Art Rubloff Rides Again

Mrs. Arthur Rubloff of Chicago got a present from her husband last week: A $1,500 beaver coat. Art Rubloff, ex-shoe-shine boy, now a top Chicago real-estate man, was feeling chipper. Said he: “I’ve done myself a nice fat deal.” The “fat deal” was for a new $4,700,000 Greyhound bus terminal which will streamline the skyline of Chicago’s Loop.

As agent for Greyhound, Rubloff bought the famous old Ashland Block, a 16-story terra cotta skyscraper that sunburned the tonsils of visitors to the World Columbian Exposition in 1893. He also bought seven adjoining properties, making 70,000 square feet in all. Total cost: $1,700,000. Best guess on Rubloff’s commission: $50,000.

When & if Greyhound can get steel and other construction materials (probably not very soon), it will tear the old buildings down. In their place will rise a long, low (four stories) $3,000,000 building which will be the world’s largest and swankest bus station. Busses will enter the basement by ramps, unload passengers to escalators running to a first floor complete with waiting rooms, shops, restaurant, newsreel theater, parking garage.

Rubloff has worked on the deal for 30 months, scurrying around for options, renewing them when they expired, getting 2,200 of the Ashland Block’s certificate holders to approve a sale. “All big deals are one long series of headaches,” he said last week. “I used stooges and dummies and anything I could think of. … I scarcely even tell myself what I’m doing until I’m through.” Rubloff, 39, quit grade school to shine shoes and peddle newspapers for a living, got into real estate in 1919 as an office boy. His only departure from the Alger script was in the lush ’20s: “I made plenty of dough but I spent it—while the other boys were losing theirs in the stockmarket.” When he went into business for himself in 1930 he didn’t have a dime. He rented a $45-a-month office, got $1,500 worth of credit from a sign-painting company, talked himself into managing properties that had been hard hit by depression. In the first year, he says, he made $57,000.

Since then he has been agent in Equitable Life Assurance Society’s $1,275,000 purchase of a La Salle Street office building, in several other spectacular deals. Last week’s was tops to date; Rubloff calls it “Chicago’s biggest real-estate deal in three decades.” Tall and trim, Rubloff lives in the fashionable Lake Shore Drive Hotel, spends weekends raising flowers and Gordon setters on a 314-acre Wisconsin estate which he bought two years ago for $300,000. On the estate are 40 acres of woods which Rubloff calls “the national park.”

Rubloff on Rubloff: “I’ve been told that I’ve performed real-estate miracles, but there are no miracles. … I have vision and I know how to work. . . . I’ve got a new deal brewing now, and boy it’ll really wake up the old town.”