The Great Salesman

New York City lost a major landmark --a gregarious, white-maned, 70-year-old supersalesman, one of the last of the P. T. Barnum era--Joseph Paul Day. Auctioneer Day had sold more real estate in & around New York City than any other single human being in the memory of man. As far back as 1935 his transactions were totted up to $1.5 billion. And years before he died last week in Manhattan's Flower Hospital, he had become a millionaire--and a legend.

The Legend. Joe Day was Manhattan-born of English-Irish parents. His father, who had a prosperous soda-water business in New York City, died when Joe was five. His mother died nine years later. Joe left school, went to work for a Manhattan wholesale dry-goods firm; salary, $100 a year. By the age of 20, he was a star salesman, and had left the firm when he was refused a raise to $15 a week. He went into the real-estate business with a friend. Terms: Day put in no capital, but was to get a partnership if he doubled the business in two weeks. He made the gamble good; two years later he was doing nine-tenths of the business, and had pulled out to start his own office.

At that time, selling real estate was on a social par with selling patent medicine. Suckers were" lured with door prizes of "imported" china and junk jewelry, free lunches and a circus barker's side show. Joe Day revolutionized the business by 1) investigating and advertising his properties in advance; 2) discovering that a one-man side show by a man who knew his business sold more lots than all the free china he could stack up.

The Price of Peace. Joe Day's discoveries about selling real estate coincided with the northward expansion of Manhattan. As he progressed from one "biggest deal in history" to the next, feature writers repeated the Joseph P. Day legends over & over. He was the man who used no gavel to knock down his sales, but had the auction block padded to keep his right hand from fracturing; the man who relaxed his nerves by quaffing pineapple juice and having two strong-arm men grip his arms and his heels and try to pull him apart; the man who invariably breakfasted on acidophilus milk and lunched on crackers & milk and ice cream.

He was also the man whom one hard-headed client insured for $1,000,000 until he had safely completed the sale of the Sheepshead Bay race track, and whose sales in a single year (1922) topped $100,000,000. Just after World War I started, he put the lid on his own legend by trying to persuade the world that the holocaust could be stopped if Germany bought a piece of France at a price high enough to persuade every last penny-pinching Frenchman that peace had a profitable price.

The Deals. A loyal Tammanyite and oldtime pillar of the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick, Joe Day was always a tough trader. When he engineered the sale of Tammany's famed 14th Street headquarters, one cynic penned a sarcastic parody of When Day Is Done, ending:

"It's fifty-fifty, so they say--fifty Joe and fifty Day.

And there is nothing left when Day is done."

But Joe Day was also the man who stopped an auction in mid-frenzy when the bidding went higher than his shrewd sense of values told him was sound. Nonetheless, he had some frantic figures to brag about:

P: "The largest absolute partition sale of city real-estate lots in the history of the country": a four-day, 1918 auction of the 1,500 Bronx lots that made up the old Ogden Estate. Other famous-name estates partitioned by Day: Van Cortlandt, Astor, Harkness, Gould, Schwab, Doherty, Juilliard, James Gordon Bennett.

P: The $3,882,000 auction, in December 1922, of 1,574 Jersey shipyard homes owned by the U.S. Shipping Board--a record 12-hour session when Day stopped the clock for two hours to avoid selling on a Sunday.

P:The development of the Jersey Meadows, across the Hudson from Manhattan, from no-account marshlands into a prime industrial area (including big plants owned by Ford, U.S. Steel, and Western Electric)

P: Persuading U.S. Steel's legendary board chairman, the late Elbert H. Gary, to pay a cool $5,000,000 for the Empire Building at Broadway and Rector Street where Big Steel had made its offices for years. Day sold Judge Gary on staying where he was by simply letting him reminisce about the steel history that had been made in the old building.

The Heirs. No one has ever disputed Joe Day's claim that he sold "at least a third of the Bronx" and almost as big a slice of Queens, Brooklyn and Upper Manhattan. Last week one eloquent obituary estimated that if all his sales were strung end to end they would "make a strip 100 ft. wide from the Atlantic to the Pacific." He was also a fanatically successful booster of New York and of the U.S., was famed for his war-bond sales and social services. Stuck in London when War I broke out, he was the man who got 60,000 stranded Americans home from Europe, and started Herbert Hoover along a similar humanitarian road by putting him in charge of lost luggage.

But Joe Day's own favorite project was New York City's famed, misnamed Brooklyn resort, Manhattan Beach. He poured some $8,000,000 into turning it into the city's greatest "middleclass Coney Island." He liked to tell his children that it would some day be the heart of Day properties worth perhaps $100,000,000. That dream died with World War II: early in 1942, Joe Day sold Manhattan Beach to the Coast Guard (as a training center) for a mere $6,000,000. But, although his estate was modestly valued in the Surrogate's Court last week at "more than $10,000," Real Estater Day's heirs should do well--at least until Manhattan is sold back to the Indians.

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