Will Trump Be the Next Zeckendorf?

His name hasn’t been in the news now for more than thirty years, but at one point in the mid-1960’s, a real estate tycoon named William Zeckendorf was to the New York real estate market back then what Donald Trump is to the New York real estate market now.

And what I mean by that is here are two guys who’s audacious and take-no-prisoners approach to real estate development in Manhattan made them outsize figures in an industry which seems to attract big egos who make big deals and when their property empires begin to collapse, the bang can be heard just about everywhere.

Zeckendorf dropped out of NYU in the 1920’s and began putting together parcels for major real estate developments at a time when New York was replacing London as the world’s financial center, and within two decades what had been an urban core of four-story loft buildings and rundown, dingy apartment dwellings would become a high-rise landscape of office towers and luxury hotels.

Zeckendorf’s most notable project was the assembling of some 75 separate parcels of land between 42nd Street and 49th Street alongside the East River which would be the location for the world headquarters of the United Nations, the area dominated by a massive tower housing the organization’s Secretariat complex which is still an iconic piece of real estate to this day (see pic above.)