Billionaires' Row

Chapter 1

Saving Harry Macklowe

Maybe we should take a walk?

It was 2008, the depths of the global financial crisis, and Harry Macklowe had been stuck for hours at the Lower Manhattan offices of his law firm when his broker, a real estate power player named Darcy Stacom, suggested the septuagenarian might want to step outside and clear his head. 

As Macklowe and Stacom headed for the doors, a team of lawyers and brokers stayed behind as they continued to hammer out the final terms of a deal Macklowe desperately didn t want to make: the sale of the iconic General Motors building on New York s Fifth Avenue. 

The General Motors building, a gleaming marble-clad tower anchoring the southeast corner of Central Park, was the crown jewel of Macklowe s real estate portfolio, which at one point included at least ten trophy office buildings in and around Midtown. Built in the 1960s by the architects Edward Durell Stone & Associates with Emery Roth & Sons, the building was a defining example of the International Style, characterized by clean rectilinear forms, and it appealed to Macklowe s taste for what he deemed architectural purity. The firm he founded, Macklowe Properties, had beaten out at least a dozen other developers to buy it in 2003 for a record-breaking $1.4 billion, the most ever paid for a skyscraper in the United States, putting down only a $50 million deposit in a highly leveraged deal. He had then taken great pleasure in restoring its tasteful, stripped-down aesthetic by removing the big gold letters on its marble exterior that spelled out t-r-u-m-p, one of the former owners. 

Initially, the real estate community had scoffed at the high price Macklowe paid for the tower, but he had proved them wrong when he unveiled a new glass cube at its base that would serve as the striking retail entrance for Apple s latest New York retail store, which would attract around fifty thousand visitors per week in its first

Katherine Clarke is a reporter at The Wall Street Journal, where she covers the high-end real estate market across the United States. Previously, she wrote for the New York Daily News and The Real Deal.

Some years hence, anthropologists or aliens will look to a half-dozen spindly towers that rise improbably high above the southern edge of New York s Central Park when trying to understand this particular age of hyper-wealth. In the meantime, the rest of us can consult Billionaires Row, Katherine Clarke s thrilling chronicle of those towers and the people who built them. Financial Times

Based upon extensive accounts from New York s power brokers, this fast-paced narrative cracks open the cutthroat world of $100 million apartments for the global one-percenters. Robb Report

A rollicking account . . . The Wild West has nothing on the cowboy builders, bankers, and buyers who populate Clarke s tale. . . . Engrossing. Air Mail

Katherine Clarke knows the world of real estate down to the ground indeed, down to the bedrock! But she carries that knowledge lightly as she describes the swashbuckling egos, the daredevil deals, and the tsunami of wealth that are imposing skyline-shaping changes on one of the world s most iconic cities. I loved this book. Diana B. Henriques, bestselling author of The Wizard of Lies

A necessary book about how not to build a city . . . Katherine Clarke has the rare ability to make you understand both the personalities and the numbers behind our modern Towers of Babel along 57th Street; the result is a coolly devastating portrait of the game of greed and ego that has permanently scarred the skyline and the psyche of New York. Thomas Dyja, author of New York, New York, New York

Thrilling, incisive, and a lot of fun to read. Eliot Brown, bestselling co-author of The Cult of We

A captivating portrait of the powerful mix of ego, money, and competition that a century after the construction of the Empire State and Chrysler buildings continues to transform the city s skyline. Kate Ascher, professor, Columbia University, and author of The Heights

This book is a study of how