Zeckendorf

by William Zeckendorf

  In the first category of predictable, avoidable trouble, I destroyed one thousand copies of the first brochure my aides put out on our Montreal project. The reason: in Canada just experiencing the first strong spasms of economic anti-Americanism, our brochure would have read like a version of "The Stars and Stripes Forever." Quite unconsciously, by what it did not say, this brochure dismissed Canada as a mere state, another Illinois or Colorado where Webb & Knapp of New York operated. Such a pamphlet would have been a psychological and political disaster. I stopped its distribution and had a new broadsheet prepared. Turning the spotlight away from Webb & Knapp, New York, to Webb & Knapp (Canada), I laid special emphasis on our illustrious board of Canadian directors, our relationship with Gordon and with the CNR, and our plans for Canada. Brochure number two went forth to the press, the public, and investment world and was received quietly. It created no favorable breezes in the form of new investors, but since brochure number one would have whistled up a raging nationalist squall, I was content.

  The niceties of nationalism, moreover, did not stop at things American vis-a-vis things Canadian. There is the complex and ever-present business of things French versus things English waiting to trap the unwary from the south. In Webb & Knapp's case, we were fortunate; the Montreal scene boasted of a number of chilling examples of knowledgeable men who, moving briskly through the maze of English-French relations, ran into sudden and painful obstructions. In fact, one of these examples was provided by the CNR and my estimable friend Donald Gordon when they were naming their new hotel.

  The hotel was being built next to the proposed Place Ville-Marie. It was going to be the pride and flagship of the CNR's hotels. It also would have been the toast of Quebec province had not the CNR been hoist on an imperial petard. For weeks, as construction went on, the CNR directors thrashed about trying to ready a decision about the name of the new hotel. On their own, I am sure they would come up with a suitably French name, but in the meantime a great many volunteers joined this pleasurable pastime. One of the volunteers was Sir Vincent Massey, the governor general and Queen Elizabeth's official representative to Canada. On a visit to Britain, the governor general, in a fairly offhand way, wondered out loud if the Queen might wish to have the hotel named after her. In diplomacy, as in business, indirection can become a way of life, because certain kinds of official entanglements can thus be avoided, but there is also a constant danger of over-interpretation of signals. This now happened. No one in England, I am told, was that anxious to see a hotel named after the Queen, but they assumed the Canadians, as loyal ex-colonials, wished nothing more and had, with proper British understatement, just signaled as much. After due consideration, word was sent out that, yes, her Majesty would be pleased to grace a hotel with her name. And the CNR's decision was, in effect, made. For now, not to name the hotel after her would be an insult to the Queen, and to the Crown, which is not done. Thus painted into a corner, the CNR board stiffened their collective upper lip and announced the name of the new hotel—the Queen Elizabeth.

  This incident is fairly typical of English-French relations, in that all the parties involved felt innocent, righteous, and put upon. When the hotel's name was announced, the hoots and howls of rage and frustration from French politicians and editors lasted for months. To the French this was just one more bitterly resented, politically exploitable instance of arrogance on the part of the English. To many of the English, who, if the Queen's acceptance had been rejected would have been ten times more upset than the French, this was just one more instance of the overexcitable French seeking out and finding trouble where none existed.

  As for the Americans, one crass executive of the Hilton chain tried to have the hotel named the Elizabeth Hilton.

  To us, this was a lesson and a warning that whatever name we chose for our project, it had better be French—or there would be no project. I toyed with the name Place Renaissance, because we were dealing in a rebirth of Montreal, but finally chose Place Ville-Marie, evoking the beginnings of the city. Mayor Drapeau, delighted with the name, immediately checked with his Eminence, Montreal's cardinal, Paul-Emile Léger, who was equally enthusiastic. Boosted by this from both the church and the laity, we were just barely able to hurdle the next totally unexpected obstacle—the election of a new coalition federal government in Ottawa when the Liberal Party, after years in office was voted out. Flushed with victory and stuffed with their own economic-nationalist oratory, the new parliament looked on our "foreign" project through jaundiced eyes. A throw of the election dice had done us in, and the CNR was quietly advised to desist in its dalliance with the devilish foreigners from the south. And yet, we were a special case (no one else in the world was willing to tackle this project for the CNR), and we were in French Canada, another special case, where some of the French leadership had smiled upon our cause. Lazarus Phillips, that invaluable mediator, arranged for me to go to Ottawa to visit with the politically powerful Louis St. Laurent of Quebec province. Maybe, with St. Laurent's help, something could yet be salvaged.

  St. Laurent was most polite, but definitely cool. At the very start of our conversation he noted that the American economic presence was becoming increasingly unwelcome in Canada and that turning over twenty-two acres of CNR properties, Crown properties, to Americans, even if it were in Canada's long-term best interests, would be extremely difficult to support politically. Then he asked three questions:

  First: what we were going to name the new development? Well, since I was dealing with a Frenchman, I immediately told him it would be called Place Ville-Marie, which the cardinal and all French Montreal were pleased with. At this he gave a very French arching of the eyebrows and sigh of relief, which said all by itself several separate paragraphs about the Queen Elizabeth Hotel, Montreal, Quebec, and English-French politics in Canada. Next, after a series of indirect questions, he asked two quite pointed ones: Would we be putting up a lot of small buildings to compete directly with going businesses in Montreal? The answer was no, we were going to put up one great structure that would be to Montreal what the Eiffel Tower was to Paris. Finally he wanted to know if we were going to insist on taking over the whole of the CNR's twenty-two acres for development. And here, sensing what was wanted, I again said no, our interest was in the tower project, a mere seven acres; all we asked for was the right to bid on any second-stage project. Meanwhile, we would contribute to the overall project by donating our master plan for the whole of the area to the CNR.

  On hearing this last, St. Laurent said, "Mr. Zeckendorf, based on what you have told me, I now see things in a quite different light. I shall try to help you." The vote was close, but the government did give its approval, and we did get our lease.

  In matters great as in matters small, around the world as in Montreal, I find it is not logic but emotions, sometimes carefully rationalized to resemble logic, that more often than not decide most issues.

  We saw ample evidence of this in Canada in politics, in business, and in politics-verging-on-business, where I found a strangely strict, quid-pro-quo, favor-for-a-favor, an-eye-for-an-eye framework of English-French coexistence. Thus, before any street widening or property expropriations could be undertaken for Place Ville-Marie (which was considered to be in the English part of town), something had to be done in the French part of town. Therefore, the multimillion-dollar Berri Street tunnel and underpass had to be authorized by the City Council in order to clear the way for legislation aiding Place Ville-Marie.

  Even the St. James Club episode, where Webb & Knapp publicly played the villain's role, fit into place as part of the meticulously scored Montreal game of tit-for-tat. In our early plans for Place Ville-Marie we very carefully skirted the sacrosanct site of the St. James Club, with the intention of building around it. After all, what newcomer seeking friends and favor would willfully disturb the office-hour rookery of some of the richest and most important old birds and most likely customers in town?

  It just so happened, however, that the top French
club had been razed in a previous street widening. Montreal's French administrators, after pointing out the evident flaws in our compromise site plans, flatly announced that if anything at all was to be razed for Place Ville-Marie, the St. James Club would have to be, too.

  I dislike having to demolish such fine old buildings as the St. James Club, but, as I previously mentioned, since its razing did make good architectural sense and because I could find no workable alternative, we went ahead with the operation.

  The club members naturally fought this move, but, local politics considered, it was no contest. A Montreal cartoonist, French of course, depicted a last battle with assorted club members umbrellas drawn, standing off the workmen and fending off the bulldozers with blasts from seltzer bottles. This pretty much told the story. I suspect poor Donald Gordon, a St. James member, may have suffered some cool moments during the last days of the club on its old site. I tried my best, and went to considerable expense, to turn a bad situation into a good one. The top floor of the great tower in Place Ville-Marie is two feet higher than the other floors. We designed this floor, along with its private elevator, as new quarters for the St. James Club. The club membership, however, could not bring themselves to join with Place Ville-Marie. Instead they took quarters in a small, most unprepossessing and expensive new building diagonally across the street from their old quarters. The last I heard the St. James Club's operating costs had risen to the point that it was spending more than its annual income from dues.

  Another, and quite different, instance of in-city infighting involved Jim Muir. The longer the Royal Bank could keep any competitors from making a similar move away from St. James Street and onto the high ground in midcity, the longer it would be able to reap the advantages of being the sole bank in a modern office and new location. Therefore, Muir never publicly announced that the Royal Bank would be moving its headquarters to Place Ville-Marie, announcing only that he would take space in the new building. Muir was particularly interested in foxing another Scottish money man, McKinnon of the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce. But McKinnon was not fooled for long, and working with local developers, the Imperial Bank pulled a sly maneuver of its own. It acquired from the Royal Bank the lease to a key property at Dorchester and Peel streets. They began erecting the high-rise Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce Building, designed to compete with the Royal Bank in Place Ville-Marie.

  When he learned of these plans, Muir called in the bank officer who, all unknowing, had turned over the lease to McKinnon, thus giving aid and succor to the enemy. He gave this executive such a fierce tongue-lashing that that night the shaken man toyed with thoughts of suicide. Fortunately, he went back to work instead, to find Muir still bubbling furiously in the morning but no longer emitting lava. Like it or not, we and the Royal Bank were face to face with some competition. Muir was especially delighted to learn that, by city regulations, his competitors had to provide suitably spacious parking facilities within five hundred feet of their building. If they could not, they would be required to dig down through solid rock for the four or more extra floors to supply the necessary parking area for their building. The only available parking site was the Tilden Garage, and Muir immediately had us buy it with his money. Eventually, I believe the Imperial Bank of Commerce, which was not without friends and influence in Montreal, was able to have the pertinent regulations "properly" interpreted so it did not have to dig quite so deeply and expensively as might have been the case. The quite handsome Imperial Bank of Commerce Building was completed almost at the same time as Place Ville-Marie and is now doing well. The Royal Bank building, as we first planned it, was to be the tallest such structure in the British Commonwealth. McKinnon pointedly designed his building to be a few feet taller than ours. We made no visible response, but I had Cobb design the top of the building so that, if we wished, we could add a few floors. Then, when the Bank of Commerce plans were finally frozen for construction, I added three extra floors, to once more make ours the tallest building in the Commonwealth.

  The Bank of Commerce, however, was not our only competition. Back in 1955, during one of our first visits to Montreal, I had hosted a luncheon for a dozen of Montreal's top real-estate men. At some point between dessert and coffee I asked each of these gentlemen to give his estimate of the maximum amount of office space Montreal could assimilate in the next five years. They wrote their predictions on slips of paper, which I collected. Most estimates ranged from 300,000 to 750,000 square feet. I read these answers out. Then I cheerfully announced that we would soon be starting on a four-million-square-foot complex, which would be larger than the original Rockefeller Center. The faces at the table turned green with horror.

  One of my guests that day was a local developer named Ionel Rudberg. Galvanized by our entry into his town, he did a wonderful thing: he set out to build a thirty-four story, 600,000-square-foot office tower at the corner of Dorchester and University streets and catercorner from our own complex. Rudberg's smaller structure was completed before our own. To what degree home-town boy Rudberg drew on Montreal's underlying xenophobia, I do not know but he soon found backing. Canadian Industries, Ltd., which had turned us down, signed a lease as principal tenants and the building was named after them. Between the Canadian Industries, Ltd., the Bank of Commerce, and our own Royal Bank buildings, we eventually had three million square feet of new office space simultaneously on the Montreal market. Because of this competition, Webb & Knapp had to offer more attractive and lower terms than might otherwise have been the case in order to fill Place Ville-Marie. As a partial palliative, the rise of two new buildings on our flanks definitely assured the shift of the business and financial community to midtown. All this was very good for Montreal, which did indeed begin to undergo a renaissance, but what followed next, an amputation of a minor Place Ville-Marie extension, was not good for anybody.

  Rudberg, in order to get Canadian Industries, Ltd., as tenant for his new building, was forced to meet the exceedingly handsome trade-in offer of five million dollars which we, in trying to draw Canadian Industries to Place Ville-Marie, had made for their building. This building, at McGill College Avenue between Cathcart and St. Catherine streets, lay right beside our plaza and complex. Place Ville-Marie, like my concept of "X City," is set on a great, three-block-long, one-block wide platform. The buildings rise through this plaza. The plaza's long southern boundary, at busy Dorchester Street, flanks the Queen Elizabeth Hotel, while on the north, the platform stands fifteen feet above the elevation of quiet Cathcart Street. The center of the open portion of the plaza intersects the heartline of the city, McGill College Avenue. A man standing at the foot of Place Ville-Marie's cruciform tower can look north, along McGill College Avenue, across crowded St. Catherine Street, and directly onward to the bluff of Mount Royal—a perspective that provides a pleasant play for the senses. We decided to accentuate this pleasing geometry by widening McGill Avenue from Cathcart to St. Catherine streets, some 60 to 115 feet. Then, from the level of our plaza we would build a gradually sloping mall to the intersection of McGill and St. Catherine, the town's main shopping street. We visualized this combination causeway-promenade as the final link connecting Place Ville-Marie to the great department stores uptown and the commuter railroad and offices downtown. Though on a smaller scale, the mall was, in a way, reminiscent of the great approachway I had once tried to create for United Nations Plaza in New York.

  This time, however, it was not a prideful Robert Moses but a worried Ionel Rudberg who blocked our way. He was worried about a possible five-million-dollar turkey, the Canadian Industries building, which he would soon have on his hands. He fought the proposed street widening and mall in City Council, and what transpired was a lively example of the effects of in-city politics and pressure on planning.

  On the local political scene Mayor Drapeau had lost the 1957 election, to be replaced for one term by Sarto Fournior. Our relations with city hall were still excellent, and we had every hope of getting our project through.
That is, we had such hopes until Rudberg pulled out his aces in the form of a multibarreled corporate cannon. He persuaded his friends at Canadian Industries, then still owning and occupying their old building, to write a letter protesting our causeway, stating that the rise of a ramp alongside them would adversely affect their building. That letter cowed our allies on the Montreal Council like General Wolfe's guns on the Plain of Abraham once quelled the French in Quebec. Under Mayor Drapeau and his associate Lucien Saulnier (who could look beyond an immediate skirmish to long-term goals and effects) we might have been able to hold our ground, but no ordinary mayor could whip his councilmen into line against one of the city's major employers and one of the nation's larger and more wealthy corporations.

  The upshot of all this was that our opponents and enemies enjoyed a minor triumph and we were temporarily dismayed. But the real loser was the City of Montreal; it lost not only a delightful architectural flower but also the vital momentum for badly needed improvements and further widening along McGill Avenue. In spite of later great efforts by others, including my friends at Eaton's, the department-store chain, this momentum never built up, nor is it likely to do so for quite some time. (We dealt with Eaton's all over Canada, and I will later have more to say about this peculiar institution.)

  In retrospect we now know that Rudberg's building would not have been hurt, but much helped, by the increased flow of traffic through and around our proposed mall at St. Catherine Street, but this, too, is now just so much blood under the bridge. The lesson is that in a city, a relatively minor investment in open space can pay off handsomely in better rents for whole blocks in the area—if the city and property owners can raise their eyes above and beyond the limits of their own sidewalks.