moment. “I thought [the GM Building] was the best building in the world,” he'd say later. “I knew exactly what to do with it.”
On June 6, 2003, he tried to muscle his way to the front of the line. He phoned Cremens and asked him what it would take to “pre-empt” the bidding on the building. Cremens brusquely shot him down; he told Macklowe that “we don't do pre-empt.” Eastdil would be running a sealed bid process. Macklowe would have to play by the same rules as everyone else.
Macklowe had anticipated this. He had also anticipated that no one considered him a serious candidate to buy the most expensive and prestigious office building in the world. A deal for over $1 billion would require an enormous amount of leverage. Macklowe didn't have much money (in real estate terms), and, to make matters worse, he had limited options with most real estate lenders. Maggin knew there were “certain bankers, including Lehman Brothers, who were not prepared to do business with Harry.”
Ben Lambert, Eastdil's tall founder and chairman, liked Macklowe but saw through his charm and affectations. Each time Macklowe pulled out his little black sketchbook filled with his riffs on architectural drawings, Lambert studied it politely, but remained skeptical. “I've often thought that there must be another book in which [Harry] wrote down what he really thought,” Lambert says. He would not be gulled into selling the building to anyone who couldn't come up with the right money and terms.
Macklowe knew his reputation, but he also knew that some people – quite a few even – thought his charm and taste redeemed him. “He can be elegantly articulate in the way he draws out his vision on a napkin or talks about a building,” says Douglas “Doug” Harmon, Eastdil's most prolific broker.
Macklowe has always deployed his charisma as skillfully as a wartime general deploying his artillery, treating laughter, tears, gentility, vulnerability, and jokes as different parts of his arsenal. “He is quite capable of bursting into tears if he thinks that will help him get what he wants,” says Harmon, smiling.
An afternoon with Harry Macklowe is like spending time with the personification of Vanity Fair magazine: at one moment highbrow, the next low, always, always intriguing. Among the numerous topics he talks about: He'd love to buy the American rights to the Smart car. He imported a few for six months and lobbied hard, but Mercedes stopped him, “and then I thought I should get back to my day job.” He'd like to own a hotel. He did once – Hotel Macklowe in Times Square on West 44th Street. He liked getting to know the staff, and hearing them say, “Good 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
