morning, Mr. Macklowe, how are you?” “How could I not like it?” asks Macklowe. “It was a show every day.”
He loves to tell stories – about buildings, about himself, about his friends. He enjoys being with writers, artists, and performers. He collects them much in the way Andy Warhol assembled his Factory crew.
He gets lost in reveries on Mies van der Rohe; the precision of a Henri Matisse drawing (“his lines.. the pencil seems to never leave the page”); the modernist influence of Hungarian-born architect Marcel Breuer; the details of Paris's Place Vendôme and Place de La Concorde. In moments of tension or if he wants to change the subject, he breaks into songs – funny, nostalgic show tunes, often by Cole Porter. He talks about art; he and his wife Linda (whom he describes as “very clever”) have accumulated a “massive” contemporary art collection that includes works by Alberto Giacometti, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning.
Then there are his endless off-color jokes delivered with the panache of a stand-up comic. Macklowe slips into an Irish accent while delivering them, as if distancing himself from the filth of his utterances. The accent and the sparkle in his eyes disguise, temporarily, the sordid, mostly sexist nature of what he is saying.
“There are layers of darkness to Harry,” says Doug Harmon. “There's a complexity that's difficult to explain.”
That dark side was first exposed in what is commonly called the “SRO debacle.” As Macklowe and his wife moaned to close friends, for more than 20 years it wasn't possible to read a news item about Macklowe without finding a mention of the incident.
SRO stands for single-room occupancy – or, according to Joseph “Joe” L. Forstadt, one of Macklowe's lawyers, an apartment building full of “rooms without a bathroom.”
In 1984 Macklowe put a $1 million down payment on two Manhattan SROs from a developer named Sol Goldman – with the intention of demolishing them along with two neighboring structures and erecting a 38-story hotel, the Hotel Macklowe.
Then the city government under the administration of the mayor, Edward “Ed” Koch, imposed a moratorium on such destruction, since most SRO inhabitants had nowhere else to live.
Macklowe needed to move quickly – before the ban took effect. He recalled, “We had instructed our construction department to get their demolition permits and move forward. For some reason, they dropped the ball. They promised me that they had all the papers in hand.”
On January 7, 1985, with only hours left before the law changed, a cold winter's night darkness fell – as did the four large buildings at 145, 147, and 149–151 West 44th Street. A crane was moved into the street and one by one the buildings were pulled down. Their destruction created so much debris that one onlooker said the air “looked like fog.”
Not only had the permits not been “in hand,” but the gas had been left on. It was a miracle no one was killed.
There was an immediate outcry. The Real Estate Board of New York held an emergency meeting. Macklowe waived immunity and appeared before a grand jury. Reports of his testimony stated that he categorically knew – as opposed to what he now says – that his team did not have a permit. Still, he maintained he absolutely thought the gas was off. “Whether I had a demolition permit or not, I relied on and presumed that my demolition man would do a proper job,” he told the grand jury.
His vice president for construction, John Tassi, would admit he had given the go-ahead to the owner of the construction company, Edward “Eddie” Garofolo, knowing that the permits weren't in place and that the gas wasn't turned off. Both Tassi and Garofolo were charged with reckless endangerment. (Garofolo would later be killed in a mob hit.) Tassi, who now lives in North Carolina, refused to discuss the incident for this book.
Macklowe was not indicted.
The foreman of the grand jury told the court that “our concern is that the man who initiated the whole thing hasn't been charged.” District Attorney Robert Morgenthau told a reporter for the New York Times there hadn't been sufficient evidence to indict Macklowe.
The city sued Macklowe, who settled and paid a fine of $2 million; he was banned from building on the site for four years.
“We have sent a loud and clear message to real-estate developers,” Mayor Koch said. “You cannot shield yourself from the consequences of your misconduct by having others do your dirty work.”
Just two years later, the Hotel Macklowe was under construction.
How? Why? Editorials in the New York Times criticized the government and called the saga “the Macklowe Mess.”
Harry Macklowe had beaten the system with the help of a “very, very brilliant attorney” named Joe Forstadt of Stroock, Stroock & Lavan, who argued the case all the way to the United States Supreme Court.
In a rather garbled way, the city now stated there had been a muddle. It had been “unconstitutional” to ban Macklowe from building on the site.
Macklowe moved on blithely. “What a privilege it is to go to Washington and argue before a seven-judge panel,” he said in the summer of 2013, about his visit to the Supreme Court.
The SROs left a stench about him. Subsequent headlines almost always conjured up a ruthless, sinister profiteer. The story lines were variations on a theme: He bought buildings; he lost them. He fought with tenants, with everyone. He defaulted on loans. He played hardball. Some of the headlines: In 1995 he was embroiled in a long-running border dispute in East Hampton with neighbor Martha Stewart over a row of trees he put up – and she took down. In 1997, as he was clearing a building site at Second Avenue and 53rd Street, he evicted 13 rent-controlled tenants, including an 82-year-old blind man, Carl Steindler, who compared the eviction to a death sentence. Later that year, bricks fell onto the sidewalk from a building Macklowe had bought on Madison Avenue. And, again, he was lucky no one got killed.
It seemed he couldn't outrun his origins. Macklowe was an outsider, a hustling striver in a world of very rich men. The son of a textile converter, he used leverage – borrowed money – to buy properties, while many of those around him – the children or grandchildren of rich families with names like Rudin, Durst, and LeFrak – “viewed leverage, at least on a grand scale, as a last resort.” But what was Macklowe, a college dropout from upstate New York, to do? He wasn't rich and he was in a hurry. “I was impatient,” he says of his early days in the business. Leverage was the only way he could play in New York City's rocketing real estate market.
By the late 1990s, his net worth was around $100 million. But he wanted much more. “I just.. love it; it's a challenge, and I love being the designer. I love being the architect. I love being able to execute my vision, and I think my vision – this is obnoxious – I just think my level of taste is better than most architects’. I think I have my finger on what it is that I want to do, and the actor in me, that little bit of bravado, all of that shit which just bubbles up, gives me a lot of gratification, and kinda drives me to it. So I could talk passionately about how this [building at 610 Broadway] was a car wash, and I bought it from a Russian Jew. I did this, and I did that. But what I'm most proud of is the graceful lines of that building, the glass elevator there. Nobody has a glass elevator to the street. This is hot shit,” he said.
A friend of the Macklowe's put it this way: “There's a German expression, Profilneurose; it means literally ‘fear of invisibility.’ That's what Harry had. He wanted to be recognized for the attributes he saw so clearly in himself.”
In June 2003, Harry the scrapper wasn't about to give up the idea of owning the GM Building just because he might have been the poorest man in the bidding. He had said he was going to buy the GM Building, and he would. He believed he had a plan – a vision – for how to make the building more profitable.
“A very clever entrepreneur who sees something there that somebody else doesn't see.. has the advantage,” he says. “I perceived that to be the best piece of real estate in the city;.. it was being sorely neglected, there was room to grow the rent, there was room to change the building.”
In