LITMIR.BIZ

      Apart from the caissons jutting out from the ground, the site was completely blank and silent. The enormous metal pipes that dove fifty feet down into the earth at the tip of Manhattan were exposed and useless with nothing to anchor them to the solid bedrock below. Around the empty construction site a locked fence signaled the end of progress.

      This was 50 West—my legacy project as a real estate entrepreneur, a sixty-four-story tower of glass and steel that was going to alter the city skyline. It was supposed to embody my career in real estate that began with leasing office space as a sixteen-year-old high school dropout; meandered through close calls, generous mentors, terrible disappointments, and moments of great luck; and arrived at success beyond any expectation. Only, 50 West had become a $500 million mud puddle.

      I had seen my share of wild swings over the course of my fifty years in the business, but the radical shift from the abundance of money during the housing bubble to the global debt crisis set off by losses in the US subprime mortgage market was, to put it mildly, unexpected and unprecedented. As a seasoned developer and investor, I knew all too well that markets can turn on a dime. And I had spent my career always looking over my shoulder for signs of trouble and keeping an ear to the ground for the sounds of crumbling economic conditions. Even so, I completely missed the signs of this disaster that I experienced through the very expensive prism of 50 West.

      When, in January of 2008, we began demolishing the three buildings on the site that sat across the street from Manhattan’s Battery Park area, I was full of optimism. And why shouldn’t I have been? Arranging the financing for the project had been a given. Despite the size of the project, which cost more than $6 million in architectural plans alone, it was only a question of which bank we would allow to give us the money. That’s how flush the times were. As the starchitects we solicited to join a competition to design the property unveiled their plans before me, I felt the amazing sensation of being at the start of something great. And when my wife Isabelle and I saw the Helmut Jahn entry, I was overcome with a sense of possibility as soaring as the tower itself: We were going to do something great.

      Six months later, construction workers were driving the caissons into the ground. Later that summer, truckloads of earth were dragged out of the ground and carted away as we started excavating the site for the foundation of the skyscraper.

      Then on September 15, Lehman Brothers filed for Chapter 11 in the largest bankruptcy in US history, and the world got really strange really quickly. That autumn, when many investment banks fell as fast as the leaves on the trees, I made the decision to shutter everything at 50 West. As high as I had felt when I was surveying the plans for the skyscraper was as low as I’d sunk while putting a stop to its building.

      There remained $15 million undrawn and available on the pre-development loan I had on the property to design and build the foundation (the plan had been to phase into a full construction loan to go straight up once the foundation was complete). I had to pull everyone off the site and begin the painful process of unwinding the long list of contracts we had with engineers, architects, and construction companies, because the last thing any developer wants is to have a half-built building when the money runs out.