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| Subject: Samuel LeFrak, Master of Mass Housing | |
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Author: Dies at 85 |
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Date Posted: April 17, 2003 4:45:26 EDT Samuel J. LeFrak, an outspoken champion of middle-income housing who headed the family company that produced it in and around New York City more plentifully than any other builder in the years since World War II, died yesterday at his home in Manhattan. He was 85. Through four decades, the flamboyant Mr. LeFrak led the Lefrak Organization, founded by his grandfather, Aaron, in 1905. Starting with five-story walk-ups in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, the company put up some 200,000 houses and apartments in the metropolitan area. While Sam LeFrak was in charge, during the great wave of postwar construction and through the 1970's and 80's, about three-quarters of the total was built. Mr. LeFrak's signature building was the six-story brick apartment house, a standard feature of the residential landscape of Brooklyn and Queens. But then came the immense Lefrak City in central Queens, home to some 15,000 people, and projects built under New York State's middle-income Mitchell-Lama program. In the 1990's, there was Lefrak's Newport development on the Hudson River shorefront in Jersey City, a $10 billion residential and commercial project that, on completion, is expected to house 35,000 people. More than for most builders, Mr. LeFrak's business was also his cause. His voice would rise to exhortation when he addressed the importance of decent and affordable housing and the need for more of it. His mode of expression was emphatic and rarely self-effacing, with a distinctive singsong inflection and a Brooklyn accent that grew more pronounced as he grew more excited. "I gave the people what they wanted, at a price they could afford to pay," he said. "I took them out of public housing, out of the ghettos. I was the only one who put my name to it. I wasn't hiding behind a `Realty.' " What people wanted, he insisted, was epitomized after World War II by the standard Lefrak product in Brooklyn, and later Queens, the Bronx and Manhattan: a two-bedroom, two-bath apartment of generous size, usually with a sunken living room in a six-story brick building with a fair rent. He built it wherever he could buy reasonably priced land after he took over the company in 1948, always following the principle that housing should be close to subways, schools and shopping. "I adopted another `S' — Safe," he said. His buildings emphasized security systems that were advanced for their day, like a 60-man security force for the 20 18-story buildings at Lefrak City, whose elevators had television surveillance. Mr. LeFrak produced 5,000 apartments and two million feet of retail space at Lefrak City in the early 60's, and he included swimming pools and doormen. The apartments rented for $40 a room a month, or $120 for a one-bedroom apartment. At Battery Park City in Lower Manhattan in the early 1980's he built 1,800 apartments at Gateway Plaza. But even his six-story buildings were often put up in a complex of several buildings so that the development would involve several hundred apartments. Among such Lefrak projects were University Gardens in Flushing, Queens; College Park in Rego Park, Queens, and the Hollywood Park in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. He held costs down by speedy production methods, relatively low land costs per apartment and mass buying of building supplies. This created affordability, and his buildings tended to rent quickly. "If you cut my veins, you'll get cement!" Mr. LeFrak liked to say. Samuel Jayson LeFrak was born on Feb. 12, 1918, in Manhattan to Harry and Sarah Schwartz Lefrak. In an interview in 1995, he gave an explanation for why he spelled and pronounced his name differently from other members of his family. He said that his father, Harry, Americanized the name after arriving in the country in 1904 from France, spelling it Lefrak and pronouncing it LEH-frack. But on his own birth certificate his mother's French-born physician wrote "LeFrak," and to avoid having to change the birth certificate, he said, he maintained that spelling for himself. He also preferred that his name be pronounced "le-FRACK" although he continued the Americanized spelling and pronunciation in his business. Mr. LeFrak attended Erasmus Hall High School in Flatbush and the University of Maryland. Later he studied finance at Columbia University and the Harvard Business School. Maurice LeFrak, the father of Aaron, the patriarch of the family business in New York, had been a developer in France in the 1840's. Aaron's son, Harry, first went into the glass business, designing and manufacturing customized glass for Louis Comfort Tiffany. Sam LeFrak liked to say that he "went into the business" at the age of 8, carrying buckets of water and nails for workmen at construction sites. In 1938, while still a student at the University of Maryland, "I built my first building." He was given the responsibility of completing a 60-family, 16-story project on East 14th Street in Brooklyn. A two-bedroom, two-bath apartment with a stall shower and a sunken living room rented for $70, but he had to give a three-month rent concession to fill it up in that Depression year, he said. When Mr. LeFrak started working for the family company full time in 1940 it was building Army camps and housing. His father, who had bought a 2,000-acre farm in Brooklyn in the 1920's and had been building there long before World War II, turned the presidency of the company over to him in 1948. He held it until 1975, when his son, Richard LeFrak, became president, with Mr. LeFrak holding the title of chairman. In the early 60's, when housing production in New York exploded before a more restrictive zoning law went into effect, the Lefrak Organization built "an apartment every 18 minutes," said Arthur Klein, the company's chief financial officer. Lefrak used its own labor force or contractors who worked only for the organization, farming out only contracts for heating, ventilation and air-conditioning. It also bought and stockpiled material by the carload. In Forest Hills, Queens, he built the New England Quadrangle for 1,000 families. In Flatbush, Prospect Park West, Forest Hills, Sunnyside and Elmhurst he built apartment buildings named for states: the Alabama, Illinois, Nebraska, Vermont, Massachusetts and Connecticut, among others. When he ran low on states, he chose the names of leading colleges for his buildings — the Harvard, the Princeton, the Dartmouth. He also favored presidents. Among those so honored were George Washington, John Adams, James Madison and Abraham Lincoln. At first he expressed contempt for the Mitchell-Lama program on the ground that he needed no governmental help to build housing. "I've got 45,000 apartments and they pay enough rent to give me enough money to build without any help from anyone," he would say. In the end, however, he did build housing under the Mitchell-Lama program, which provided bond financing and lowered taxes to make new housing affordable for middle-income people. No one doubted the single-minded tenacity that Mr. LeFrak brought to real-estate development, or his devotion to his idea of what the rental housing product should offer. It took four years, he said, for him to reach agreement with the trustees of the William Waldorf Astor estate on the $6 million sale price of the 40 acres of central Queens property that became Lefrak City. What he created there might be considered the in-city rental answer to Levittown on Long Island, the famous large-scale single-family housing development that was also named for its developer, William Levitt. The site of Lefrak City, like other sites Mr. LeFrak chose for development, was well situated for commuting. "If we lived here, Daddy, you'd be home now," trumpeted a sign along the car-choked Long Island Expressway. In time everyone in New York knew the LeFrak name and the idea was copied by many places around the country. In his later years, Mr. LeFrak turned to other business ventures: oil and gas exploration through the Lefrak Oil and Gas Organization, a drilling company, and the entertainment business, through Lefrak Entertainment Company, which develops and produces popular records and buys and leases out the performance rights to popular songs. He also built a formidable art collection, which included paintings by Delacroix, Daumier, Renoir, Monet, Picasso, Pissarro and others. He had more offbeat interests as well. He financed expeditions in underwater archaeology, at one time in search of seventh-century Byzantine shipwrecks off the coast of Israel. He also helped finance a search for Noah's Ark, a failure when the Turkish government withheld permits to explore Mount Ararat. More successful was his financial aid to the search team that found the Titanic in its Atlantic grave. He was also a major philanthropist and the landscape is dotted with his endowed buildings that are named for him and his wife, the former Ethel Stone, whom he married in 1941. They include a concert hall at Queens College; a gymnasium at Amherst College; a meadow in Flushing, a sculpture terrace and art gallery at the Guggenheim Museum, a learning center at Temple Emanu-El, and a classroom building with an amphitheater at the University of Maryland. In addition to his wife and son, Mr. LeFrak is survived by three daughters, Denise LeFrak Calicchio, Francine LeFrak Friedberg and Jacqueline LeFrak Kosinski, five grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. To them, Mr. LeFrak often repeated what his parents had told him: just be smart and never get caught overleveraged. [ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ] |
| Subject | Author | Date |
| Re: Samuel LeFrak, Master of Mass Housing | John | July 18, 2003 12:56:07 EDT |
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