The United Nations at 50: the Zeckendorf connection - United Nations building; real estate developer William Zeckendorf Sr

Among the photographs and architectural renderings hanging on William Zeckendorf Jr.'s Midtown office is a glass-encased, slightly-worn and crinkled, 48-year old, block-by-block plot plan.

It's of a nine-acre tract running from 42nd to 49th Streets between First Avenue and the East River Drive. "The map was a memento given to my father the night, back in December '46, he was told the Rockefellers would accept his United Nations land offer," recalls his son, himself a developer of such mega-projects as the International Trade & Cultural Center in Washington DC. "There's quite a story behind that map..."

Indeed there is. And, by piecing together differing versions that have appeared over the past half century in various memoirs oral histories, unauthorized biographies and contemporary newspaper clippings, what most people think of as a cut-and-dried non-profit transaction turns out to be a lot more byzantine. Some may even call it an old-fashioned cliff-hanger.

The seemingly impetuous decision by William Zeckendorf Sr. (1905-1976) to scrap 12 months of elaborate planning for an urban complex larger than Rockefeller Center and make the land available to the United Nations at a huge financial sacrifice to himself and his partners is usually depicted as an extraordinary act of civic generosity. It surely was that, but in historical hindsight, it also turned out to be a master stroke of public relations. When Fortune Magazine characterized it as "one of the finest real estate deals anyone ever made," it wasn't just talking numbers. The worldwide media exposure that came to Zeckendorf and his firm, Webb & Knapp Inc., in the wake of that selfless gesture gave him instant credibility in the financial world.

It also launched one of the most spectacular careers in the annals of modern real estate development - one not likely to be repeated in our lifetime.

The passage of fifty years has reduced it to an historical footnote. In the wake of the 50th anniversary of the founding of the United Nations, with Bill Zeckendorf's two grandsons poised to take over the family-owned real estate business, it is worth revisiting its point of origin.

Paying the Butcher's Bill

In the early days, Turtle Bay was a wooded hollow on the eastern slope of Manhattan, flanked to the north and west by steep hills. Early in the 19th Century, that sylvan setting gave way to streets, trolley tracks, tenements and a progression of wharves and warehouses. After the Civil War, many of these buildings were converted into slaughter-houses, cattle pens and meat-packing plants. They were still operating at full capacity as late as 1946, polluting the air of the surrounding neighborhoods, a visual cesspool.

"On days when the wind blew from the east," William Zeckendorf Sr. would write in his memoirs 25 years later, "the smells from the slaughter-houses reached to Third Avenue and beyond. This is why the section of Tudor City backing on First Avenue has no windows."

From time to time, real estate brokers would sniff around, hoping to snare a prospective buyer to take to the owners in hopes of getting them to sell. It was a waste of their time. Actually, the owners - Chicago's Swift and Wilson families - had no intention of selling. Again, quoting Zeckendorf Sr.'s memoirs: "Since [the meat packers] held an irrevocable and presumably profitable franchise to operate in Manhattan, there seemed little hope of ever getting them out."

All that changed abruptly changed in December 1945. Early that month, Bill Zeckendorf Sr. got a visitor. He was John Dunbar, a broker with Cushman & Wakefield, who happened to be married to one of the Swifts. Dunbar said he'd been authorized by the two families to dispose of the roughly nine acres they held between them.

Their asking price was $17 per square foot. "Preposterous," said Zeckendorf counter-offering five dollars which, he pointed out, was well over the going market price for that putrefying strip of land. It was unacceptable to Dunbar, who reiterated that the families would accept "nothing less than $17." Zeckendorf began raising the ante, but stopped at $12. When Dunbar got up to leave, Zeckendorf excused himself to consult with his partners downstairs.

They differed sharply with Zeckendorf, reminding him that the land would certainly be worth a great deal more than $12 or even $17 a square foot once the meat packers left. They pointed out that just three blocks to the east, at Grand Central Station, land was going for $300 per square foot. The logic was overpowering. He saw that once the entrails-strewn charnel houses were leveled and the putrid air cleansed, there would be no limit to what the land could eventually fetch. "I was sure the price could jump to $50, possibly $75 and maybe even as high as $100," Zeckendorf would write.

He now told Dunbar he had a deal at $17. Even at that price ($6.5 million), a profit as high as $32 million seemed attainable. Webb & Knapp would put down one million dollars cash and pay the outstanding $5.5 million exactly 12 months hence of the date of signing.

To ensure against a "price-rise land-rush," Zeckendorf insisted the deal be kept secret for as long as possible. Dunbar would see to it that his clients' exit plans likewise be kept under wraps until the deal was consummated the following year. Besides, it would buy them time they would need to figure out what to do with the properties, as well as to raise the balance due. To come up with the down payment, Webb & Knapp formed a small syndicate of investors.

"On the While, We'd Rather Not Be in Philadelphia"

By sheer coincidence, Webb & Knapp's deadline would fall on the exact same day - Wednesday, December 11, 1946 - as the deadline set by a special committee of the United Nations Organization (UNO) to come up with a headquarters site.

UN Secretary General Trygve H. Lie, the former wartime Norwegian Foreign Minister, had set up a Headquarters Committee shortly after his installation in February 1946. At the time the fledgling UN was operating out of a vacated defense plant at Lake Success on Long Island. It needed a permanent home. Most of the defecates leaned to basing the UN in the US, setting off a competitive scramble that had narrowed down to New York, San Francisco, Boston and Philadelphia. New York's Mayor William O'Dwyer was determined to keep the UN here. Zeckendorf recalled O'Dwyer telling him "he'd give an arm, a leg and various other parts of his body... but that none of them was particularly salable."

The problem was that the city was broke, its infrastructure falling apart after four years of war-time neglect. "I felt," O'Dwyer is quoted in the Oral History Project at Columbia University, "that this was the one great thing that would make [us] the center of the world."

He'd appointed Robert Moses, the all-powerful parks commissioner, to form a blue-ribbon task force to liaise with Trygve Lie's UN Headquarters Committee. Moses packed it with such well-heeled movers and shakers as former Postmaster-General James A. Farley, Thomas Watson of IBM, Arthur Sulzberger of the New York Times, the Bronx borough president and two members of the Rockefeller clan. Together, they could ensure a flow of slick brochures, engineering plans, market research and whatever was needed to make the case for New York.

To make the UN a little more dependent on New York City, Moses had managed to "find" $2.2 million and convert an indoor skating rink on the old 1939 World's Fair grounds in Flushing Meadows Park into a makeshift General Assembly hall. The UN gratefully moved its operations there in October, but balked at the city's offer to make some 350 acres of the park available for a UN compound. The delegates didn't want to be in Queens nor, as it turned out, in suburbia. Too far, too hard to get to, and just as critically, the Nassau, Westchester and Fairfield county communities with the most suitable landed estates were very vocal about not wishing to have their manicured lawns trampled by footloose Bolsheviks and Third World delegates. They communicated those unbrotherly sentiments directly to the US State Department.

The problem with New York was manifold: there was no vacant site in Manhattan large enough to accommodate the UN. Even if there were, acquiring and developing it would be prohibitively expensive. Next, there would have to be Secretariat staff and delegate housing in a housing-short city. The UN also insisted the organization be exempt from city real estate taxes.

This last condition put O'Dwyer and Moses into an intolerable political bind: how could City Hall possibly subsidize the UN when there was no money in the budget for construction of schools, public housing, hospitals, sewer, bridge and road repair? Clearly, to stay in the running the city would have to seek funding in the private sector. Which is why Moses had recruited Nelson Rockefeller and his cousin, Winthrop Aldrich, to serve on the blue-ribbon task force.

With their self-imposed deadline less than six weeks off, the delegates were heading for an impasse. New York City attracted about as many as it repelled. By late October, San Francisco seemed to have been struck from the short list. With the jet age and trans-polar flight still some 20 years off, California was seen as being too remote from Europe. Its industries in flight southward, Boston was in even worse fiscal shape than New York. That now left Philadelphia.

The Philadelphians were dead-serious; they had begun condemnation procedures to clear a large tract near the University of Pennsylvania. Indeed, so sure was Philadelphia of winning the UN that its City Council had scheduled condemnation hearings for December 6th.

On November 9th, Lie told some of his staff people it appeared New York was no longer a viable choice. He felt he could stall no longer. "I telephoned (O'Dwyer and Moses) and told them that unless they came up with a new and better proposal," wrote Lie in his memoirs, "the whole thing would be over as far as New York was concerned. I had done all I could." In his disappointment, he still admired Bob Moses, and hoped that he would still somehow pull the rabbit out of his magic hat.

Moses did just that when he phoned Lie to tell him "something" had come up that might allow the city to actually make room in crowded Manhattan. His spies had learned of the Cushman & Wakefield/Webb & Knapp deal, but were in the dark as to details. The good news, Moses told Lie, was that if true, the land could be gotten cheap, for as little as two to three dollars a square foot. He would look into it and get back to him.

In his autobiography, Trygve Lie waxed rhetorically, "For what greater purpose could such a civic betterment be undertaken?" The problem, he told Moses. was that even if the 1and could be bought cheap, he wouldn't know where to get the financing. Moses said he knew just whom to call.

The X-City Epiphany

Having put a lock on the nine acres, what to do with them? "The challenge was not in selling land, but in creating value by using it judiciously," Zeckendorf Sr. would write later. "Not since Columbia University turned over its Midtown properties for the construction of Rockefeller Center had such a great land parcel as ours become available in New York."

First things first. Webb & Knapp needed to bring down its cost, so Zeckendorf hired "three or four brokers. to stealthily buy up surrounding properties clear up to Second Avenue at two to five dollars per square foot. "To throw the hounds off the scent" - pun unintended - Zeckendorf took off on a three-week vacation in South America. The dodge wasn't entirely successful. Word of the secret assemblage leaked and some property owners began holding out for more. Ultimately, some 75 properties were acquired for an average $9 a square foot. Webb & Knapp now sat on 17 acres.

What to do with all this potentially pricey land? Webb & Knapp could either resell parcels to other developers or become one itself.

Earlier that year, as Zeckendorf stood atop the 49th Street knoll, gazing south across the seven block-long aromatic hollow at Fred French's Tudor City complex, it came to him they would put a 14 squareblock platform over the hollow, anchored to the north and south heights. It would be like a 40-foot high roof over the cross streets, which would continue to sustain local traffic, parking and commerce. Atop this deck he pictured a city-within-a-city, bigger than Rockefeller Center. The next day he hired Wallace K. Harrison, one of the original Rockefeller Center architects, to give shape and dimension to his vision.

X-CITY (working name) would be comprised of at least four identical 40-story office slabs at the southern (Tudor City) end, three identical 30-story apartment towers for 7,500 families at the northern (Beekman) end and in between, two 57-story curved back-to-back slabs, one for offices, the other a 6,000-room hotel. Penetrating these two towers would be a large horizontal structure housing a concert hall and The Metropolitan Opera (known to be looking to leave its antiquated home on West 38th Street). In addition there would be a passel of retail/service stores, an East Side airlines terminal, a 5,000 car garage and on the East River waterfront, a marina, floating nightclub, etc.

In their recently published 1,374-page book New York 1960: Architecture & Urbanism Between the Second World War and the Bicentennial, authors Robert A.M. Stern, Thomas Mellins and David Fishman praise the project as "a boldly-scaled vision of postwar urbanism that astutely married sound real estate principles with enthralling, futuristic aesthetics."

The platform idea wasn't all that unusual; after all, that is precisely what the New York Central Railroad had done back in 1913 when they covered the open tracks running north and south in and out of Grand Central Station. "The roofing created Park Avenue' and a fortune in real-estate values," Zeckendorf would write in 1970, "but what l was proposing was a greater and more unified development." That summer, he set up shop at the Club Monte Carlo, a nightclub on which Webb & Knapp had foreclosed, using elaborate scale models to woo prospective investor/tenants. There was a lot corporate interest, but not to the extent Zeckendorf had hoped.

Meanwhile, in Chicago, the Swift and Wilson families questioned whether Webb & Knapp would meet its due-date. If Zeckendorf, too much the consummate salesman, was worried, he did not let on. Privately, he despaired of ever finding sufficient financing, and even toyed with the notion of selling the land to the city - not that the city could afford to buy it.

But then, on Friday morning, December 6th, wrote Zeckendorf in his memoirs, "Suddenly, a new, totally unexpected possibility developed."

At home, over morning coffee, while scanning the New York Times, Zeckendorf read of UNO's impasse. He turned to his wife and exclaimed, "I'm going to put those bastards on my platform! n He phoned Mayor O'Dwyer and confirmed that his company had assembled a large chunk of Manhattan real estate which he now would be willing to sell to the UN, "for any price they wish to pay." O'Dwyer summoned Moses who, in turn, phoned Nelson Rockefeller.

"Why Pa, That's Most Generous!"

Weeks before, Nelson, the once and future Governor of the Empire State, committed to keep the UN in the state, had almost convinced his father and brothers to give the world organization a major chunk of the family's 4,000-acre Pocantico Hills estate near Tarrytown, but the UN scouts - after an aerial survey on a Rockefeller plane - said no, New York meant New York City. Rockefeller then impetuously proposed the UN take over the (now-defunct) Center Theater at Radio City, but hastily withdrew the offer after protests from brothers Laurence, David, Winthrop and John III. Now Nelson was about to become the man of the hour.

Throughout that entire weekend, meetings took place at Pocantico Hills and in Room 5600 at 30 Rockefeller Center. It was a nonstop conclave of various family members, consultants and friends - including architect Wallace Harrison and Bob Moses. Conspicuously absent was Bill Zeckendorf. He'd made his offer; now he would have to wait for a response. He knew how these things worked.

"Saturday and Sunday were among the most tense and exciting that I can recall as Secretary-General," wrote Lie. "Momentous conversations were taking place backstage; steps were being taken that might snatch victory from defeat and crown these fifteen months of effort with success. "

What would normally have taken months now had to be done in the four remaining days before the UNO Headquarters Committee was gaveled into session. But as former Newsday journalist Robert A. Caro detailed in his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Moses, "In just 96 hours it was done." Land that Webb & Knapp didn't control had to be acquired; 47th Street would have to be widened to provide access to the site; city property such as the East River bulkheads would have to be surrendered; Albany would have to sanction the closing of certain cross streets within the designated UN perimeter; Washington would have to be asked for an interest-free construction loan, etc. "For every snag that arose," said Caro, "Moses had a knife."

The patriarch, 70-year old John D. Rockefeller Jr., had decided the family would make a gift to the UN much like the large sum his father had bestowed upon the League of Nations. The UN would then buy the land from Webb & Knapp. "Why, Pa," exclaimed Nelson, "that's most generous of you!" (According to Rockefeller Family biographers Peter Collier and David Horowitz, his father would later take Nelson aside and say, "I hope this makes up for the Center Theater. " They also suggest that the Rockefellers' generosity may have been tinged with practicality: with Rockefeller Center only 60 percent leased, X-CITY posed a competitive threat).

As Zeckendorf had pointedly not set a figure, Rockefeller turned to Harrison. "Ask him to be more specific, we need a figure." It may be assumed Harrison already knew what Webb & Knapp would have to come up with on Wednesday and what it had paid Harrison Abramovitz & Harris to develop the X-CITY renderings and scale models.

On Tuesday night, December 10th, as Zeckendorf was celebrating his 41st birthday with a dinner party at the Monte Carlo, according to Robert Caro, "Harrison walked in with a block-by-block map of the site bulging out of his jacket pocket, sat down, tried to assume an air of nonchalance, failed and blurted out, "Would you sell it for $8.5 million?"

The deal was struck then and there. "After Harrison had signed the history-making option," recalled Architectural Forum publisher Howard Myers, "He started back to Rockefeller Center to report the news to Nelson. Realizing how much Rockefeller wanted to know the outcome, Harrison decided to telephone. When the word came through, Rockefeller was understandably delighted and shouted, "Wally, that calls for a celebration. See if you can't bring back a bottle of champagne." Entering a liquor store, Harrison selected a vintage appropriate to the occasion. Carefully he withdrew his wallet from an inside pocket. In it were the executed options for $8.5 million, and two $1 bills."

Wednesday morning, Zeckendorf was in his office when Nelson Rockefeller called. "We've been up all night patching up the details, but it's going to work. The old man is going to give that $8.5 million to the UN and they're going to take your property. See you soon... good-bye."

Within the hour, over at Flushing Meadows Park, US delegate Warren Austin announced the Rockefeller gift, stipulating that the City would add another $2.5 million to build a half-mile tunnel beneath First Avenue, street widening and other improvements. Philadelphia had lost.

When the General Assembly convened three days later, it voted 46-to-7 to accept the Rockefeller gift - the nay votes coming from Australia, El Salvador and the Arab bloc.

To help sell the member nations, the UN Headquarters Committee utilized parts of Zeckendorf's X-CITY proposal, which had been annotated by one of Harrison's aides. According to Harrison's biographer, Victoria Newhouse, "[he] had simply penciled in the words `General Assembly' in place of the opera, and 'Security Council', `Economics & Social' and `Trusteeship' next to various other auditoriums that the proposal had contained." This was just one of the ways, notes New York 1960, in which the design character of the world headquarters was established." A number of Zeckendorf's platform ideas were ultimately adopted in the final plan.

Now Harrison assembled team of renowned architects, including France's prickly Charles Edouard Jeanneret (a/k/a Le Corbusier), Brazil's Oscar Niemeyer, Sweden's Sven Markelius, Uruguay's Julio Vilamajo, Canada's Ernest Cormier, the USSR's Nikolai D. Bassov, UK's Howard M. Robertson and designers from ten other countries.

When Trygve Lie asked Harrison for a construction cost estimate, he was shocked to learn the UN complex would require al least $85 million. The best they could do was to bring the estimate down to $65 million. President Harry S. Truman prevailed upon Congress to approve a 30-year interest-free loan to pay for the construction. It was repaid, on schedule, in 1982.

Three months after the UN's acceptance of the gift, Mayor O'Dwyer and the Board of Estimate pledged an additional appropriation of $15 million to rehabilitate the area adjacent to the UN compound. By the time the UN complex had been completed the city's tab had risen to $25 million - still worth it, given the tourist value of the UN. Excavation commenced in the summer of 1948. Construction would take four years.

Finally, a personal post-script: Bill Zeckendorf Sr. bowed out of UN development after a bruising battle with Moses over the city's refusal to create a triumphal boulevard on East 47th Street for reasons probably more political than architectural. And though he actually had few meetings with Trygve Lie during the 15 months the UN was looking for a home, he would see a lot more of him through sheer happenstance ten years later: In 1956, his son, William Zeckendorf Jr., had a blind date with Trygve Lie's daughter Guri, and not long afterwards, the two married. Their two sons - William Lie Zeckendorf, 36, and Arthur William Zeckendorf, 34 - on whom both grandfathers would dote, now serve as co-executive vice presidents of Zeckendorf Realty LP.

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