Man About Hotels: LAURENCE ALAN TISCH

EVERY hotel in New York is obsolete. The city is crying out for new hotels.” So says Laurence Tisch, 37, the liveliest and fastest-moving young man in the U.S. hotel business.

With his brother Preston Robert Tisch, 34, Larry Tisch has run up a $65 million fortune in real estate, mostly by building, leasing and selling hotels from Florida to New York. Now, as chairman of Loew’s Theaters Inc. (no theaters), he is moving the sluggish old theater chain into new real estate ventures—beginning with some changes in the Manhattan skyline.

Construction is under way on Manhattan’s East Side (at 51st Street and Lexington Avenue) for a new Loew’s-owned, 800-room luxury hotel — the first hotel to be built in Manhattan in 30 years. Ground was broken this week on Manhattan’s West Side (Seventh Avenue between 52nd and 53rd Streets) for a new Loew’s hotel, to be called the Americana of New York. It will be the world’s tallest hotel (50 stories) and one of its largest (2,000 rooms) and most luxurious, with restaurants and banquet halls that can feed 6,800 people at a sitting, and a private automobile elevator direct to the grand ballroom.

For good measure, Tisch is also building two luxury motels on Eighth Avenue in midtown Manhattan, a third in Washington, D.C. If his new hotels live up to his standards, they will be lighter, gayer and more modern than most, will not try to ape foreign hotels. “An American waiter in a French-style hotel,” says Tisch, “just doesn’t look authentic.”

With a Loew’s kitty of $20 million, Larry Tisch is searching for new acquisitions that may take the theater firm into real estate, manufacturing or radio and TV as well as hotels. Tisch is demolishing several theaters in order to lease the land or put up new buildings. Yet he does not intend to take Loew’s out of theaters, is looking for new sites to lease on the grounds that TV’s “deteriorating quality” will drive more and more people to the movies.

Skeptics believe that Larry Tisch will find it hard to turn a profit on Manhattan hotels that are costing $20,000 a room to build. He replies that the skeptics are still thinking in terms of the ’30s, points out that he has already booked 75 conventions into the unbuilt Americana. He has no intention of running profitless operations. In only a year as Loew’s chief stockholder (he served as chairman of the executive committee before becoming company chairman and chief executive last month), he has cut costs and improved business so much that the firm’s earnings will be up 33% this year over last, to about $1 a share.

Tisch got into the hotel business when his father, a New York manufacturer of boys’ clothing, gave him $125,000 to invest after he had graduated from New York University (at 18) and spent three years in the Army. He bought the drowsy Laurel-in-the-Pines resort hotel in Lakewood, N.J. with a partner, attracted guests by refurbishing it and using promotion stunts (one: importing three reindeer from Finland). He made so much money the first year that he bought out his partner.

His next partner: Brother Bob, who joined him in buying a resort hotel in New York’s Catskills after he graduated from the University of Michigan.

They quickly bought an Atlantic City hotel for $4,350,000 (they later sold it for $15 million), leased another in Atlantic City and two more (the McAlpin and Belmont Plaza) in Manhattan. By refurbishing each, cutting costs, adding attractive facilities and raising room rates, they made all prosper. In 1956 they decided to build their first hotel. The result was the $17 million Americana in Bal Harbour, Fla.—which was so flamboyantly luxurious, even by the standards of nearby Miami Beach, that it easily won the title of Miami’s “hotel of the year.”

THE Tisches sold the Americana last April to put their money into higher-paying investments, immediately leased it back. They have also built two luxury motels in Atlantic City, but intend to make most future acquisitions in the hotel-motel field through Loew’s. They had been large stockholders in Loew’s Inc. before the court-ordered separation of the theater corporation in March 1959 made it a separate company. Early this year they got control (they now own 650,000 shares) of the theater firm.

While luring guests into his hotels with conspicuous luxury, Larry Tisch has little use for it in his own life. He lives with his wife and four children in a ten-room house in suburban Scarsdale, commutes by train, neither drinks, smokes, nor indulges in any steady hobby. He often works late into the evening, spends his free evenings at home or at Broadway plays or movies (twice a week) with his wife, works hard in fund-raising and community affairs. Larry Tisch is shocked by any suggestion that he might like to relax and enjoy his money. “This is too much fun,” he says. “The harder I work, the better I like it.”