Word: zeckendorf
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Ponte was educated at Harvard ('49) to make grand designs; on a Fulbright in Rome, he studied the relationship of baroque planning to infinite calculus. But when he went to work with Architect I. M. Pei for Developer William Zeckendorf, the realities of real estate narrowed his focus. Helping to plan Zeckendorf's many urban-renewal projects, Ponte learned how even one strategically located building could improve a city's tax structure as well as its aesthetic ambiance. He discovered something else: "The feet have their own reasons. The activities that make a city-shopping, finance...
...anecdote, among the best in this personable, skillfully concocted autobiography, is characteristic Zeckendorf because, win or lose, he has always managed to come out sounding like a winner. After all, a man as shrewd as Howard Hughes would only send for the best...
Major in Real Estate. Immodesty becomes few men as well as it does Zeckendorf. Apart from the tangle of overextensions and bad luck that resulted in the collapse of Webb & Knapp in 1965, Zeckendorf seems to have little to be modest about. The son of a Long Island shoe manufacturer, he dropped out of high school, but entered college after attending a cram school and completing 16 regents' exams in one week. In 1925, after three years of parties and football, he dropped college to major in real estate...
During World War II, Zeckendorf won a reputation as an astute real estate manager by increasing the value of Naval Commander Vincent Astor's properties by $15 million. But it was the postwar building boom that finally made the ambitious and by now well-seasoned Zeckendorf a "bee in clover." Basically, a successful real estate deal is an economic snowball operation. You find a good property, make a minimal down payment, borrow as much as possible at low interest, then sell high to finance the next deal. In addition to having an uncanny instinct for all the complex variations...
Together with Architect I.M. Pei, he helped rebuild whole sections of Denver and Dallas. The two men were also prime movers in the renovation of southwest Washington, D.C., which began in the early 50s, and in the planning and building of the imposing Place Ville-Marie in Montreal. Zeckendorf devotes a major part of his book to detailing each venture. Outer leases, inner leases, sandwich leases, varieties of mortgages and credit, fees simple and not so simple-all are juggled so adeptly that even if the layman doesn't fully understand them, he is dazzled by the performance...