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Informationen zum Autor Katherine Clarke Klappentext A “thrilling” ( Financial Times ) fly-on-the-wall account of the ferocious ambition, greed, and one-upmanship behind the most expensive real estate in the world: the new Manhattan megatowers known as Billionaires’ Row—from a staff reporter at The Wall Street Journal “Deeply informative, delightfully entertaining, and addictively readable.”—Diana B. Henriques, bestselling author of The Wizard of Lies A CEO Magazine Best Book of the Year • Longlisted for the Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year Award To look south and skyward from Central Park these days is to gaze upon a physical manifestation of tens of billions of dollars in global wealth: a series of soaring spires stretching from Park Avenue to Broadway. Known as Billionaires’ Row, this set of slender high-rise residences has transformed the skyline of New York City, thanks to developer-friendly policies and a seemingly endless gush of cash from tech, finance, and foreign oligarchs. And chances are most of us will never be invited to step inside. In Billionaires’ Row, Katherine Clarke reveals the captivating story of how, in just a few years, the ruthless real-estate impresarios behind these “supertalls” lining 57th Street turned what was once a run-down strip of Midtown into the most exclusive street on Earth, as legendary Trump-era veterans went toe-to-toe with hungry upstart developers in an ego-fueled “race to the sky.” Based on far-reaching access to real estate’s power players, Clarke’s account brings readers inside one of the world’s most cutthroat industries, showing how a combination of ferocious ambition and relentless salesmanship has created a new market of $100 million apartments for the world’s one-percenters—units to live in or, sometimes, just places to stash their cash. Filled with eye-popping stories that bring the new era of extreme wealth inequality into vivid relief, Billionaires’ Row is a juicy, gimlet-eyed account of the genius, greed, and financial one-upmanship behind the most expensive real estate in the world—a stranger-than-fiction saga of broken partnerships, broken marriages, lawsuits, and, for a few, fleeting triumph. Leseprobe Chapter 1 Saving Harry Macklowe “Maybe we should take a walk?” It was 2008, the depths of the global financial crisis, and Harry Macklowe had been stuck for hours at the Lower Manhattan offices of his law firm when his broker, a real estate power player named Darcy Stacom, suggested the septuagenarian might want to step outside and clear his head. As Macklowe and Stacom headed for the doors, a team of lawyers and brokers stayed behind as they continued to hammer out the final terms of a deal Macklowe desperately didn’t want to make: the sale of the iconic General Motors building on New York’s Fifth Avenue. The General Motors building, a gleaming marble-clad tower anchoring the southeast corner of Central Park, was the crown jewel of Macklowe’s real estate portfolio, which at one point included at least ten trophy office buildings in and around Midtown. Built in the 1960s by the architects Edward Durell Stone & Associates with Emery Roth & Sons, the building was a defining example of the International Style, characterized by clean rectilinear forms, and it appealed to Macklowe’s taste for what he deemed “architectural purity.” The firm he founded, Macklowe Properties, had beaten out at least a dozen other developers to buy it in 2003 for a record-breaking $1.4 billion, the most ever paid for a skyscraper in the United States, putting down only a $50 million deposit in a highly leveraged deal. He had then taken great pleasure in restoring its tasteful, stripped-down aesthetic by removing the big gold letters on its marble exterior that spelled out t-r-u-m-p, one of the forme...
