Real Estate Forum - September 2011

their next steps, “and it didn’t take long for us to realize that I should devote the rest of my career to rebuilding the World Trade Center.” First to rise was a new 7 World Trade, which opened in the spring of 2006. Although a 2006 agreement with the Port gave the agency the lion’s share of control over developing the 1,776-foot-high One World Trade Center, the tower eventually will be ringed by as many as three new SPI skyscrapers totaling nearly 7. 5 million square feet.

a few years earlier. Mall after mall followed from coast to coast, ranging from Cape Cod Mall in Hyannis, MA and Towne East Square in Wichita, KS to the Forum Shops at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. Melvin Simon & Associates went public in December 1993, forming Simon Property Group in what was then the largest REIT IPO in US history. A little more than a year later, David Simon was named president and chief executive officer of Simon Property Group; Melvin and Herbert Simon became co-chairmen. In common with another industry icon, Related Cos. chairman Stephen Ross, Melvin and Herbert Simon became major-league franchise owners, acquiring the Indianapolis Pacers in 1983. Uniquely among the legends spotlighted here, Melvin Simon was also a Hollywood producer, scoring his biggest success in that arena with the raunchy 1982 teen comedy Porky’s.

MELVIN SIMON

Melvin Simon “helped invent an industry,” Indianapolis developer Gerald Kosene told USA Today in 2009 upon Simon’s death at age 82. “He was among two or three pivotal people in the shopping center industry who created the enclosed shopping mall. No one did it on the scale and velocity he did.” The Indianapolis transplant from New York City, together with his brothers Herbert and Fred, launched what was then known as Melvin Simon & Associates in 1960, getting their start by developing Southgate Plaza in Bloomington, IN. It was the brothers’ first fully owned retail project after co-developing Eastgate Shopping Center in Indianapolis with Albert Frankel

JERRY SPEYER

The man who now owns Rockefeller Center and the Chrysler Building began his career as assistant to the vice president at another New York City landmark: the third of four arenas to bear the name Madison Square Garden. Then in 1966, Jerry Speyer joined Heitman-Real Estate Forum-Sept 2011-2.pdf 1 9/14/2011 3:00:02 PM

Tishman Realty & Construction, where he became executive vice president and director. Speyer and Robert Tishman launched Tishman Speyer Properties in 1978, with Speyer serving as president and chief executive officer, titles he holds to this day. Under Speyer’s leadership, Tishman Speyer has built office towers here and in Europe, and since its inception has managed a portfolio of assets totaling more than 116 million square feet and more than 92,000 residential units on four continents. The firm also made one of the signature deals at the height of the previous cycle, only to see its bet on market conditions go spectacularly wrong: the $5.4-billion acquisition of the massive Peter Cooper Village/Stuyvesant Town apartment complex, which ended with a $3-billion default two years later. A 1998 New York Times profile of Speyer labeled him “the anti-Trump” for his low-profile movement through the worlds of real estate, finance, culture and politics, although he is a prominent figure in all of these spheres. “I think of real estate as a little bit like cooking or art,” Speyer told the newspaper in 1998. “Real estate is dependent on a way of thinking that is very different from the way that, for example, financial engineers look at a project.”