

  Laura Blankfein’s sense of entitlement would soon get unwanted public exposure. In 2009, the day after Blankfein asked Goldman’s employees to “avoid making big-ticket, high-profile purchases” in a bad economy, Laura tried to scream her way into a charity event ahead of other ticket holders. Page Six quoted her complaining that she shouldn’t have to wait with “people who spend less money than me.” Blankfein would later defend her. “Even the Mafia leaves wives alone,” he said. But the Mafia doesn’t let wives negotiate, either.

  “Whatever we did from then on was never enough for her,” says the Zeckendorf insider. “It was not a good situation.” A conciliatory letter to Lloyd and Laura was drafted, but never sent. Instead, the Zeckendorfs appealed to the city’s best-wired real estate lawyer, Jonathan Mechanic, whose firm represented the Blankfeins. Mechanic calmed things down, but ill feelings persist, at least in the Zeckendorf camp.

  The Blankfeins won’t comment, but someone who knows their thinking says they blame their architect for being pushy. They knew nothing about it then and recall even less now. Which is the sort of nonanswer one expects from someone with experience testifying before Congress.

  It’s convenient that the apartment that Goldman Sachs’s first family chose is in the building’s A-line, a block away from Arthur Zeckendorf. Arthur considers the building “a life achievement,” he says. “It’ll be hard to achieve that again. I take great enjoyment and pride living in a property we built.”

  His brother, it would soon emerge, wanted something quite opposite: a classic Park Avenue cooperative. “I did not want to live in a building I codeveloped,” he says. “If a doorman is not at his post, I get angry. I take it personally. I kept going back” to the half-floor penthouse he’d reserved “after it opened and I could just never relax.”

  After a decade in his father’s Park Belvedere, Will and his family had moved to the Majestic, a co-op since 1955, where he lived while building 15CPW. But he’d always wanted to live at 740 Park, the building his grandfather had owned for an eye-blink back in the 1950s. In spring 2010, he heard of a whisper listing (an informal listing not recorded in shared broker databases) for the very apartment once owned by the Hearst lawyer Clarence Shearn and then the fashionable heiress Thelma Chrysler Foy, which his grandfather had tried to buy after he had helped John D. Rockefeller Jr. turn 740 into a co-op. But just after Will went to see it, the owner pulled it off the market and “I didn’t want to wait around forever,” he says, so Will put his Fifteen penthouse on the market, and sold it to Min Kao, the Taiwanese billionaire cofounder of Garmin, the GPS navigation system, who paid $40 million for the empty forty-first-floor aerie, setting a record of $10,259 per square foot, by that measure the most expensive property ever sold. Will’s profit was $29 million. But attaining that astonishing price per square foot might have been even more satisfying.

  “You can’t go to another new condo, a building you haven’t built, from Fifteen,” he continues. “That leaves you in the prewar category.” At the end of 2010, Will managed to snare a prewar trophy, an eleventh-floor duplex at 927 Fifth Avenue, paying the estate of the investment banker Bruce Wasserstein, who’d owned it, just over $29 million for it. But the next summer, he flipped it—after only a week on the market—for more than $34 million. Real estate gossips asked why. It turned out the Shearn-Foy apartment was back on the market. “I had a tumultuous weekend,” Will says. “I had to decide.” Why did he want 740? “I just knew it. Leaving Fifteen wasn’t easy, but 740 is special in another way. And three terraces are hard to beat.” He bought it in November 2011 for $27 million.

  Will had not only renounced his own building and his brother’s life achievement, he’d chosen to live in one of the originals upon which 15CPW was modeled. And he’d chosen a co-op and was moving east, back to the old ways. He’d gotten a good deal, too, thanks to the rise of the luxury condo: a huge trophy apartment at a great address for far less per square foot than Fifteen then commanded. And he still had plenty of pocket change left to decorate.

  Like any smart co-op owner, Will politely resists discussing his new apartment or any connection it might have to his grandfather and the rest of his tangled family history. He’s bucking the tide “a little bit,” he admits, a boat against the current he created himself, but he refuses the notion he’s backsliding into the past.

  “Arthur and I are both pretty good at looking forward, not back,” he says. “Fifteen bucked the tide, too.”

  The front entrance of Fifteen Central Park West with its golden-granite base. The Pentagram-designed Fifteen logo, and the spindle-and-lantern metalwork created by the office of architect Robert A. M. Stern, are visual motifs that are repeated throughout the building and were used in its promotional materials. (MIKE TAUBER)

  Columbus Circle, looking north, circa 1861, 1903, 1921, and 1931. Originally farmland, the area developed after Central Park was begun just to the east.

  In 1903, the Broadway subway was under construction, streetcars ran up the length of the park, Durland’s Riding Academy occupied the northern end of the circle, with apartment houses, private homes, and the Century Theater beyond.

  In the 1920s, Durland’s was replaced by William Randolph Hearst’s low Gothic building. He planned, but never built, a skyscraper above it.

  Automobile Row stretched above the circle. The Coca-Cola sign later became a local landmark, as did the Mayflower Hotel behind it, and the Century apartment house to the north.

  “Big Bill” Zeckendorf, paternal grandfather of Fifteen Central Park West’s developers, in his prime, behind his desk in his I. M. Pei–designed cylindrical office. (DICK DEMARSICIO/WORLD TELEGRAM, LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)

  Arthur (left) and Will Lie Zeckendorf (right) flank their maternal grandfather, Trygve Lie, first secretary-general of the United Nations. (COURTESY WILLIAM LIE ZECKENDORF)

  Big Bill Zeckendorf (standing), William Jr., and Will Zeckendorf. (COURTESY WILLIAM LIE ZECKENDORF)

  Big Bill Zeckendorf with grandsons Arthur (left) and Will (right). (COU
RTESY WILLIAM LIE ZECKENDORF)

  William Zeckendorf Jr. and son Arthur in front of Zeckendorf Towers on Manhattan’s Union Square in November 1986. (SHERRIE NICKOL/CRAIN’S NEW YORK, COURTESY ARTHUR ZECKENDORF)

  Will Zeckendorf re-creates the moment he tore the “tower” from the model of Fifteen Central Park West created by SLCE Architects and reoriented it parallel to Central Park West. (MICHAEL GROSS)

  Robert A. M. Stern Architects designed this never-built glass-and-masonry tower for the Columbus Circle site of the New York Coliseum. Stern would shortly design the all-masonry Fifteen Central Park a block to the north. (ERNEST BURDEN III/ACME DIGITAL)

  Architect Robert A. M. Stern and Fifteen Central Park West partner (and future resident) Eyal Ofer at the building’s ground-raising ceremony, September 27, 2005. (JIMI CELESTE/PATRICK MCMULLAN CO.)

  In the Fifteen Central Park West sales office a few blocks from the construction site, potential purchasers could light up individual units in this model of the building. (JIMI CELESTE/PATRICK MCMULLAN CO.)

  The construction site for Fifteen Central Park West. (JIMI CELESTE/PATRICK MCMULLAN CO.)

  Floor plans of the penthouse trophy apartments bought by Sanford Weill (above),

  Lloyd Blankfein (above),

  Eyal Ofer (above),

  and Lindsay Rosenwald (above). Rosenwald’s duplex would later be quietly offered for sale for $90 million, and Weill’s would sell for $88 million to a trust controlled by Russian fertilizer oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev. It is allegedy used by his daughter. Ofer’s apartment boasts a “King of the World” terrace beneath the building’s swooping roof arches. Blankfein and Sting, the musician, have adjoining terraces.

  Robert A. M. Stern’s office designed the copper-topped pavilion between the building’s two courtyards as an homage to Frederick II’s Sanssouci Palace. The reflecting pool sits atop the seventy-five-foot lap pool in the health club below. Light passes through the water and a skylight into the pool enclosure. (PETER AARON/OTTO)

  Fifteen Central Park West’s lobby is decorated with English-oak paneling, red-, pink-, and purple-marble fluted columns, two fireplaces, and a seemingly floating ceiling with a central oval cutout that gives the illusion of sky above. (PETER AARON/OTTO)

  The elaborate health club beneath Fifteen Central Park West is reserved for building residents. It boasts a skylit pool, as well as areas devoted to weights, cardiovascular machines, yoga and workouts, private massage rooms, two steam rooms, and a sauna. (PETER AARON/OTTO)

  Apartment 33D in the tower, originally owned by Duquesne Capital Management managing director Zachary Jared Schreiber and his wife, Lori, was sold for $29 million, almost three times what they paid for it, in July 2013.

  It boasted a lavish library (above),

  sprawling living room (above),

  and stunning park and skyline views (above and below). (MIKE TAUBER)

  Codeveloper Eyal Ofer and his brother, Idan, are two of the world’s richest men. Idan’s duplex apartment in the front “house” portion of Fifteen Central Park West was built by Stern Projects, and run by Nicholas S. G. Stern, the building architect’s son. The starkly modern apartment in the postmodern building features a custom-designed staircase by Legorreta & Legorreta (above) and a bathroom with a dramatic shower view (below). (PETER AARON/OTTO)

  Fifteen Central Park West seen from across Central Park. (MIKE TAUBER)

  In fall 2012, protesters calling their action Occupy Goldman Sachs set up a vigil across the street from Fifteen Central Park West and camped there for several weeks. (CHRIS PHILLIPS)

  The New York Observer heralded 15CPW with a story accompanied by an illustration showing some of the most illustrious apartment-buyers (clockwise from top), hedge-fund runner Daniel Loeb; Citigroup founder Sanford Weill (in the building’s restaurant); sportscaster Bob Costas and his wife, Jill Sutton (swimming in the pool); producer Norman Lear; NASCAR champion Jeff Gordon; and actor Denzel Washington (in the screening room, of course). (GARY HOVLAND)

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  In 2006, I was deep into writing a book about the Metropolitan Museum of Art when I got a phone call from Richard Rubenstein, a public relations man for Will and Arthur Zeckendorf, the brothers who built Fifteen Central Park West. He asked if I’d be interested in writing an authorized book about the building, which was then beginning to rise. With my plate full, and a disinclination to write an “authorized” book I wouldn’t control, I declined. A few months later, though, Peter Kaplan, then editor of the New York Observer, asked me to profile the building and its developers, and I accepted. I already had a working connection to the Zeckendorfs: their grandfather is a vital character in my first book on a luxury apartment house in New York, 740 Park, and would also pop up in a later book about Los Angeles. I’d also moved just around the corner from 15CPW, albeit into a century-old cooperative apartment house. Then, in 2011, Dan Strone, my agent at Trident Media Group, suggested I write about Fifteen, and the stars had aligned. Dan brought the idea to Leslie Meredith, my editor at Atria Books. I’m indebted to Richard and Dan for the idea, to Peter for my ride up the hoist at Fifteen, and to Leslie, for whom I am grateful every day. Thanks, too, to Leslie’s associate Donna Loffredo, to Martha Levin, and at Atria, to the president and publisher Judith Curr; jacket director Jeanne Lee; the unbelievably patient Lisa Keim, VP director of subsidiary rights; production editor Laura Wise; Dan Stone’s assistant, Kseniya Zaslavskaya; Paul Olewski and Bobbilyn Jones on Atria’s publicity team; and Diane Mancher at One Potato Productions. I feel blessed to have worked with each of you.

  I am also deeply grateful to Will and Arthur, who agreed to cooperate with an independent book. They not only gave me their trust but countless hours of their time, stayed out of the way when I was researching the parts of the book they felt unable to help with, and reacted with good humor when I came to them with matters they likely wished I hadn’t discovered and questions they wished I hadn’t asked. They also introduced me to their partner Eyal Ofer, the principal and chairman of Global Holdings, a private, US-based real estate holding company specializing in large-scale commercial development, and the president of its New York subsidiary, Samuel Kellner, who were equally open and accommodating. None of them asked to approve what I wrote about them, and the opportunity to tell this story with complete access to its principals and without obstruction when enterprise reporting was called for was unique in my experience. The Zeckendorfs’ decision to not only allow but encourage this book still boggles me as much as it has delighted me. It would not, could not, exist as it is without them. Thanks also to Will and Arthur’s father, William Zeckendorf Jr.; his wife, Nancy; and his sister, Susan.

  It wasn’t strictly necessary to gain the cooperation of the executives at Goldman Sachs who were also key characters in the story, but it was desirable. What was necessary was patience. I especially recall the day I peppered Goldman Sachs with phone calls unaware (as I’d gone to work without reading the newspaper that morning) that one of its employees had resigned from the bank using an op-ed piece in the New York Times as his kiss-off. Many months went by before Andrea Raphael, a managing director of the investment bank, got me the interviews I’d hoped for, but eventually she did. So thanks to her, and to Stuart Rothenberg, Alan Kava, and Jerry Karr, and also to their predecessors at Goldman, Dan Neidich and Ralph Rosenberg (and Tina Buyea in Ralph’s office). All were (or seemed) open and candid in describing the usually secretive bank’s vital role in the story—and like the Zeckendorfs were sophisticated enough to understand that my account would not be hagiography. Thanks also to the major Manhattan real estate players who helped me, especially John Avlon and Bob Konopka, but also Earle and Bill Mack, Ben and Henry Lambert, Joanna Rose of the Related Company, Phil Aarons at Millennium Partners, Miki Naftali, and Donald Trump (and Rhona Graff in his office).

  Architecture is as vital to this story as finance. At Robert A. M. Stern, thanks to Stern himself, to Paul Whalen, Peter Morris Dixon, and Christian Rizzo. At
SLCE, thanks to Jim Davidson and Peter Claman. Thanks also to Costas Kondylis and Margaret Clare Norton, Rafael Pelli, and Jim Polshek.

  For twenty years, my books have occupied the intersection of public and private lives, a delicate position, to be sure, so it was with considerable trepidation that I picked up the phone to call the supporting cast in this story, the owners and residents of 15CPW apartments. But many of them understood and supported what I hoped to do, and some were even willing to help. Some of those allowed me to quote them by name; others agreed to speak to me only if I didn’t acknowledge that I had. I interviewed several dozen residents of the building and visited more than half a dozen apartments. I thank all those who are quoted by name in the preceding pages, the anonymous others, and also those who didn’t contribute but agreed to check facts. And I apologize to the residents of the building who do not appear in the text, though some no doubt prefer it that way.

  As I interviewed one resident, an envelope appeared under his door. Later, he called to tell me it was from Fifteen’s condo board—warning residents that I was prowling the building, seeking information. But instead of asking them not to cooperate, the board merely noted that scrutiny came with the territory and left it up to residents to decide for themselves how to deal with me. Some did and some didn’t, some were nice, a few were not, and only one sicced a lawyer on me. So I thank Jeffrey Walker, the condo’s president, for that measured missive, and for his good humor when I called him. And I thank those who were kind, even if they chose caution over cooperation. But just in case there is any lingering unhappiness, I will not name the other residents who invited me into their homes, took me on tours of Fifteen, and even treated me to lunch in the restaurant, but I am grateful to them, too. To those few who snarled and snapped, all I can say is, if you don’t like attention, you probably shouldn’t buy or rent a trophy apartment in the media capital of the world.