Last week marked the final installment of the weekly “30-Minute Interview” column, which had profiled, via a Q-and-A format, prominent people in the world of New York real estate, largely commercial. It had a respectable run: just over six years and eight months, which basically covered two divergent economic cycles.
This New York Times column was authored solely by moi and every single week — through vacations, sick leaves and even a few nasty hurricanes and storms. It resided first in the Sunday Real Estate section, then Sunday Business, and more recently, in the Wednesday Commercial Real Estate pages of Business Day. There were 352 in all. (Yes, I kept track.)
My first interview was published on July 10, 2009, and featured William Rudin, the scion of one of New York’s oldest and most prominent real estate families, and my last was on March 15, 2016, featuring Michael Dana, who heads Onex Real Estate Partners, a developer focused on Flushing, Queens, and the real estate arm of one of Canada’s largest private equity firms.
In the years in between I had some very memorable, and not-so-memorable, encounters with the industry’s major movers-and-shakers as well as the up-and-coming. Some were lovely to work with, others, well, not so much. There were developers, architects, builders, brokers, project managers, property managers, lawyers, investors, government officials, and even one public relations executive — a list far too extensive for me to name everyone.
My subjects included the big-time, well-known developers like Mr. Rudin, along with Larry Silverstein, Bruce Ratner (pictured above), Douglas Durst, Richard LeFrak, Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, Robert Toll, David Walentas, Aby Rosen, Ian Schrager, Arthur Zeckendorf, Stephen Ross, Orin Wilf, and Henry and Thomas Elghanayan, to name just a few (whew!). And some of their offspring or relatives, like Jonathan “Jody” Durst, Justin Elghanayan and Jed Walentas.
I interviewed prominent brokers. Among the many were: Mary Ann Tighe, Faith Hope Consolo, Dottie Herman, Howard Lorber, Pamela Liebman, Frederick Peters, Shaun Osher, Andrew Heiberger. Michele Kleier, along with Elizabeth Stribling and her daughter, Elizabeth Ann Stribling-Kivlan.
And then there were the “starchitects”: Richard Meier, Daniel Liebeskind, Costas Kondylis, Gary Handel and Robert A.M. Stern (I also interviewed his son, Nicholas S.G. Stern).
Readers have often asked if I had a favorite subject (I had a few), and whether there was someone who I had considered particularly unpleasant (Yup).
But I dare not divulge that information now. Maybe years from now — if I’m ever interviewed.
This past December marked 16 years at The New York Times, but January 2016 was also a career milestone: My first photo was published in the digital version of the newspaper.
It’s one of 17 colorful photos in a slideshow that accompanies a story I wrote for the Real Estate section’s “Exclusive” column about Maya Angelou’s Harlem brownstone about to go on the market, for $5.095 million. I was the first to report this — hence the “exclusive” title, and in the process got to tour this beautiful, four-story home on West 120th Street, and take in the beauty of this historic brownstone neighborhood.
Her house in this lineup is the one with the wandering ivy. You can read the full story here.
I thought I’d drag out once again this little “drag ‘n drop” holiday game that I created a couple of years ago when I was first starting to learning Flash. (Too bad these skills aren’t really useful anymore.)
If you’d like to play, select/click the picture to the left. It’s actually kind of fun, though it may not be viewable on some devices. Oh, and, happy holidays!
Getting published abroad is nothing new for me, really.
As a longtime journalist for The Associated Press (stationed in Hartford, Conn.; Miami; and New York), my stories have been featured in newspapers and on broadcasts just about everywhere. (I’m not bragging — it’s just how a global news service works.)
But I’ve never written directly for a foreign publication — until now. I have a feature article in the November issue of Telva, a Spanish language monthly women’s magazine published in Madrid. It’s actually that country’s second largest women’s magazine with a circulation of around 1750,000. (I’m not sure of its digital traffic.)
The article is about the real estate developer Jared Kushner, who is is the son-in-law of Donald Trump, the presidential hopeful. Pretty timely, I suppose. Telva’s editor in chief contacted me about doing this story, having seen a Q-and-A profile I did on him for The York Times earlier this year.
There was nothing terribly new in this Telva piece, but it didn’t matter to them: Spain was hungry for anything related to the Trump family, especially the young, handsome and wildly successful husband of Ivanka.
You can also read a version of my recent high school reunion essay on Medium in the Midcentury Modern magazine. Just click on the logo below. Feel free to comment, and while you’re at it, browse through some of the great articles there.
Fading summer green
ushers in a burst of red
and orange and gold.
Vivid leaves hold tight
because it’s time to show off,
but only briefly.
The brisk autumn breeze
shakes them, scatters them about,
forming a blanket.
Runners and joggers
hear the crunch, feel the cushion
as they stride along.
Winds brush back their hair.
Smoke from the chimneys billows
Ahh, it smells so good!
Long-sleeve fleece will do.
Everyone else needs a coat.
That’s autumn running.
Halloween Half (marathon) 10/18/15
I’ve often found the month of October to be unsettling, maybe a little foreboding. There are the wild fluctuations in the financial markets that historically occur then, and the volatile transitional weather increasingly common in some parts — the mudslides, freak snowstorms and hurricanes. (Now that’s really scary.)
And then, of course, there’s the thought of seeing throngs of neighborhood children at my doorstep demanding sweet treats, and (horrors!) having nothing left to give them halfway through the night.
This year I added high school reunions to the mix — those stress-inducing decennial or quinquennial gatherings, often coinciding with annual homecomings, that have a way of conjuring up in the best of us old feelings of teenage inadequacy, or worse, a longing for the glory days, particularly if you happened to “peak” early on.
My reunion was held the second weekend in October. And, yes, I did attend. More on that later.
It took me awhile to commit to going and mail in my $40 check, which entitled me to a buffet dinner with cash bar at the Parsippany Elks Club. I remained perched on the fence for months. Whenever I brought up the topic of reunions with friends and colleagues, and this internal debate I had going on, I often received a sympathetic look back or audible sigh.
“I spent a year in therapy preparing for my 10th reunion,” said my friend and co-worker, Susan, “and then when I actually arrived at the place where it was being held, I stepped on the gas and plowed back home.”
Another friend, Cecelia, spoke of how during her recent 35th, she ended up babysitting a former classmate who had ingested one too many tranquilizers beforehand, apparently hoping they would serve as social lubricants.
My husband, on the other hand, a graduate of an all-boys prep school and hockey player, seems to relish reunions. He gets together informally at local bars with several former high school classmates almost every year and happily rehashes the good times he has had for weeks to come.
My time spent in high school was neither gloomy nor glorious, and, frankly, I hadn’t really been thinking of those days at all when reunion discussion first surfaced earlier this year.
For me, high school was more fragmented than anything else. I went to three different schools in three different states — a formidable undertaking, I know, but especially so for an often-shy teenage girl. (I wasn’t an Army brat; my father just changed jobs a lot back in the ‘70s.)
Over the years, I would tell people that this challenging life experience provided the mettle-building framework for the independent person I would become today. To some degree, this is true. But allow me to be a bit more blunt in my middle age: Being the “new kid” almost every year just plain sucked! There, I said it. I have since kept my promise to never, ever put my two daughters through this itinerant hell.
And so when I was tracked down by classmates from two of my high schools — No. 2, in Houston, and No. 3, in Parsippany, N.J. — and invited to upcoming 40th class reunions, I was torn. Did I really want to revive some of those uncomfortable memories associated with moving all the time? (At lunchtime I would spend my first few days eating alone in a hallway or sequestered in the library, before eventually making friends.) Would most of these classmates, with long histories together, even remember me? And if I did decide to go, which one should I attend, anyway? (High School No. 1, in Franklin Square, N.Y., wasn’t having one, thank goodness.)
With the prevalence of social media, I had wondered, too, whether reunions are all that necessary. Thanks to Facebook, I already knew that my friend Patti had two adorable grandchildren; that Laura had just moved to Nashville from Memphis; and that Bob grew up to become a successful executive chef.
The adventurous and curious side of my won out — I missed a 10th and 20th, and really did want to experience at least one reunion in my lifetime — and I opted for the school from which I ultimately graduated, and the one closest to my New Jersey home. This was Parsippany Hills High School, home of the Vikings. (Blue, black and white. Fight, fight, fight!) Besides, I got to know several of my classmates there even better at a local college we all attended for a couple of years afterward.
I prepared for this reunion by telling myself that if I wasn’t having a good time, or felt the least bit uncomfortable, I’d just head back in my car and drive the 14.2 miles home. Needless to say, I stayed the whole four hours. Then I spent the next several days texting old and newfound friends and happily posting massive amounts of selfies and messages on social media.
I had no expectations walking through those doors at the Elks Club that Saturday evening, but was pleasantly surprised by the genuine fun I had — it was awesome! — and the number of people who I remembered (and remembered me back) after all. I suppose being the new kid, with a hint of a Texas drawl, can make you stand out just a little in a Jersey senior class of more than 400, even if you weren’t a star athlete or popular cheerleader.
That night we all seemed to be on equal footing. And although there were a number of people who hadn’t a clue who I was, I observed just about everyone being kind and welcoming and interested in what other former classmates had been up to over the last four decades. Sure, you can get the CliffNotes version by logging into Facebook or Instagram, but nothing beats the face-to-face conversation, belly laughs and heartfelt hugs.
This reunion was a chance for me to not only reconnect or meet with the people I truly wanted to see again, but to make peace with my teenage past.
I can’t wait to do it again!