Some quotes from a lengthy piece on Barnett...
http://nymag.com/news/features/establishments/68503/
The Anti-Trump
Gary Barnett, the builder of this era’s glitziest buildings, does not have cotton-candy hair or a big mouth—but what he does have is hubris.
By Gabriel Sherman
Sep 26, 2010
Quote:
“I’m not Greta Garbo,” says Gary Barnett of Extell company, a developer of luxury Manhattan buildings and just about the only builder of consequence who hasn’t been stopped by the crash. While Barnett is an increasingly visible presence on the Manhattan skyline, most of his life is elsewhere. An Orthodox Jew and father of ten children, he lives in Queens and guards his privacy obsessively. In a recent Crain’s article, he refused to divulge his age (he is 54). “It’s not like I’m frightened of the camera,” he continues. “I’m not Howard Hughes. It’s not that I hate publicity because I hate publicity. It’s that I don’t see any good use of it. Donald Trump sells buildings that way, or he gets a television show and makes money off it. But that doesn’t do anything for me.”
Barnett is the anti-Trump. His buildings are as ostentatious as he is unassuming. Extell, which Barnett founded in the early nineties after a career as a diamond trader in Belgium, is emblematic of a new type of New York real-estate firm that specializes in developing ultraluxury buildings that are akin to gated communities in the sky, where buyers with millions to spend can satisfy nearly any desire without ever stepping outside. His condos, like the 60-story Orion on West 42nd Street or the Ariel towers on Broadway at 99th Street, include such extravagances as indoor lap pools, spas, screening rooms, and pet salons. Barnett’s particular vision for urban living now appears wildly out of touch with current economic realities—and yet he continues to sell properties to buyers who, so far at least, have been insulated from the ravages of the recession. “He has a really strong stomach,” Corcoran CEO Pamela Liebman says. “He shows no fear.”
...Since blasting onto the scene at the start of the last decade, he has clashed with Bruce Ratner and the New York Times for control of the land under the Times’ new Eighth Avenue headquarters and made a surprise eleventh-hour bid for Atlantic Yards just as Ratner thought the massive development project was in his grasp. And now that the boom is over, Barnett is even more out of step with his peers.
While few other developers are building, Barnett is charging ahead with projects that are grander than anything conceived at the market’s vertiginous peak.
In March of this year, he snapped up the Helmsley Carlton House at 680 Madison Avenue for $170 million, vastly outbidding other suitors. And, in an act of either extreme confidence or epic folly (or both), Extell recently started construction on a project called Carnegie 57, a 1,000-foot-tall, $1.3 billion condo and hotel designed by Christian de Portzamparc and backed by the investment arm of the Abu Dhabi royal family. When completed in 2013, Carnegie 57 will top Trump’s U.N. Plaza tower for bragging rights as the city’s tallest residential building. “There’s a resentment that he’s able to still build and doesn’t give the appearance that he’s affected by this market,” says Stuart Saft, a partner at Dewey & LeBoeuf.
The resentment is tempered by the fact that many of his peers expect him to fail. “You have to bet that the peak will be higher than it’s ever been,” one incredulous real-estate banker said. “It’s a huge bet.”
“I don’t see there being significant competition for what we’re doing,” Barnett tells me. Barnett is standing at a conference table in his corner office, flipping through a glossy prospectus with renderings of the Carnegie 57 tower—a real-estate fairy tale in blue glass, punching out of a scrum of midtown skyscrapers. “I hate to speak in hyperbole, but I think it’s going to be the nicest project done in the city, because the architecture is beautiful,” Barnett says, sounding, it must be said, more like Trump than usual.
Barnett claims that irrational exuberance is not involved in his building spree. “There’s no new inventory coming to market,” he says. “If you go around, there’s a lot of pieces of dirt that didn’t get built. When this thing crashed, there wasn’t tons of overhang of inventory. If the bubble had continued for another two or three years, it might have been really bad.”
...In 2001, Bruce Ratner and the New York Times were maneuvering to buy a plot of land on Eighth Avenue and 41st Street to develop the Times’ Renzo Piano–designed headquarters. Barnett, who owned a parking lot on the site, tried to organize surrounding landowners. “I said, ‘Let’s all join together and we’ll be in control of the site, and if the New York Times really wants it, they’ll pay us more,’ ” he told me.
The effort failed, and when the state seized his property in an eminent-domain ruling, he sued. “The litigation can go for a lifetime, as far as he’s concerned,” says Ault. “He will tell lawyers, ‘I got more money, I got more time, and I got more lawyers.’ ”
The judge in the case ruled against him, a decision that still rankles. “I don’t think that whole process was fair at all,” Barnett told me. “The market turns great and [the state] turns around and hands it over to another developer and the New York Times to make money on?”
By this time, the city was shaking off the post-9/11 recession, and Barnett was looking for deals all over the city. In 2003, he partnered with the Carlyle Group and built the $305 million Orion, a 60-story luxury tower on a far-west stretch of 42nd Street that became the city’s sixth-tallest residential building.
...Given his meteoric rise, many in the real-estate world wonder if Barnett is creating a global firm like Tishman Speyer or Related. That seems unlikely, because Barnett insists on controlling every aspect of the development, from the financing to the choice of marble counter space, so the company will always be essentially his operation. He chuckled when I asked if he sees himself as part of the Establishment. “I don’t think of myself as a macher,” he said.
But machers are definitely paying attention. “A lot of guys, I call them the Rendering Boys,” says Trump. “They come in with renderings. They’re always showing renderings but never get them built. He gets them built.”
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