Zeckendorf

by William Zeckendorf

  What I did do was join my son and my son-in-law, Ronald Nicholson, in a new company, General Property Corp. Since my personal assets were subject to the claims of creditors, I could not be an owner. I became a consultant to the company. For financial backing we turned to the investment firm of Lazard Freres. We needed little over a quarter of a million dollars to start promoting various properties we had acquired. After much deliberation, Lazard Freres, which in times past had made more than seventy million dollars from various Webb & Knapp ventures, agreed to provide some capital, but there was a condition: Henceforth they would have the right of first refusal on all General Property Corp. projects. Such an arrangement would, in effect make us lifelong vassals of Lazard. We turned down this offer and set up the new company on a more modest scale with our own financing. To begin with, we took over our old Webb & Knapp offer and set up the new company on a more modest scale with our next move was to acquire control of our own building, 383 Madison Avenue, and it was this maneuver that led to my autobiography.

  The underlying lease for our building was held by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company (I had sold it to them in 1948). The lease had four years to go, but Met Life agreed to sell it to us, and Equitable Life agreed to buy it—if we could persuade the major tenants to sign new leases for twenty-one years.

  We went to the building's three prime tenants. The advertising firm of Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn, whose lease was just expiring, were agreeable to a new lease, especially since we also offered them much of the space Webb & Knapp used to hold. The Carrier Corporation (whose lease had four years to go) took a bit more persuasion, but it was prime space at a prime rate, so they also extended their lease. Last came Holt, Rinehart and Winston, whose lease had another twelve years to run.

  I stopped in to see a friend at Holt, Rinehart and Winston and told him we would like to renew their lease.

  "But it runs to 1977 now," he said reasonably.

  "I want you to extend it to 1986."

  He laughed. "You're crazy; come back in twelve years."

  "No, I'm serious," and I explained what we were doing.

  My friend reached into his desk, pulled out a manuscript, and handed it to me. The front page was titled, "The Mad, Mad World of William Zeckendorf."

  "What's that?" I asked.

  "It's a book suggestion. How do you like it?"

  "I don't."

  "Well, we'll make a bargain. You write your autobiography for us, and we'll extend our lease for you."

  I'll do almost anything to close a deal. We shook hands. General Property Corp. now had its first building, and I had my first book.

  With a safe home base established at 383 Madison Avenue, General Property Corp. began to move out and around town. Having little capital of our own, we reverted to the tactics and style of the early 1940's and became packagers and promoters for other people. Our reward was in the form of fees or a piece of the profits. We tackled all kinds of assignments. For instance, it was my son who arranged the purchase of the Queen Mary by the town of Long Beach, California, and acquisition of the London Bridge by the McCullough people. It was General Property Corp. that assembled the land for the new Gimbels store at Eighty-sixth Street and Lexington Avenue in New York. We bought, held, and profitably sold an old Webb & Knapp property, the Manhattan Hotel. We also conceived and promoted the conversion of the old Bell Telephone labs, by the Lower West Side docks near Greenwich Village, into the Westbeth cooperative artists' colony. Rather early in the game, the word that William Zeckendorf and friends were alive and busy at 383 Madison Avenue began to spread. Once more, deals and propositions began to come to us.

  Only my personal assets, not my brains, were in hock. I still knew how to make money for people. Moreover, with the fantastic pressures of Webb & Knapp's last few years off my back, I was beginning to feel like a man suddenly released from solitary confinement. True, the trustee for Webb & Knapp had filed a suit against me and the other directors of Webb & Knapp, but I had done my best to save the company, as I had in the past done my best to build it. My conscience was clear. For the present I was busy and relaxed. Marion and I saw more of each other. We went to plays and we traveled. We spent one summer in France, the following Christmas in Portugal. I had turned over our estate in Greenwich to creditors, but we had acquired a quiet place in Westchester County and were very happy. Marion had been completely cured of a facial skin cancer by a new and remarkable therapy developed at Memorial Hospital, and her morale was high. We were both enjoying a sense of renewed happiness and confidence. In the spring of 1968 Marion flew to South America for a month's tour. She planned to wind up her trip with a visit to the Inca ruins in Peru. From there she would fly to Guadeloupe in the Caribbean. She was to arrive at 8:30 P.M. I flew down to meet her plane. The next day we were to fly to Santa Lucia to board the France and sail back to New York.

  I arrived in Guadeloupe two hours before Marion's plane was due. I had brought her miniature pinscher Mimi with me and held her as we waited. The scheduled arrival time came and went for the flight from Peru, but no plane landed. I walked over to the counter to make inquiries in my very poor French. The attendant made a Gallic face and a gesture with his hand, an up-and-down gesture. I thought he meant the plane was about to land. A few moments later the announcement came over the loudspeaker: the plane had crashed.

  The sensation from then on was one of being in a dream from which I couldn't wake up. For a time I sat in the airport manager's office, then finally pulled myself together and tried to call New York to tell my children what had happened, but it was impossible to get through. I went back to the hotel where we had reservations for the night, bathed, shaved, and lay down. All this time Marion's dog, sensing the tragedy, had been whimpering. Now she insisted on creeping up to lie by my side.

  The first plane out of town was at nine o'clock the next morning. I boarded it. At Antigua I took the dog off for a walk. Coming back aboard, I found, sitting on the aisle, my old friend Winthrop Aldrich and his wife. Glad to see familiar faces, I told them what had happened and cannot remember anyone ever being so solicitous and kind. Later, two other old friends, Dr. and Mrs. Howard Rusk, came aboard. They too were a solace, but there was no real consolation. Marion had been my friend and my confidante. She had given me insight into worlds I would never have known without her—the worlds of art, archaeology, music, and ballet. At the most dramatic moment in my career, when I was buying out my partners in Webb & Knapp, she urged me on and offered to put up every penny that she had in order to help me. She loved me, she forgave my transgressions, and now she was gone. In clear weather her plane had crashed into a mountain. There were no identifiable remains; the victims received a mass burial.

  In New York, Dr. Norman Vincent Peale conducted a memorial service. Services were also conducted at the C. W. Post College of Long Island University, of which I was chairman of the board of trustees. Literally thousands of letters of condolence came in for me. I answered each and kept on with my work. Thank God for work! I was difficult to be with for a time, but dropping a curtain of work about myself was the best way to adjust to the situation.

  After Marion's death I decided to declare personal bankruptcy. Making money is something I can always do. There are certain debts of honor I shall see are paid, but filing for bankruptcy was the only way to finally clear my entanglements with Webb & Knapp and start a new life.

  As for the present and immediate future, I am busy. Continually and enjoyably busy, keeping up with just some of the opportunities that come my way to get things done. For just one example, quite early on my comeback trail, I met (I made it my business to meet) a young entrepreneur, a descendant of Vikings, a yachtsman, and a shipowner—Jakob Isbrandtsen of American Export Isbrandtsen.

  Jakob is a tough, energetic man with the handshake of a dock worker and the mind of a Yankee trader. He is an early riser, so am I, and over a series of six- and seven-o'clock breakfasts we worked out a continuing and convoluted and mutual
ly beneficial series of business transactions. He had acquired control of Equity Corp., a holding company, that had properties which we were interested in. It turned out that he was also interested in acquiring new docking facilities around New York, resulting in our assembling two miles of waterfront property on Staten Island for the Isbrandtsen company. The modern containership port that will evolve on this site will do much to keep New York a major shipping center. Shooters Island presently blocks the channel to this site, but what we saw that nobody else could then see was the possibility of dredging up the sand and gravel that form Shooters Island. We will pipe this material over to stabilize and build up our low-lying Staten Island holdings into prime land. The end result will be a much safer ship channel and expanded ship facilities for New York.

  Again, while in search for a profitable solution to the parking problem in New York, I conceived of a new building and space-use technique that has a phenomenal range of applications and implications. My joint partners in this new venture are the hard-headed engineers who run Morrison-Knudsen Co., Inc., the worldwide construction firm, and the U.S. Steel Corp. They joined with me after I had my new system carefully designed and engineered by Carlos J. Taveres, a brilliant California architect and engineer.

  Basically, what we have is a new and inexpensive way of building in water. Take the new, twin-tower Trade Center presently under construction in New York. It is being built on fill land where the river once flowed. To create this land, first a bulkhead had to be built out into the river. Then fill was trucked in to create new land. Later this fill was dug out again so foundations could be laid for buildings. Then the buildings began to go up. This process is time-consuming and costly.

  I thought to myself, Why not build concrete caissons or some kind of floating dock whose underside is sloped to the actual contour of the underlying land? These concrete units can be floated into place, sunk, tied to piles driven down to bedrock, then the water pumped out. Now the foundations are in place for the buildings, plus a huge area for parking or storage. What's more, instead of digging and carting off a lot of dirt, all that is needed is to pump out water, a cheap and quick operation—and the displaced water helps hold up the structure. In fact, the structure has to be anchored down, or it would float away.

  The more I thought about it, the better it sounded. I voiced the idea to a number of architects, but they only smiled dubiously and tried to change the subject. I have been around architects and engineers long enough not to take them completely seriously and decided to go to Taveres, who is highly regarded in the construction field. He took to the idea, analyzed its possibilities, and came up with a series of designs and cost studies that would make an accountant weep for joy. Basically it works out as follows: Using our system, a builder would create a concrete plaza, upon which buildings would then be constructed, at a considerable saving in cost compared to present landfill methods. But, aside from his saving per square foot of land, the builder using our technique would, in effect, be getting hundreds of thousands of cubic feet of usable space below the plaza absolutely free.

  After we had gone over these figures a number of times, I contacted U.S. Steel and Morrison-Knudsen. Accepting the logic of Taveres' figures, they immediately saw beyond them to the marketing implications. Think of an STOL (Short Takeoff and Landing) air building built out into the Hudson—planes on the roof, passenger terminals below that, aircraft-maintenance decks and auto parking even farther below in the space that could not otherwise be afforded. Envision a great ship dock handling massive container cargoes. Today such a dock needs acre upon acre of back land, called the "farm," to take care of storage and routing of cargo. With our system the "farm" would be right there in the form of layer after layer of storage area reaching down to the sea bed. Eventually, our new system is also going to be used to build a supersonic jet port at sea. There the owners of homes, naturalists, and conservationists won't join forces to prevent the building of an airport; there the sonic boom won't be a problem; there no clogged highways will force the air traveler to miss his flight.

  While we nurse along this new development in the use of space, I work on half a dozen bread-and-butter projects at the same time. I am enjoying every day of my renaissance. As to my previous life, which is what this book is supposed to be all about, I say this: If I had it to do over again, I would—only bigger and better.

  ▪ 1 ▪Beginnings

  WE NEW YORK ZECKENDORFS are actually misplaced Westerners. My grandfather, a frontier merchant, lived, traded, and sometimes fought with the Indians in the Arizona Territory. Zeckendorf wagon trains carried the mail and delivered supplies to the many mining camps ringing Tucson, and my cousins still own and run the department store, now called Steinfeld's, which my grandfather William Zeckendorf opened in that town.

  In September, 1867, when Grandfather rode into Tucson with thirty thousand dollars' worth of goods in twelve wagon trains, Tucson's established merchants were less than pleased. By the time Grandfather had managed to rent an old adobe building for his proposed store, the local storekeepers had had several private conferences among themselves. They approached Grandfather with an offer to buy him out, lock, stock, and miner's picks, for sixty-five thousand dollars. Grandfather accepted. He returned to New Mexico where he and his two brothers lived, with a fine profit in hand. That next year William went back to Tucson with an even larger wagon train of goods. This time the local impresarios were not buying. So Grandfather had to open a store, and he settled down to make his mark upon the country.

  A while ago I was invited to Tucson for the centennial celebration marking the founding of the original Zeckendorf store. There were bands, a parade, the usual flow of goodwill, and long speeches. As a guest of honor, I sat in the front of the reviewing stand. I noticed that throughout the performance one man seated in the back of the platform kept staring at me. Every time I turned my head, I met his gaze, so when the ceremonies were over I turned to him and asked, "What can I do for you, sir?"

  "I have an indiscreet question to ask," he said.

  "There are only indiscreet answers. What's your question?"

  He introduced himself as head of the anthropology department at the University of Arizona and said that he had been studying my face and wondered if I had any Apache blood.

  I looked at him for a moment and answered, "No, but I have reason to believe the Apache may have some Zeckendorf blood." Before his marriage, Grandfather had lived with the Indians for a time, and I have no doubt that he partook of all hospitality offered.

  Grandfather was an activist, a gregarious man with a zest for life and a flair for publicity. Soon after he arrived in this country from Germany, he moved to Tucson, and from then on the local paper regularly reported his announcements about new shipments of goods or his shooting at robbers trying to break into his store in the night. The safe arrival of a wagon train of goods, his brother's marriage, the coming of Christmas, and his own birthday were all occasions for treating the town to a public display of fireworks. As some dry wit remarked in the June 11 Weekly Arizonan of 1870:

  On Sunday last, Mr. Zeckendorf called the attention of every man, woman, and child to the anniversary of his birth by a magnificent display of fireworks. The spectators generally enjoyed the sport and made Z. the recipient of sundry congratulations upon his extraordinary good luck in not having died while a little baby, and his subsequent fortunate career made manifest by his living presence, "whole and entire" The grandest pyrotechnic display of the evening, which marked the closing of the celebration, consisted of the burning of Don Fernandez' stable and hay ignited by the spark of a Roman candle in the hands of Z. or some other man.

  By now Grandfather had become a deep-dyed frontiersman—he had even scalped an Indian caught rustling cattle. He was also leader of a posse that tracked down and hanged three robbers who had murdered a local Mexican-American merchant. In the war against Geronimo's Apaches, Grandfather served as aide-de-camp to General Nelson Miles. In 1886, after Gero
nimo's surrender, he was Tucson's parade marshal for a gala honoring the general. I still cherish an old photograph of him, a big, broad-shouldered man, once again in uniform for this occasion.

  As the frontier quieted down, so did its citizens. Grandfather eventually became a member first of the territorial and then of the state legislature, but for all his many side ventures, his world centered around his store, where he sold everything from crowbars to diamond stickpins. The store was famous throughout the territory, and whenever the command of the local military establishment changed hands, it was a custom for the outgoing commander to bet the new commander a bottle of whiskey that he could not name any merchandise carried by an eastern department store which was not also on sale in grandfather's store. The outgoing officer invariably won, even, as happened one time, when the new man asked for a pair of ice skates.

  Grandfather's Tucson store prospered and the year he had spent socializing in New York City, before he went West, had not been wasted. In 1872 he returned to the big city and married lovely eighteen-year-old Julia Frank. The young couple spent their honeymoon on the second transcontinental train trip of the Union Pacific across the plains and mountains to Oakland, then sailed across the bay to San Francisco and on to San Diego. On the morning of their departure from San Diego to Tucson by stagecoach, Grandmother for the first time saw her handsome, flamboyant new husband in his native habiliments. He arrived at breakfast with a pistol on each hip, crisscrossed bandoliers of ammunition across his chest, and a rifle in his hand.

  From what we know of Grandfather, he was probably laying it on just a little bit for his young bride's benefit, but as they got along the trail that day, they were hailed by a posse of U.S. cavalry that had been sent to meet them. The preceding stagecoach—and also, as it turned out, the stagecoach that followed theirs—had been held up. Those were the bad good old days.