Which is why I consider The Big Short a spiritual cousin to my book, The New Kings of New York. Such stubborn “craziness,” (others call it “vision”), is often what animates the most audacious and successful plays in the New York City development world (as well as some of the most calamitous and spectacular failures). Its main characters are a handful of savvy, eccentric investors who saw what was coming, and were willing to bet against everyone else-even when everyone around them told them, repeatedly, they were crazy. This book isn’t about the buildings themselves it’s about the banking system and the speculators who helped inflate the 2008 subprime real estate bubble. Michael Lewis, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine
Along the way, you’ll read about a cold-blooded murder, a disgraced Indian tycoon who ran the hotel from a maximum-security prison cell 7,000 miles away in Delhi, and the real story behind Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball.
And, once again, the ubiquitous Harry Macklowe and his soon-to-be-divorced wife of 57 years, who also purchased a pair of units, moved in, and muscled onto the condo board. Its owners included, among others, Donald Trump and the aforementioned Harry Macklowe, who bought it with almost no money down, unlocked tens of millions of dollars in value-and then lost it all when he offered it up as collateral in a ruinous deal to buy a $2 billion portfolio of midtown office portfolio with just $50 million of his own money, at the height of the 2008 real estate bubble.Īnd the famous institution’s role during the dawning of the second Gilded Age: you can read about the condo conversation plan in the early aughts, when a mysterious Russian oligarch, famous for surviving a car bombing in a Kremlin parking lot, paid a record price for the hotel’s largest penthouse. In Liar’s Ball, she recounts the antics surrounding the ownership of midtown Manhattan’s famous GM building, a luxury office tower and hedge-fund haven across the street from Central Park that long commanded the highest rents in the city and attracted the desire of some of the city’s biggest egos. Ward, a bestselling author and former Vanity Fair contributing editor, is a masterful storyteller. Vicky Ward, The Liar’s Ball: The Extraordinary Saga of How One Building Broke the World’s Toughest Tycoons Some of them even chronicle the additional exploits of some of the characters mentioned above. There are plenty of good yarns about some of the city’s most iconic properties, and the big personalities behind them. Of course, the real hero of many of the best real estate stories (certainly it is in my book) is often the most fascinating, enigmatic, famous character of all: New York City itself. Steve Ross, who owns the Miami Dolphins and built the Time Warner Center and Hudson Yards Arthur and Will Lie Zeckendorf, dynastic scions whose opulent condo on the Park was so successful fellow developers named it “Limestone Jesus” Kent Swig, whose epic spending spree ended in epic calamity and his irascible father-in-law Harry Macklowe, the meanest, most charming octogenarian in the city.
My book, The New Kings of New York, is about some of these larger-than-life personalities. (Along with divorce, physical altercations, lots of yelling and fortunes won and lost). And when you break the story down, the quest to win, build, or buy these concrete prizes constitutes the same kind of archetypical human dramas you find in many good stories-ambition, ego, hubris, failure, redemption. The building of properties in question are simply the embers that ignite their grandiose ambitions. Which is why books about the city’s most storied individual buildings (my favorite books at least) are never just about a lifeless piece of “real estate.” The most memorable New York City real estate books are also about the crazy, eccentric, larger than life characters the city has a habit of attracting. Some end up in the psychiatric emergency room of Bellevue. New York City has always been a magnet for the world’s most ambitious, creative and megalomaniacal.
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