An Appetite for Empire

"There is a certain glamour to buy ing a city within a city," says Harry Brakmann Helmsley. Especially, he might have added, when the price is $90 million, just about the top tag ever placed on a single piece of property.

Last week Helmsley, a former office boy who, at 59, has become one of the nation's largest real estate owners, an nounced his latest purchase. Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. has agreed to sell Helmsley its gigantic Parkchester apartment complex in The Bronx.

As head of a six-man syndicate, Helmsley will take over the 12,271-unit project later this year. The 129-acre community, home to some 38,000 New Yorkers, also includes offices, banks, a post office, theater, library and a 100-store shopping center. When built by Metropolitan between 1938 and 1942, Parkchester cost $67 million. Even though it yielded $14.9 million in rents last year, Metropolitan has for some time yearned to unload it. New York City rent control has kept the top rent on a three-bedroom apartment to a bar gain $165 a month, even while taxes and operating costs have soared.

Also, New Wiring. The first thing Helmsley plans to do at Parkchester is raise rents. An apartment-building own er can seek a "hardship increase" under rent control if his income fails to amount to a 6% return on his invest ment, plus 2% for depreciation. Having agreed to pay $90 million for the property, Helmsley will be in a position to make use of the hardship proviso. "Then," he adds, "we're going to put in new wiring, which brings another increase."

By such shrewdness, Helmsley has made himself more than a millionaire.

As president and principal owner of the real estate firm of Helmsley-Spear Inc., he manages properties worth $1.5 billion by his own estimate. He also controls two rival Manhattan realty companies and personally shares in the ownership of dozens of profitable buildings, many of them operated by his own firms. Among his holdings: the Empire State Building, still the world's tallest, two high-rent Beverly Hills apartments, Brooklyn's industrial Bush Terminal and Manhattan's St. Moritz and Carlton House hotels.

Syndicate Specialist. A Manhattan-born Quaker, Helmsley grew up in The Bronx, joined the firm he now heads after leaving high school at 16. Rising from office boy to rent collector to building manager to broker, he performed so well that his name went on the company's title before he was 30. Later, as a specialist in syndicate purchasing, Helmsley joined with Lawrence Wien, a Manhattan lawyer and investor, and began putting together his realty domain. The Empire State Building, which they bought in 1961 for $65 million, is the crown jewel, but their widespread holdings include shopping centers in Fort Wayne, Ind., and Decatur, Ill., apartment projects in Indianapolis and St. Louis, and Chicago's Insurance Exchange.

Tall and lean (6 ft. 3 in., 195 lbs.), Helmsley keeps fit by frequent skiing. He often stays home in Westchester County for a day or two a week to toil over papers without interruptions. He keeps a direct phone line from home to his office switchboard, however, "so no one knows whether I'm calling him from the office or not."

Helmsley is busy building two Manhattan skyscrapers and a hotel that will face Central Park. This may seem like enough to keep him occupied, but his appetite for real estate is still growing. Last month, he agreed to buy the stock of the Furman-Wolfson Trust, which owns property valued at $167 million in a dozen cities. It will cost him, he figures, $75 million in cold cash.

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