The New York Times Book of New York

by The New York Times

  Leona Helmsley, Dogs’ Best Friend, Left Them Up to $8 Billion

  By STEPHANIE STROM | July 2, 2008

  SURE, THE HOTELIER AND REAL ESTATE magnate Leona Helmsley left $12 million in her will to her dog, Trouble. But that, it turns out, is nothing much compared with what other dogs may receive from the charitable trust of Mrs. Helmsley, who died last August.

  Her instructions, specified in a two-page “mission statement,” are that the entire trust, valued at $5 billion to $8 billion and amounting to virtually all her estate, be used for the care and welfare of dogs, according to two people who have seen the document and who described it on condition of anonymity.

  It is by no means clear that all the money will go to dogs. Another provision of the mission statement says Mrs. Helmsley’s trustees may use their discretion in distributing the money, and some lawyers say the statement may not mean much anyway, given that its directions were not incorporated into Mrs. Helmsley’s will or the trust documents.

  The two people who described the statement said Mrs. Helmsley signed it in 2003 to establish goals for the multibillion-dollar trust that would disburse assets after her death.

  The first goal was to help indigent people, the second to provide for the care and welfare of dogs. A year later, they said, she deleted the first goal.

  Mrs. Helmsley, the widow of the real estate developer Harry B. Helmsley, was best known for her sharp tongue and impatience with humanity. She became a household name after she was featured in glossy advertisements for the Helmsley hotels. “It’s the only palace in the world where the queen stands guard,” advertisements for the Helmsley Palace proclaimed.

  But for many Americans, she later became a symbol of unbridled arrogance and belief in entitlement, particularly after she was convicted in 1989 of $1.2 million in federal income tax evasion and was sent to prison. She was the subject of a 1990 television film, “Leona Helmsley: The Queen of Mean,” with Suzanne Pleshette in the title role, and at least three books.

  Long, Long Legal Battle for Tall, Tall Building

  By CHARLES V. BAGLI | December 12, 2001

  THREE POWERFUL REAL ESTATE FIGURES—Irving Schneider, Peter L. Malkin and Leona Helmsley—are battling once again for control of the Empire State Building. The squabbling adds to the uncertainty surrounding the status of the 102-story skyscraper and other tall buildings after the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center.

  The skirmish comes as Mr. Malkin is trying to buy the property outright from a Japanese group led by Donald J. Trump for about $60 million.

  Naturally, it is all about money. And for now, Mrs. Helmsley, who controls the formidable estate of her husband, Harry B. Helmsley, is siding with Mr. Schneider.

  “You’ve got a real battle going on involving millions and millions of dollars,” said Alvin Lane, an investor in the Empire State Building.

  Mr. Schneider, whose company manages the landmark skyscraper, filed a lawsuit in State Supreme Court recently against Mr. Malkin, alleging a host of misdeeds in his role as a partner and supervisor of the investment group that owns the master lease for the building. Mr. Schneider, who owns one of 3,330 shares in the group, is seeking to oust Mr. Malkin.

  “You’ve got a real battle going on involving millions and millions of dollars.”

  The building was bought in the 1990’s by a company led by a Japanese businessman, Hideki Yokoi. His daughter then cut a deal with Mr. Trump, in which he would get half of any increased value in the building. The only problem was that under the terms of its lease, the Japanese are entitled to only $2 million a year in rent.

  So Mr. Trump secretly backed a small tenants’ group that sued, alleging that Mr. Malkin and Mrs. Helmsley had turned the landmark building into a “high-rise slum.” But Mr. Trump’s five-year legal offensive ultimately failed.

  Thomas Dewey, a lawyer for Mr. Malkin, dismissed Mr. Schneider’s charges as nonsense. For her part, Mrs. Helmsley said Mr. Malkin “is up to no good.”

  Blue-Collar Builders Expand Empire To Glitzier Shores

  By CHARLES V. BAGLI | October 9, 2007

  SAMUEL J. LEFRAK, THE VOLUBLE PATRIARCH of New York’s most prolific real estate family, often declared, “We serve the mass, not the class,” during the five decades he presided over an empire of apartments in sturdy brick buildings from Queens to Manhattan, office towers on both sides of the Hudson River, and oil wells in Louisiana.

  Mr. LeFrak died in 2003, and now the family is striking out in a dramatically new direction to serve the class, not the mass. Mr. LeFrak’s son, Richard, 62, has reached beyond the New York area to buy office buildings in the Golden Triangle area of Beverly Hills, Calif., and a development site on Hollywood Boulevard for a luxury high-rise apartment building. The LeFrak Organization is also actively hunting for a big development site in London.

  “The capacity to make something from nothing—that’s the sex.”

  Known for boxy, unremarkable buildings, the LeFraks are now using brand-name architects like Arquitectonica to design stylish towers. They also sold 2,000 of their older working-class apartments in Brooklyn and Queens earlier this year for $250 million, and more are headed for the auction block.

  “We have a huge amount of assets in this city,” Richard LeFrak said during an interview in his blond-wood offices, where the walls are lined with images of the family’s buildings and paintings of Sam LeFrak. “It’s the best market in the country. But we need diversification. I think L.A. has a lot of pluses.”

  A genial, straightforward and even-keeled tycoon, he displays none of the noisy flamboyance of his father, but all of the family’s work ethic and aversion to high-risk financing. There is little or no debt on the family’s holdings: 22 million square feet of residential property, the equivalent of about 25,000 apartments, and 12 million square feet of office space.

  Like his father and his sons, Mr. LeFrak said his most satisfaction comes from developing complexes like Newport from the ground up. “The capacity to make something from nothing—that’s the sex,” Mr. LeFrak said. “The other stuff is kissing.”

  EDITORIAL: Up, and Down, With Donald Trump

  June 9, 1990

  WHAT’S THE RIGHT WORD, ARROGANCE or audacity?

  Is Donald Trump a tarnished golden boy, on his way from riches to rags in a real live morality play? Or is he still the daring risk-taker, maker of magic deals who has simply run into short-term cash problems from which he’ll come out stronger than ever?

  To many Americans, Donald Trump is both. They are pleased to imagine that, with a little more luck, they could be holding off their creditors, Trump-like, while preparing the next coup. And at 3 a.m., staring at a late-notice mortgage payment reminder, it gives them solace to remember that the famous Donald Trump is also in trouble.

  The Donald, people call him now, not many years after he charged out from the shadow of his father, a prosperous Brooklyn builder, with a scheme to revise Manhattan’s dormant East 42nd Street. It ended up costing millions more than he could possibly have found alone, but he shrewdly made a tax-abatement, tax-exemption deal with the New York City government, courted the owners of the Hyatt Hotel chain into partnership, acquired the charmless Commodore Hotel at 42nd and Lexington and turned the neighborhood around.

  Now he is the owner of three gambling casinos, a shuttle airline, glittering towers, plazas, palaces, and hotels, all of which together were said to be worth $1.5 billion, net of debts, only a few weeks ago.

  The Donald has given nonadmirers plenty of reasons for the malicious glee with which they hear of his problems. Good at his business, at every opportunity he tells the world how good. He feels compelled to paint the name TRUMP on every acquisition. He flaunts his possessions: the biggest yacht, the biggest house, the grandest helicopter, and not long ago pronounced his intention of building the tallest building in the world.

  Arrogance? For sure, and yet in a world lacking individual heroes, even some of the Donald’s critics must confess to a sneaking res
pect for his insistence on being himself, however outrageous.

  Donald Trump Builds Image As He Buys Buildings

  By JUDY KLEMESRUD | November 1, 1976

  Donald Trump, shown here in 1976, is now one of the highest paid personalities on television.

  HE IS TALL, LEAN AND BLOND, WITH DAZZLING white teeth, and he looks ever so much like Robert Redford. He rides around town in a chauffeured silver Cadillac, with his initials, DJT, on the plates. He dates slinky fashion models, belongs to the most elegant clubs and, at only 30 years of age, estimates that he is worth “more than $200 million.”

  Flair. It’s one of Donald J. Trump’s favorite words, and both he, his friends and his enemies use it when describing his way of life as well as his business style as New York’s No. 1 real estate promoter.

  “If a man has flair,” the energetic, outspoken Mr. Trump said the other day, “and is smart and somewhat conservative and has a taste for what people want, he’s bound to be successful in New York.”

  Mr. Trump, who is president of the Brooklyn-based Trump Organization, which owns and manages 22,000 apartments, currently has three imaginative Manhattan realestate projects in the works: a large Manhattan convention center over the Penn Central Transportation Company’s 34th Street yards; a 1,500-room Hyatt Regency hotel near Grand Central Terminal; and construction of 14,500 federally subsidized apartments on the Penn Central’s 60th Street yards, to which Mr. Trump has acquired the development rights. The site is bounded by West 59th and West 72nd Streets, West End Avenue and the Hudson River.

  “What makes Donald Trump so significant right now,” said one Manhattan real estate expert, “is that there is nobody else who is a private promoter on a major scale, trying to convince entrepreneurs to develop major pieces of property.”

  Finally, the Debut of Wall Street West

  By WINSTON WILLIAMS | August 25, 1985

  BEFORE MAMMOTH REJUVENATION PROJECTS like Manhattan’s Battery Park City ignited building booms and changed cityscapes in the nation’s downtown areas, it seemed that a deadly cancer was spreading unchecked through urban America.

  Only a few years ago, major metropolises were facing financial ruin. Aging industrial slums and dilapidated residential neighborhoods had a choke hold on inner cities, discouraging development. And much of corporate America, complaining about crime and the poorly educated urban labor force, fled to the lush greenery and superior schools of the suburbs.

  Manhattan’s downtown financial district was as battered by these forces as most others. But now, major corporations like Merrill Lynch, American Express and Dow Jones will soon begin moving into Battery Park City, the bold renewal project that is adding a new dimension to Wall Street.

  Conceived in the late 1960’s by Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller and a pet project of his three successors, it is a complex of residential and commercial buildings built on 92 acres of landfill skirting the Hudson River. When it is completed in the next decade, its price tag is likely to be between $3 billion and $4 billion.

  Its commercial space, the World Financial Center, will house 30,000 office workers.

  Its commercial space, the World Financial Center, will house 30,000 office workers. Fueled by sharp growth in the financial services industry, the World Financial Center’s four glass and granite-sheathed skyscrapers are already 90 percent spoken for.

  But its sponsor, Olympia & York, the world’s largest privately held real estate developer, had to buy some older downtown buildings to entice tenants to move.

  Today Is Moving Day for Goldman, Sachs & Co.

  April 1, 1957

  THIS IS MOVING DAY FOR GOLDMAN, SACHS & Co., the big investment banking concern. It’s shifting from 30 Pine Street, home since 1869, to ultra-modern quarters at 20 Broad Street.

  The most striking innovation in the new offices is a 16-telephone turret trading desk, designed especially by the New York Telephone Company. It is said to be the first of its kind and size installed anywhere. Unlike the flat keyboards of conventional trading desks, the new phone turrets are vertical to give considerable working space for each trader. Each turret handles 120 direct circuits independently of the firm’s main switchboard. In all, they provide 1,920 private lines. Traders can also dial into a circuit on any trading turret for greater flexibility in transacting business.

  Goldman, Sachs managed or co-managed underwritings last year with a value of $1.1 billion. Most prominent was the largest corporate issue to date, the first public financing of the Ford Motor Company, $657 million of common stock. The firm was one of the managing underwriters.

  Can Google Come Out to Play?

  By DEBORAH SCHOENEMAN | December 31, 2006

  Google employees blow off steam by playing “Guitar Hero” in the company game room.

  THE GAME ROOM AT GOOGLE’S NEW OFFICES in Chelsea was being put to good use. Two engineers were taking a break from coding at the pool table. A programmer in a purple Phish T-shirt was practicing juggling. “Sweet Child O’ Mine” by Guns ’N’ Roses blasted from the flat-screen television, where two 22-year-olds played Guitar Hero, a video game that lets players strum scaled-down guitars—karaoke without the singing.

  Only one guitarist, Aaron Karp, worked for Google. “It’s very convenient that he works in such a cool place and invites me over,” said Mr. Karp’s roommate, Alex Hurst, who works in the breaking news division of CNN. “We don’t have this, or Razor scooters, at CNN. It makes me want to work here.”

  Google started moving its 500-plus employees in New York from a cramped Times Square office to a former Port Authority building on Eighth Avenue last summer. The new office is the company’s largest engineering center outside its headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.

  From lava lamps to abacuses to cork coffee tables, the offices may as well be a Montessori school conceived to cater to the needs of future science-project winners. The Condé Nast and Hearst corporations have their famous cafeterias designed by, respectively, Frank Gehry and Norman Foster; but Google has free food, and plenty of it, including a sushi bar and espresso stations. There are private phone booths for personal calls and showers and lockers for anyone running or biking to work.

  The campus-like workspace is antithetical to the office culture of most New York businesses. It is a vision of a workplace utopia as conceived by rich, young, single engineers in Silicon Valley, transplanted to Manhattan. The New York tradition of leaving the office to network over lunch or an evening cocktail party has no place at Google, where employees are encouraged to socialize among themselves.

  LABOR

  141 Men and Girls Die In Waist Factory Fire

  March 26, 1911

  Crowds around the site of the Triangle Shirt Waist fire in 1911. The factory was inside what is now the Brown Building of Science, which is located in Greenwich Village.

  THREE STORIES OF A 10-FLOOR BUILDING AT the corner of Greene Street and Washington Place were burned yesterday, and while the fire was going on 141 young men and women—at least 125 of them mere girls—were burned to death or killed by jumping to the pavement below.

  Nothing like it has been seen in New York since the burning of the General Slocum. The fire was practically all over in half an hour. It was confined to three floors—the eighth, ninth, and tenth of the building.

  The victims were employed at making shirtwaists by the Triangle Waist Company, the principal owners of which are Isaac Harris and Max Blanck. Most of them could barely speak English. Many of them came from Brooklyn. Almost all were the main support of their hard-working families.

  There is just one fire escape in the building. That one is an interior fire escape. The building was fireproof, and the owners had put their trust in that.

  The girls rushed to the windows and looked down at Greene Street, 100 feet below them. Then one poor, little creature jumped. There was a plate-glass protection over part of the sidewalk, but she crashed through it. Then they all began to drop. The crowd yelled “Don’t jump!” but it was jump or b
e burned—the proof of which is found in the fact that 50 burned bodies were taken from the ninth floor alone.

  Messrs. Harris and Blanck were in the building, but they escaped. They carried with them Mr. Blanck’s children and a governess, and they fled over the roofs. Their employees did not know the way, because they had been in the habit of using the two freight elevators, and one of these elevators was not in service when the fire broke out.

  Labor Marking 75th Anniversary Of Triangle Shirtwaist Fire

  By WILLIAM SERRIN | March 25, 1986

  Photos of the tragedy were displayed at the memorial site during the 92nd annual memorial in 2003.

  IT LASTED 18 MINUTES.

  “I was just fixing my hair and putting on my coat,” said Pauline Cuoio Pepe, 94, a sewing machine operator who is one of three remaining known survivors of the fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company. When she saw the flames, she ran.

  “There were about 100 people right next to the door,” she said, “but it was closed.”

  Doors were locked, said Mrs. Pepe, who resides in Broadlawn Nursing Home in Amityville, L.I. “We saw people throwing themselves out the window, but I said, ‘I wouldn’t do it,’” she recalled in an interview with Justice, the newspaper of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. “We went down the steps.”

  The tragedy brought workplace health and safety laws. It generated reform that led two decades later in passage of New Deal legislation. It shaped views of a generation, among them Alfred E. Smith, later governor of New York; Frances Perkins, who would become secretary of labor in the Roosevelt Administration; and Senator Robert F. Wagner, an architect of the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, still the foundation of union rights.