The Sit-Down

Location: So, one day, the phone rings. It’s Robert De Niro. He wants to build a hotel. Why did he turn to you?

Mr. Born: I’ve got to believe that he was very methodical and careful because he actually spent years with this piece of property [the eventual Greenwich Hotel]. I think he liked us because we were probably a little more low-key than some of the obvious names. And I think he was comfortable also because, from a financial point of view, he wanted to know he was getting involved with people who were solid and would be up to the task.  read more »

Location: This is a horribly anxious time to be in New York real estate, especially if you’re one of the city’s biggest builders. What keeps you up at night?

Mr. Sciame: I like to say that I sleep like a baby: I sleep for two hours and I cry for two hours. Only kidding. … Any major builder in this town in 2008 is having a very good year. And we’re having a very good year.

How is that possible? It’s been incredibly unsteady; apartments are going unsold.

It has been, but as the builder, we are building that building, and the apartments that you’re trying to sell have been paid for … which is why my year has been good.  read more »

Location: The city’s fiscal future looks pretty rough. How would you feel about raising property taxes?

Mr. Thompson: What you’re looking at now … it’s almost a rollback on a reduction. Because if you look, they just cut property taxes 7 percent. I think it is reasonable to expect that that’s going to get rolled back—I know the mayor is attempting to do that now. That probably makes the most sense in the short term.

Do you think the mayor will be successful in getting that through?

It’s clear the state isn’t going to be helping us; we haven’t felt the full impact of what the state cuts are going to be, so I think it makes sense to be able to do that, and the members of the [City] Council will probably agree with that.  read more »

Location: You were recently quoted in Crain’s saying that the hotel business might now be facing ‘the biggest decrease since the immediate aftermath of 9/11.’ Can you quantify this for us?

Mr. Fox: It’s a little tough to judge in the short term. Generally, we’re down anywhere from 10 to 12 percent for the first two or three weeks of October, compared to the same period last year.

 
Whereas the average monthly occupancy rate was as high as 92 percent, its highest level in years, just this past August.

The citywide number for the month was 92, but year-to-date we’re in the high 80s.  read more »

Location: About your new market report with PropertyShark, is this an attempt to challenge the Douglas Elliman-Miller Samuel juggernaut or to gain greater name recognition in the industry?

Ms. Liebman: The Corcoran Report, which we started in the ’80s, was actually the first report to ever come out in Manhattan, so we had a great head start in market reports. Our relationship with PropertyShark was more about getting as much data as possible, because to me, the market report should have as much clear information as possible for any buyers and sellers, so we want to put forward the best data that we can.  read more »

Location: Can I get you to talk about the much discussed report on the middle class that you are working on?

Mr. Bowles: I think one of the things that I’m excited about is that we’re not talking strictly about how to save the middle class. We’re looking at New York’s historic role as a place that groomed a middle class and looking at whether that’s continuing to happen today. We’re going well beyond just the real estate price increases that you’ve seen—and obviously that adds quite a bit of a burden to the middle class in New York—but we’re also focusing on things like the economy, and one of the problems that we find is that there aren’t a lot of middle-income jobs being created in New York City like the ones that were before.  read more »

Location: Where is New York headed now that its main economic engine, financial services, is on the rocks? Do cities normally survive when the main employer, job generator, income generator, goes belly up?

Mr. Kotkin: Well, in the case of financial services, it’s less a job generator than an income generator just because the jobs are such huge providers of income. Basically, New York has been on what you could call the ‘plutonomy wagon.’ Plutonomy is a term used to describe the intersection of plutocracy and economy. So New York has been the ultimate trickle-down economy—it’s been a relatively small group of people driving the economy.  read more »

Location: Since you bought Harlem’s Delano Village, now called Savoy Park, in 2006, how many of its 1,800 apartments have been deregulated?

Mr. Rubler: None. Or, under 10. I mean, occasionally, an apartment will achieve a legal rent that’s over $2,000, which, at least under today’s regulations, means that it’s technically deregulated, but it’s never a part of our business plan to deregulate apartments. Specifically, it’s part of our plan to keep 100 percent of our apartments within rent stabilization.

 
The New York Times reported that last year when you refinanced Savoy Park, it was underwritten for an ultimate cash flow of $19.  read more »

Location: In 2006, you went after the developer Aby Rosen’s plans for a glass tower at 980 Madison in The Times, writing that the Landmarks Preservation Commission would let him build whatever he wanted. They’ve since made him and his partners redraft and scale back plans. Are you glad you won?

Mr. Wolfe: Well, that’s not over yet. They did try again, with what was in effect a plan for a tall glass building lying down. You see in plans and renderings a slab maybe three stories high, but it stretches over a huge area. That building, between 76th and 77th, 980 Madison, is a whole block! .  read more »

Location: The financial industry is changing before our eyes. What’s your outlook for the city’s economy in the short term and midterm?

Mr. Lieber: There’s no question that this is unprecedented in any kind of shape for Wall Street since the ’20s. So we’ve never seen anything this bad, at least not in a long, long time. But having said that … around the economy, our unemployment rate is still relatively low—5.1-ish percent right now—which is up a little bit. Our tax collections going forward are on target so far, though we still are fearful about some of that declining.

 read more »

Location: You used to work in finance at Merrill Lynch and Wexford Capital. Now you’re in restaurants, as CEO of Pump Energy Food. Which is tougher?

Mr. Eskin: [laughing] Finance is a joke. You just kind of sit in an office and you tell people what to do and send e-mails, and you’re like, ‘Why aren’t these numbers the way they should be?’ Now, I’m on the other end, getting barked at about why our numbers aren’t where they should be, and now I get it.

Most Pump locations are pretty tiny.

They average about 500 to 600 square feet.  read more »

Location: Does Craigslist scare brokers, in the sense that it opens up access to real estate information?

Mr. Baum: No, Craigslist doesn’t scare me; in fact, I think that Craigslist is fantastic, if used properly. The problem with Craigslist is that it lends itself to ridicule because there are many posts that are either false or absolutely untrue, and there are scams where people have lost thousands of dollars because they think they are renting something when they are not. So Craigslist has its flaws in that respect, but at the same time, the opening up of information I personally think is a great thing.  read more »

Location: Let’s talk about the Summer Streets program. Has it gone as good as you would have hoped?

Mr. White: You know, when the city first announced Summer Streets, we were thrilled. The indications from other cities are that when streets are given over to biking and walking on weekends, it’s been a huge success, but skeptics here in New York thought that not enough people would come out; but we have just had throngs of people coming out walking and biking, and it has really just exceeded our expectations for success. We are calling the summer of 2008 the ‘Summer of Car-Free Streets,’ and a few years from now we might look back at this summer as the summer when car-free streets hit the big time and people woke up to the enormous latent demand for car-free living and walking.  read more »

Editor's note: A shorter version of this interview will run in the Aug. 13 print edition of The Observer.

LOCATION: Explain why Amtrak wants New Jersey Transit's planned ARC (Access to the Region's Core) tunnel under the Hudson River to connect with the Penn Station tracks.

Mr. Kummant: Basically, look, this goes back to a process we're leading, which is a process for the whole Northeast corridor. And, at the end of the day, we're in a completely different world, where capacity matters a great deal. You're looking at 2030 projections where commuter volume and Amtrak volume in total is almost doubling.  read more »

Location: Last year, a Legal Media Group study named you the best-connected and most powerful real estate lawyer in the world. That’s sort of extraordinary.

Mr. Mechanic: I did get a kick out of that, I have to admit. That was fun. I went to a meeting with a tenant I was representing with a pretty good sense of humor, and I walked in and he said, ‘Aha! We now have the best real estate lawyer in the galaxy!’ So you have to enjoy all that. But I think I’m pretty good at what I do, and certainly I have lots of relationships that I’ve developed in almost 30 years in the business.  read more »

Location: After years of bubbling real estate prices, the market is changing, and now is not exactly a good time to be selling an apartment—let alone thousands, which is your job. Do you lie awake panicked in bed?

Ms. de França: I mean, I realize it’s a challenging market, but I can’t say I’m living in fear of it.… We’ve enjoyed an incredibly robust market in the past five or six years, which is now stabilizing; I think that buyers are much more skeptical, consumer confidence is lower than it’s been. With that said, it gives us an opportunity to be patient with the consumer, educate them.  read more »

Location: How long has your family been out here?

Mr. Fodera: We’re just about an 80-year-old company; we’ve always operated in the city of New York, but we’ve been in Willets Point in this facility for almost 35 years.

Why’d you move out to Willets?

It’s tremendous as far as highway access, as well as the labor force, and it put us very close to our customers.

You do food distribution?

Bakery ingredient distribution. My clients start from the mom-and-pop stores right up to the biggest bakeries in the city.  read more »

Location: How did you first get into the hotel business?

Mr. Bashaw: When I got out of college, I bought a building in Cape May, N.J., and renovated it into a hotel in 1989, called the Virginia. … And then we bought another one called Commerce Hall, which we opened in 2002; 110 rooms, built in 1879, really amazing building.

Sounds like a lot of renovation work.

Well, we love renovating. That’s why this Atlantic City project is so fun for us.

So, these are two hotels, a HoJo’s …

And a Holiday Inn, and we’re combining them.  read more »

Location: The theme that unites the Mayor’s 2030 PlaNYC is that the city will grow by about one million people in the next 25 years. Do you agree?

Mr. Beveridge: It’s an interesting thing because the way they framed it was that it’s inevitable that the city’s going to grow that much. … If you take a look at it, that isn’t that much growth, percentage-wise, since they have it over 30 years.

So what happens in 20 years? How big is the city?

It will be bigger. Unless something bad happens! Then it will be smaller.  read more »

Location: How’s the capital market doing?

Mr. Herzka: If you’re talking about the Wall Street type of funding, that’s pretty much nonexistent.

Where’s the financing coming from?

From a lot of the commercial banks, large savings banks, life insurance companies, a consortium of banks funding larger deals, and of course the agencies Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.

And what kind of financing do you do?

Meridian actually specializes in all income-producing properties, whether it’s multi-family, retail, industrial or office. You’re sitting here with David Rosenberg, who heads up the capital markets group. And Ronnie Levine, who heads up the structured [financing] and construction group.  read more »

Location: Have you been better protected from this credit crunch because you sell buildings in the below-$100 million market?

Mr. Knakal: Clearly, the market for buildings over $100 million is much slower than the market for buildings under $100 million, mainly because of the availability of credit. … To the extent you’re looking for a nine-figure loan on an acquisition, that’s very challenging to find, mainly because most of those loans were provided by [commercial-mortgage-backed securities] lenders that are no longer active.

How have your sales been affected?

Our number of transactions is off by about 21 percent compared to 2007.  read more »

Location: You like to give parties with dozens of Russian violinists and industrial quantities of caviar. Is decadence your worst trait?

Mr. Rosen: The last thing I am is decadent. … I’m a big thinker; I do a lot of stuff; I enjoy life immensely. … When I throw parties, I blow a lot of money, you know what, so be it; that’s what I like to do.

That sounds like Trump. Do you think of yourself as a high-art Donald?

No. I love Donald because he’s a very unique guy—and he markets what he does with his character and his personality; I don’t do that. I don’t put my name on buildings; I don’t put my name on things. I’m not a commodity, I don’t market myself.

In 2006, it was reported that you had bought 350 West Broadway with your 40 Bond/Gramercy Park Hotel partner Ian Schrager to develop a hotel. Now it’s opening as a condo—without him. What happened?

No, no, no, I bought it alone. … We tried to buy the site next to it and the site behind it, and at that point I wanted it to be a hotel. And as I do most of my hotels, I at least talk to Ian about doing it in some sort of collaboration. … I love Ian as a friend and as a—he’s as good as they will ever make them. But I have my own organization.

It’s going to be a glass luxury Soho condo building with $9.575 million-and-up apartments with steam showers. Does New York City really need more glass condos?

New York never has enough of anything. I do think that glass condos will continue; glass is a great material, you can do whatever you want with it; you can bend it—look what we did at [40] Bond Street. We used glass, but in order to replicate the environment of a cast-iron district.

We’re sitting in 350 West Broadway’s sales center, where there’s an actual Basquiat in the bathroom and a huge George Condo portrait in the entryway, and you have a Warhol at the One Jackson sales center. When does art become just a sales gimmick?

Our sales office is basically a home; so you walk into a home and the home has great furniture, a great bathroom, a great kitchen, and great art. … I actually asked George to produce a piece of art site-specific for this building, so he did this, and it stays in the lobby. I did the same thing with Peter Lane, who is a ceramic artist, who made a beautiful installation. And the other lady, what’s her name [Michele Oka Doner], she’s doing all the bronze work, pieces that are going to be hardware for the doors.

Is it true you have Basquiats in your children’s rooms at home?

Sure, there are Basquiats. The kids chose them. The kids choose what they want to hang. I think those days are over where you tell the child, ‘Hey this is how it is. You live with a Mickey Mouse drawing poster that you bought for 12 bucks somewhere else.’ … I’m not enforcing a certain life on them. They like art, they choose. It’s their choosing what they want to live with.

You seem to not comment on whether your Basquiats, Warhols, Princes and Koonses are yours personally or lent by your company, RFR. Which is it? Is it the same thing?

It’s the same thing. … I have my own art collection that I buy, and then I have a whole bunch of different art that I have in the company’s name that I basically trade and sell and lend out to other buildings and other places. For me, it’s a logistic, it’s all under one umbrella.

You were going to build a Lord Norman Foster-designed 30-story glass tower on top of 980 Madison, the 1949 galleries building, until the Landmarks Preservation Commission made you scale back plans. How did you feel about the Upper East Side’s reaction?

A lot of people voiced their opinion in a fashion that they should have not voiced their opinion, just because of respect for people, period.

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Location: You’ve made a name for yourself as a real estate broker and hospitality consultant, making deals on behalf of operators like Jeffrey Chodorow, Giuseppe Cipriani and Stephen Starr. Now, you’re a part owner yourself here in the new Surf Lodge in Montauk. How did you make that transition from middle man to being sort of the man?

Mr. Kamali: Well, for a number of years, I was doing brokerage and consulting, and I would watch the demise and the success of so many operators, and you come to realize what mistakes they’re making and what they’re doing to become successful. Over the years, you really come up with a really good plan of what’s going to work and what’s not going to work.

When I found this property, I brought Jamie [Mulholland, owner of Manhattan nightspots Cain and GoldBar] here and said, ‘You know what? This is going to be amazing. We’ve done so many deals together. It’s about time we do something together.’ Instead of me just selling off this beautiful piece of land, I’m like, I want to be a part of this. I’m going to put my money where my mouth is and I’m going to be a part of the whole thing.

How did the deal exactly happen?

There was a previous operator called the Lakeside Inn. The owner had been here for over 15 years.

Who owned it?

A gentleman named Jim Barnts. He was running it as a dysfunctional hotel, with a pseudo nightclub at night. It had a bad connotation to it.

Sum it up for me, the vibe.

Local people coming in at 12 o’clock at night and partying until 4 o’clock in the morning, falling down drunk. Big disco ball in the middle of the room.

We ended up purchasing the property. As you can imagine, Montauk actually welcomed us with open arms.

How much for the building?

Isn’t that public record?

Oh, I can look it up.

Five [million].

How does Montauk real estate compare to Manhattan real estate?

It doesn’t.

What’s the big difference between operating and brokerage?

You know how much oil it takes to fill up these lanterns? See, these are little things that I never thought I’d care about or know about, but they’re the little things that you have to actually know as an operator. It’s a hit-and-run with brokerage. I think over the years it taught me so much. But you still don’t get the breadth of how much goes into developing a place like this.

How long has the project taken?

It’s been over the course of the last year. We built it in eight weeks. I mean, we renovated it in eight weeks, which is incredible.

What are your favorite touches?

I think it’s the bar. We ripped out a lot of the sheetrock of the ceiling. It was kind of ugly. We opened it up to expose those incredible wooden beams. Put up all those surfboards. Put driftwood on the walls.

Robert McKinley, who is our partner, handled all of the design and the construction. He was behind the design of P.M., Cain and GoldBar. Rob and our other partner, Jayma Cardoza, have been coming out to Montauk for years and years and years. Rob’s a big surfer and Jayma loves the beach out here. It’s the only time she gets to disconnect from the real world. Rob always goes over these incredible concepts he has. He had this concept. I’m like, ‘Rob, this [property] really fits the concept that you had.’

You also brought on board Sam Talbot of Top Chef fame. Why?

We had been talking with a lot of restaurateurs and chefs. But Sam was at the top of my list because of his passion for seafood. He also kind of fit the persona of what the Surf Lodge was: cool, sexy, fun. He wakes up every morning and heads to the port and picks up fresh fish.

Did you feel you needed a celebrity chef to make a statement?

With my partners, with their reputation and their following, I don’t think it was about making a statement. I think it helps that there was a lot of notoriety that Sam had. But it was more about his talents and his personality. He really fits into our family.

Now that you’re out here in Montauk, are you still doing a lot of brokering? Or are you just, like, hanging out for the summer?

Hanging out? [laughing] Yeah, Chris, come up during the week, we’ll hang out and go to the beach! No, it’s like all hands on deck up here—everybody’s doing everything. No, I have my laptop and my phone. I think 70 percent of my time with respect to my other business is really consulting for the food-and-beverage development of hotels. I do not do as much brokerage as I have in the past.

The hotel business is a good racket to be in these days. Hotel construction is booming, though the credit crisis may slow things down.

Well, the credit crisis didn’t affect the people who already had their loans two years ago. So they’re continuously building. I have six projects I’m working on in New York, ground-up construction of hotels; one of which, it’s being completed, but the deal is public now, so I can talk about it. Frederick Lesort is doing a Jour et Nuit down at 85 West Broadway, a hotel called the Smyth Tribeca. He’s handling all the restaurant and nightlife down there. I forged that opportunity.

How long will the hotel boom go on?

I wish I was a fortuneteller. I think the hotel market in New York is really strong. But I think developers in New York, unlike anywhere else in the world, react very quickly. So, if there are too many hotel rooms in New York, if we come to a point where occupancy levels drop below 80 percent, then you’ll find yourself, saying, ‘You know what? Maybe we should scale back or make these condo buildings or rental buildings.’

Should we expect to see you as partner in more things going forward?

I’m looking to bring this concept and others that we have to different markets. Hopefully, there will be more hotels for me down the line. I’d love to go into secondary markets. Even Puerto Rico, Peru, Costa Rica—it doesn’t necessarily have to be a prime location within those countries. It could be this cool little fishing village, where we create this little haven where people come and hang out.

You do a lot of surfing out here?

I actually just lay there. I’m good at just sitting there on the beach.

cshott@observer.com Next Page >

Location: On the rail yards, how did News Corp. tell you that they were no longer interested in being an anchor tenant?

Mr. Blau: There were several rounds, and they [the M.T.A.] called us in for what they said was the final round. We had hoped, or thought, that we would be designated at this meeting, which was to happen the next day; and literally 12 hours before the meeting, we got a call from News Corp. that said while they were very, very interested in the site, they couldn’t agree to commit at that moment.  read more » Next Page >

Location: You paint a pretty grim portrait of the financial services sector and its present role in the American economy. You write about the recent economic bubbles, including the housing bubble: ‘As for the financial sector’s behavior in such circumstances, surely there must be some applicable variation of Lord Acton’s famous thesis about the greater the power, the greater the abuse and corruption.’ What parts of the financial services sector are so corrupt and so prone to abuse?

Mr. Phillips: It would be the huge amount of debt that was undertaken by the financial sector for purposes of future amount of leverage; the huge amount of gathering of resources, I think it’s fair to say, by the mortgage-lending sector so that they had money on hand to come up with all the exotic mortgages; then the third aspect would be the elements of securitization that came to the fore in the last six to eight years, with particular emphasis, I suppose, on collateralized debt obligations, the mortgage-backed securities and some of the other related games, like the asset-backed commercial paper and some of the asset-backed securities.

You write toward the end of the book that New York will lose ground as an international financial center, falling behind London. Can you put a timeline on that decline?

Well, first of all, nobody would agree as to whether New York is ahead of London or London is ahead of New York with any great reliability. …

But let’s hypothesize that, as of 2006, they were exactly equal. And I would say that some of the burden New York would take on that would be a problem would have to do with, for one, the export of financial products. Some of the people in the financial sector have talked about the importance of financial products as, effectively, exports; and that would include various forms of corporate debt. … [Foreigners] seem somewhat less interested in debt instruments recently; not hard to figure why. So I think it’s fair to say the sale of tainted financial products has been a black eye for the U.S.

A recurring theme in Bad Money is the movement of the American economy from literally manufacturing things to a reliance on securitization and trading of debt. Why is it such a bad thing for the economy to move from manufacturing to financial services?

Because it’s not established that it’s a reliable modernization. One of the things I’ve gotten into in several of the books … was taking the views of various economists on the extent to which you could rely on a sort of postindustrialism as a sort of way to run a national economy; a number of economists have pursued that and come to the conclusion that you could wind up doing that sort of thing successfully if you were Liechtenstein or the Cayman Islands and what have you, but there wasn’t any evidence that the leading power could effect that transformation.

The reverse, of course, would speak back a hundred years ago of how London moved in the direction, that it was sort of the financial and commercial adviser to the world, but that didn’t work out. … Even in the mid-1920s, the British were so concerned with getting the pound back up. The idea was that having a strong pound would be important for the city of London; it was not an asset for the resurgence of British manufacturing. They thought that didn’t matter; they thought that the future of Britain lay in the financial services, so a strong currency would help.

Well, the currency didn’t stay strong and financial services didn’t stay strong; and they wound up, essentially, in the bag in terms of financial circumstances by the time World War II was finished. … In other words, Britain ceased to be the leading world economic power. My guess is, if we stay with finance dominant, we will cease to be the leading world economic power.

As for the housing market, do you think the policymakers and the elected officials deliberately created the housing boom?

Yes. Now, is that something that was done with the full notion of its fallibility? No, I wouldn’t say so.

But I think one of the conclusions you could fairly reach … is that [former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan] Greenspan, in his previous incarnation as chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers in the 1970s, was a great student of what happened within the U.S. economy. And then in his early stage as chairman of the Federal Reserve in the late 1980s, again, he saw a housing boom in 1988 and 1989, saw the extent to which housing prices climbed, before any bubble popped. …

That was sort of something he kind of kept in the back of his mind; and when the securities market bubble popped in 2000 and 2001, there was this look to see where they could get the stimulus to replace the loss of the roughly $7 trillion in assets that had gone out of the wealth pattern because of the loss in the stock market. Where could you replace this? Where could you create new wealth to make up for the slippage? And an obvious area was housing.

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Location: How long have you been working with your father, David?

Mr. Walentas: Since ’97.

And before that you were with Donald Trump?

For a year.  read more » Next Page >

Location: About six months ago you released an Ian McKellen-narrated video of what downtown Brooklyn would look like in five years. Given the current economic turmoil, would you release the same video today?

Mr. Chan: Absolutely.

The video cited $9.5 billion in private investment—that included Atlantic Yards?

That includes Atlantic Yards.

So you still think Atlantic Yards will happen?

Yeah, I think it is in the process of happening.

All 16 towers and arena?

The Atlantic Yards was always a project that was conceived as taking a few economic cycles to fully realize itself.

 read more » Next Page >

Location: Last year you did $1,129,126,981 in loans, which makes you the biggest mortgage broker in the country. How is that possible during such a massive economic crisis?

Melissa Cohn: Well, 2007 happened to be probably the biggest year in real estate for New York City, and I was certainly a beneficiary of that. I mean, it was the highest-grossing year for real estate in any year that’s ever been recorded. I certainly have benefited from the increase in the value of real estate in New York City.

 read more » Next Page >

Location: After more than 60 years as a stand-alone midtown Manhattan restaurant, you’re opening a second Patsy’s Italian Restaurant in … Atlantic City?

Mr. Scognamillo: We can’t be more excited, and the partner that we’ve found at the Hilton Casino, they are just as excited as we are.

This was so important to us, because, really, it’s our little baby; I mean, we have our little baby here and we want someone to be taking care of it and nurturing it and treating it the right way.  read more » Next Page >

Location: Your family has been involved in real estate for decades, owning various commercial, industrial and residential buildings throughout New York City. But a shopping mall? Retail is a new frontier for the Hemmerdinger clan, no?

Mr. Hemmerdinger: The interest in retail is all me.

What’s the allure?  read more » Next Page >

Location: In your bid for mayor, as of January, you’d raised $180,000 compared with more than $4 million by one of your potential opponents.

Mr. Avella: I consider that a virtue.

People use the term ‘long shot.’

I agree. Absolutely. I’m bucking the system; I have been since 2002. I’m the independent voice. … The real estate industry, which is the biggest contributor giving to people for higher office, they aren’t giving to me.

How many hours a week do you work?  read more » Next Page >

Location: Your new book, Creating Central Park, asserts that the park was a testament to democracy, lowercase ‘d.’ But it wasn’t born of it. Can you explain the vote for the park and the general push for the park?

Mr. Heckscher: I would like to start by saying that the whole issue of the park has to do with open space in Manhattan. Central Park is, shall we say, the conclusion of 50 years of political machinations of how to provide, for the city and Manhattan, open space mostly for health reasons—for air and space for the health of the public, and recreation.

Why hadn’t it been done beforehand?  read more » Next Page >

Location: We’re probably in a recession, and a big culprit is the housing market—prices were much too high, and now they’re really sinking. As the nation’s largest luxury home builder, do you feel guilty?

Mr. Toll: I feel guilty for not being more cautious and recognizing that we had to be on thin ice because things had been so good for so long. [But], by 2000, we should have entered the next down cycle, on an ordinary basis. But we didn’t. And if I had become cautious then, my company would have missed the great ride that it took in ’05 and ’06. In ’05 we made $800 million plus—net, net, net!