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

by Gross, Michael

  All through 1992, the Gulf & Western tower was in financial limbo after the bankruptcy of the real estate company that had bought it from the MacArthur Foundation. The following year, the General Electric subsidiary that held the building’s mortgage foreclosed and faced two pressing issues: Paramount Communications, the successor to Gulf & Western, still rented 85 percent of the building, but its lease was set to run out in 1995 and it had no intention of renewing, and the building’s swaying problem remained; inspectors had finally declared that it was unsafe and demanded the immediate realignment of façade panels that had been knocked loose and the strengthening of all the others.

  Meantime, as Trump worked out his own financial issues, it emerged that one of his assets was untarnished: his name. When it came to selling luxury high-rise condos, Trump was “like no one else,” said the Gulf & Western Building’s managing agent. In 1993, fourteen Trump Palace condos were sold to a single buyer for $16.5 million—an average $634 per square foot. Trump Tower apartments were still changing hands at $1,000 per square foot.

  So after a year spent mulling its alternatives, when General Electric rejected the idea of selling off the building and began soliciting bids from developers instead, Trump was one of those it approached, and eventually, G.E. asked him to team up with the Galbreath Company, an Ohio-based developer that had helped G.E. consider its alternatives. “I didn’t know either one,” says Dale Frey, then-chairman of the General Electric subsidiary that controlled the tower. “I liked Donald’s proposals, but I didn’t trust him. I knew I could fall back on Galbreath.” Jack Welch, G.E.’s overall boss, was skeptical. “He said, ‘I wouldn’t, but go ahead,’ ” recalls John Myers, another G.E. executive.

  Success has many fathers and many have claimed credit for the moves that followed, Trump primary among them. “It’s hard to say who did what,” Myers admits, though Frey is willing, crediting Trump and his right-hand woman, Sunshine, with finding a way to “get around the zoning” and maximize potential profits by grafting a condominium to a condo-luxury-hotel with a restaurant in its base, with “very good design ideas,” and with what he brought in the first place, that name and the glitzy salesmanship that went with it, that made the project “take off.” Trump claims he also came up with a way to stop the building’s swaying, but Galbreath’s point man on the job, Scott Coopchik, takes exception to that, crediting a structural engineer, Ysrael Seinuk, Galbreath hired early in the process. “We were a very quiet company,” Coopchik says, adding that when it was sold in the middle of the process, “no one cared anymore, so fine, let Donald take all the credit.”

  All agree that Trump and Sunshine hired Philip Johnson, then the biggest name in architecture, to remake the tower in collaboration with Costas Kondylis. Johnson called their design a tribute to Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, with whom he’d collaborated on Park Avenue’s landmark Seagram Building as young man. Though some quibbled with Johnson and Kondylis’s choice of a dark bronze, pleated glass skin (called Trump-style gold by detractors), most agreed it was a vast improvement over what it replaced. “This is not a major work by Mr. Johnson,” Herbert Muschamp wrote in the Times. “Still, he has introduced considerable refinement to an essentially crass idea.” Johnson would later credit Kondylis for the job, telling the architecture critic Karrie Jacobs that Kondylis had done “the real plans” and he was “just the decorator.” But Johnson’s name on a building got attention.

  It was Trump’s name that really mattered, though. It “meant something to the Hong Kong Chinese,” then facing the imminent turnover of their city to mainland China, says someone privy to the deal details. G.E. knew they would want safe havens for themselves and their money. At G.E.’s insistence, he announced he would buy himself a penthouse, a purchase G.E. financed. “The Chinese wanted to know that he was going to live there,” says the source. Lots of apartments were sold to Hong Kong Chinese. The building’s success was assured. And it was probably doubly sweet for Trump, who had no other equity in the deal. Trump eventually flipped his penthouse without moving in or putting down a penny.

  Trump was also paid $75,000 a month and got a back-end share of sales profits above an agreed upon price per square foot. The observer adds a comic coda: “The building was going to be named the Trump International Tower until G.E.’s in-house lawyer noted that the acronym would have been unfortunate.” Trump and G.E. kept doing deals together. Trump still manages the building and owns its commercial spaces.

  Trump adds a coda of his own. He points out that he decided to relocate the entrance—complete with a new gold canopy—from 15 Columbus Circle to 1 Central Park West. And, of course, his name stayed on the finished product, the Trump International Hotel & Tower. His changes “immediately quadrupled the value of the asset,” Trump asserts. “And it was successful from the first. I’ve been given a lot of credit for having created Columbus Circle because I was the first there, but despite what people have said, I didn’t see it that way. I got rid of that address. I saw it as Central Park West.”

  Paramount’s lease on the Gulf & Western tower expired in spring 1995, when Trump and Galbreath started taking it apart in order to put it together again. That fall, the Metropolitan Transit Authority hit the reset button and started the process of selling the New York Coliseum all over again. The MTA finally had luck and timing on its side.

  In the intervening seven years, Boston Properties had hired a new architect, David Childs of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (who’d designed Worldwide Plaza for Bill Zeckendorf), to scale back its plan; the city had dropped the price for the land; and Salomon Brothers had agreed to pay some of the preconstruction bills that had piled up in the meantime. But critics continued to pound on all concerned. Faced with shrinking demand and discounted real estate values, Mort Zuckerman and Ed Linde had downsized their dream again, and again won city and judicial approval to proceed, but a year later, with the project stalled by yet another lawsuit, the MTA hedged its bet and sought proposals to reopen the Coliseum until the situation could finally be resolved. Meantime, Zuckerman bought the Daily News, the city’s largest-circulation tabloid newspaper, giving himself potential leverage at the same time he’d decided to press the city and the MTA into allowing him to keep the project on ice until the real estate market improved. For its part, the MTA wanted to force the issue, take Boston’s $34 million guarantee, and run. And no wonder. In the meantime, the potential bounty from the deal had shrunk from $455 million to $100 million, with a fifth of that coming from the city. It seemed relevant that Zuckerman’s Daily News had endorsed Rudolph Giuliani’s candidacy to replace David Dinkins as mayor in 1993. Even the project’s most vocal advocates were now wondering if what had first been presented as a windfall for the city had become just another corrupt political deal.

  The deadline for closing Boston Properties’ latest Coliseum contract came a few weeks after Trump’s arrival on Columbus Circle, which had served as a reminder that even in a bad economy, there was money to be made in real estate development. That deadline passed, though, and the parties ended up back in court, with Zuckerman seeking further renegotiation. Just hours before the trial was set to begin in June 1994, Boston won yet another revision to its deal. It would build only an office tower to start, and its guarantee was cut in half to $17 million; in exchange, Zuckerman and Linde promised to quickly secure both a new anchor tenant and construction financing. But not six weeks later, that deal, too, collapsed after Zuckerman refused to sign the contract and threatened to sue the MTA again for the return of his $17 million.

  Finally, Mayor Giuliani had had enough and pushed the MTA to seek a new developer rather than rent out the building, and in fall 1995, the agency agreed to make another formal request for proposals. A fresh crop of developers began circling the project.

  In the meantime, Donald Trump upped the ante, announcing something that his partners at Galbreath had actually arranged, that Jean-Georges Vongerichten, the culinary equivalent of a starchitect, would open a new restaura
nt serving three meals a day in the Trump International. “A luxury building with a star chef?” says Louise Sunshine. “Nobody had done that.” Vongerichten strikes a similar note as he recalls the day Philip Johnson dined at one of his earlier, more modest restaurants, spread the plans for the Trump International across his table, and “called me over and said, ‘I have a perfect place for you to open a restaurant.’ Everyone said we were crazy, going to Columbus Circle,” Vongerichten continues. “There was nothing around. Bums! An empty lot! But I wanted to do a four-star restaurant.”

  Both Vongerichten and Sunshine exaggerate. Bill Zeckendorf Jr. had long since brought Le Cirque and its superstar owner Sirio Maccione to the Mayfair Hotel, and there were already two high-end restaurants within a block of the circle when Jean-Georges opened in 1997, but it did eventually earn that four-star review, and it was a key factor in the tower’s immediate success. Even before that, New York magazine had noted that change was afoot on Central Park West. In September 1996, an article by Christopher Mason called “West of Eden” declared it “the glammiest address in town,” using the prices at the Trump International and resale values approaching those on the East Side’s Gold Coast as proof that it was suddenly competing with Fifth Avenue. Mason’s story noted that show people—Sting, Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick, Barbra Streisand, Bruce Willis and Demi Moore, Steven Spielberg, Dustin Hoffman, Steve Martin, Madonna, and Jann Wenner—still lived there and quoted the film producer David Brown, who’d been in the Beresford for two decades, saying the street was “no longer déclassé.”

  Really, Central Park West was the same, but perceptions had changed. “At co-ops on Fifth and Park, new money is frowned upon,” broker Linda Stein told Mason. “On Central Park West, it’s worshipped.” Donald Trump was quoted, too, of course, declaring that his new building had “led to the resurgence.” Around the same time, the New York Times ran a story calling Trump’s comeback a fait accompli thanks to his newest namesake tower. The proof? More than half its condos had been sold, sight unseen, at an average $1,000 per square foot, even though the building wouldn’t reopen for months.

  Among the other reasons: Trump peddled what one of his salespeople called the Wow Factor. He offered condo owners a health club with a swimming pool, hotel services such as fresh flowers delivered to your apartment as your flight is landing in New York, room service from Jean-Georges, larger bedrooms, his-and-hers bathrooms, higher ceilings, and higher-quality finishes than he’d ever before installed in his buildings. And though he’d toned it down a bit, there was also Trump’s signature glitz. “That’s the way Donald prefers it,” says Sunshine. “And in those days, the market was Asians, Europeans, Middle Easterners, and people from California, Texas, and Florida who wanted pieds-à-terre. Those cultures like that.” Trump played to those cultures with an international marketing effort that even included a feng shui ceremony.

  Change doesn’t happen overnight, and the one that had begun at Olympic Tower was only beginning to organize itself into something discernible. But one pundit saw what was happening at Columbus Circle and put it into a larger cultural perspective. In 1994, William J. Mitchell, dean of the architecture and planning school at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote an essay for New York Newsday titled “Will Manhattan Become a Bedroom Suburb of the Global Village?” Before most Americans had even heard of the Internet, Mitchell predicted that it would stimulate the market for high-end Manhattan apartments, “not because the jobs are there,” he wrote, “but because [buyers] are attracted to the cultural, entertainment and social possibilities that only large, intensely concentrated, well-connected populations can provide. . . . It’s nice to go out in the center of the universe.”

  Columbus Circle finally found itself at the center of that center.

  Fully aware that the moment was now, no matter what Mort Zuckerman thought, the MTA selected Eastdil Secured, a real estate investment bank, to “come up with a plan to select a group who would be capable of creating a workable plan for the redevelopment of the [Coliseum] site,” recalls Eastdil’s chairman, Ben Lambert.

  Once the bidding was opened—this time with an all-cash requirement—it was rumored Trump would be among the applicants, along with the Zeckendorfs and the Related Companies. Eastdil selected nine groups to take part; the Zeckendorfs were not among them. Most of New York’s other major developers were, including Trump, Related, and Millennium. Also in the mix were the Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette investment banks. All spent enormous amounts of time and money trying to win a deal, confirming the appeal of the strategically located property.

  The mixed-use proposals they brought with them included the obvious—hotels, apartments, offices, and big and small retail—but also television studios, auction houses, museums, an aquarium, rooftop gardens, a pool, and something called Discovery Circle, an entertainment/education complex for children with Rollerblade boardwalks, a bodysurfing pool, restaurants, and stores all rolled up into one hyperactive environment.

  Every starchitect on the planet wanted to follow Safdie and Childs into gladiatorial combat for the Coliseum site. Among the aspirants were Kohn Pederson Fox, Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo, César Pelli, Helmut Jahn, and, working for Trump, Robert A. M. Stern Architects, whose design placed a massive glass-and-masonry tower on the southern end of the site. In its rejection of a glass curtain wall, their proposal was a precursor to Stern’s 15CPW.

  Ben Lambert was still winnowing down the candidates when the Trump International opened early in 1997. “We eliminated all but three groups for various reasons,” he says. He met personally with each developer to ensure “they understood all the sensitivities of the selection process,” and that summer, with the MTA, chose Millennium Partners. “I called Chris Jeffries,” who was at his beach house on Long Island, Lambert says, “and suggested he fly in by helicopter so we could discuss finalizing the transaction as soon as possible.” But within hours, Mayor Giuliani threw a wrench into the gears, insisting that the winning design include a public performance space. Jeffries turned around and went home.

  None of the principals knows (or is, perhaps, willing to say) why Giuliani called a halt to the sale, but there are several theories. In one, Giuliani hoped the Metropolitan Opera, which ranked with the New York Yankees as his favorite cultural diversions, would open an annex, a “mini-Met,” at Columbus Circle. But the opera had no interest. Several of those involved think the mayor heard that Related was talking to Time Warner, the infotainment conglomerate (possibly through its then-president Richard Parsons, a prominent Republican), to move its operations into the project and wanted to give them time to make it happen. “He was” favoring Related, says one interested party flatly. Regardless, “everyone was sent back to the drawing board,” says Lambert. “It was a whole new process.”

  Millennium had been talking to Jazz at Lincoln Center, then a concert series without a home, to build it a performance space on Amsterdam Avenue, says Philip Aarons, but Giuliani’s demand caused a year’s delay, and in the interim Millennium lost its hotel partner and its deal with Sony and dropped out of the contest. Others did, too, and in April 1998, Related made a deal with Time Warner to rent almost all the planned office space. It also reeled in the Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group for a new hotel, and Jazz at Lincoln Center, and raised its bid.

  Stephen Ross, Related’s founder, a tax lawyer who, like Fred Trump, built subsidized housing and became a billionaire, “knew what he was doing,” says Ben Lambert, who sat down with Ross and hammered out the last details. An ironclad financial guarantee to the city from Time Warner was the clincher. “Nobody questioned if they could come up with the money,” says Lambert. So Giuliani’s pause turned out to be profitable for the MTA and the city. In the end, Lambert estimates, the price paid for the Coliseum acreage was about $100 million higher than Millennium’s earlier arrangement.

  Though Related and Ross have taken much of the credit for what became the Time Warner Center in f
all 2003, it wasn’t all the developer’s doing. Ninety percent of the $250 million purchase price was paid by a financial partner, Apollo Real Estate Advisors (now called AREA Property Partners), founded by Bill Mack, who decades earlier had watched his father’s wrecking company prepare the Coliseum site. Related and Apollo had already collaborated on deals. A year earlier, they’d won a site a few blocks south on Broadway that would become the Park Imperial luxury condo and an office tower, another addition to the Columbus Circle district.

  “We’d started marketing those [Park Imperial] apartments at eight hundred dollars per square foot,” says Mack. “But we averaged eleven hundred dollars and at the end were making deals at thirteen hundred dollars, so we had specific knowledge of what the demand was. The neighborhood was being improved, there was a natural transportation network, there were the views. And the building Trump did gave us the indication that people would pay high-end numbers. Everything said Time Warner would be a success.”

  Related’s plan for the site was created by David Childs, Mort Zuckerman’s second architect, and retained elements of his Boston Properties design, notably a pair of towers that paid homage to the Century and Majestic on Central Park West. The trapezoidal, dark-glass columns rising from the city-mandated curved base were positioned to echo Broadway’s diagonal slash through the otherwise regular street grid—a dash of jazz in an otherwise rational visual composition. The Rafael Viñoly–designed Jazz at Lincoln Center complex seemed to have been positioned atop that 150-foot-tall, glass-fronted base so its performances could be shared by strollers on Central Park South, drawing the eye toward that central retail atrium.