Lemons to Grapefruit

The prospect was tempting: "After parking her car with thousands of others in the roomy rooftop garage, the young housewife left her baby with a nurse in the playground. Strolling along the broad canopied walks and through the buildings, she stopped to watch the skaters in the rink, glancing now & then at the glittering dance hall, the glass-brick hotel, the handsome bus terminal, the quiet professional building where she could see hospital patients sitting at the windows. The moving sidewalks carried her past some hundred air-conditioned shops. . . ."

This shopper's how-to-buy dream is also the latest how-to-sell dream of big, balding William Zeckendorf, 41, up & coming executive vice president of the up & coming New York City real estate firm of Webb & Knapp, Inc. What made it more than a dream was that by last week bustling Bill Zeckendorf was almost ready to make it come true. He had: 1) 90% of the necessary property (in the heart of Flushing, near the site of the last World's Fair), 2) the financial backing of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Co., 3) the unofficial blessing of New York's Mayor William O'Dwyer.

The Percentage. An old hand at the tricky process of bringing buyers, sellers, property, and capital together, Zeckendorf spent five years getting his $50,000,000 project under way. Toughest job was getting control of the property, which he began to buy piecemeal soon after he got the idea. To get the holdout 10% he will either have to pay a fancy high price or get help from the city through condemnation proceedings.

Getting the money was not so hard. Metropolitan, which has already sunk about $2 million in the dream and has the option on further financing, was impressed with Zeckendorf's hard-headed operating plans. The ten-story hotel, office, and professional buildings are expected to be self-sustaining. The rest of Bill's world of tomorrow will be let out at a basic moderate rent plus varying percentages of gross sales (e.g., 1% for food stores, 15% for millinery shops).

In an area calculated to have the buying power of a city the size of Atlanta, Zeckendorf believes gross sales might reach $125 million annually, netting $6.5 million rent. After taxes, interest, and overhead are paid, there will still be a tidy balance of about $1.5 million.

Zeckendorf, who has helped to expand the assets of his firm tenfold in the last eight years, likes to dismiss his many big operations (in hotels, theaters, apartments, oil wells, piers, night clubs, a small railroad, and smaller shopping centers) as "making grapefruit out of lemons." This grapefruit, which he hopes to pluck by 1948, would be his juiciest.

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