Mr. Knickerbocker’s Face Lifting

Since the Indians sold Manhattan Island to Peter Minuit for $24 worth of trinkets in 1626, its face has been changed out of all knowledge. Most of the man-made excrescences have made that face more blotchy, pockmarked, chafed, scarred and haggard. But last week the battered island was scheduled to get a major face lifting.

After four months of furious effort, the fast-moving real-estate firm of Webb & Knapp Inc. had control of a rundown, 30-acre, eight-block area on the East Side (41st to 49th Streets, First Avenue to the East River). Webb & Knapp promptly announced plans to replace the run-down stables, warehouses, slaughterhouses and tenements with the biggest, costliest city-within-a-city ever built. Cost: $150,000,000. Features: a 57-story office building, three 30-story apartments, a 6,000-capacity convention hall, a yacht landing, a helicopter field, a 5,000,000,000-sq.-ft. parking platform.

To get the property, agents had had to scurry as far afield as Rio de Janeiro, and had had to garnish their cash with promises. Example: one owner, who pocketed a certified check for $250,000, wanted to remain on his job as elevator operator as long as his building stayed up.

Lightning on a Lake. Webb & Knapp had not given promise of such a mickle feat in its earlier days. Operated for years by Ivy League sprouts (Groton’s and Harvard’s Elliot Cross, St. Paul’s and Yale’s John Hurst Purnell Gould, St. Mark’s Henry Sears), the 24-year-old business was strong in contacts, weak on aggressiveness, barely managed to break even on servicing its exclusive clientele.

But in 1938 W. & K. came alive. In that year William Zeckendorf, an amiably sputtering firecracker, became its executive vice president (now, at 41, he gets $40,000 a year plus a fourth of the net—which last year was almost $1 million).

Son of a shoe manufacturer, Zeckendorf went to public schools in New York and to New York University. For a dozen-odd years in & out of various realty firms, he had been only a moderate success: he didn’t know enough of the right people. When, in the course of one of his deals, he ran into W. & K., it was like loose lightning being drawn to a lake.

From a small, conservative agency, W. & K. expanded into a dealer and operator of properties scattered over 20 states.

Zeckendorf took over the management of Vincent Astor’s realty interests, swelled their value in a series of 150 transactions by about $5 million (with commissions to W. & K. totaling $1½ million).

He drew up plans for a rooftop airport covering 144 square blocks in Manhattan, turned them over to the unimpressed city, which in turn relayed them to very-much-impressed Sweden and Russia. Two months ago he announced plans to upheave the busy community of Flushing, L. I., and set up a $50 million shopping center there (TIME, Aug. 19).

Fruits of Indigestion. Among its $20 million assets, W. & K. now owns hotels, apartments, a nightclub (Manhattan’s glittering Monte Carlo), shipping piers, warehouses, a steamship company, shopping centers in Denver, Houston and Atlanta, a nine-mile railroad and a 2,300-acre oilfield in Louisiana (one well came in last fortnight from a depth of 10,000 ft.). To avoid pyramiding, each new permanent project has been financed independently.

Where does he get his ideas? Says Zeckendorf facetiously: “From indigestion.” Sometimes he works right through the night in his penthouse apartment, but usually arrives at his office about 8 a.m. He plays equally hard; he thinks a binge is constructive.

Recently he decided to take every fourth month off to hunt, fish, sail and travel. Last week, just before he started on his first month off, he wrapped up another big bundle of real estate. For about $10 million he bought nearly a mile of the busy Hoboken waterfront.