Samuel LeFrak used to joke that he had cement running through his veins, an allusion to his heritage as a third-generation builder. And with his large imprint on the metropolitan area — LeFrak City in Queens, Battery Park City downtown, and Newport in Jersey City being the most recognizable — LeFrak’s legacy is part of New York City’s DNA.
LeFrak claimed that he was a man of the people, producing affordable housing for middle-income families and building developments himself, rather than contracting the work to outside firms. By way of contrast, he was quoted referring to Donald Trump as “Mr. Glitz and Ritz.”
“Sam was old-school,” said Sandy Lindenbaum, a high-profile real estate lawyer who was a family friend. “He built from the ground up. He had a dynamic personality, an enormous will and could be forceful — like a typical big-time developer. But he was also very loyal. He would give you his word.”
Donald Trump added, “He built a lot of middle-income housing, making it possible for people to live here who would not have been able to otherwise … he had a great vision for New York City and for his company.”
LeFrak, who died in 2003 at age 85, told people that he entered the family business at age 8, pitching in at family-run construction sites. In 1938, while still a student at the University of Maryland, he completed a 60-family project and made enough concessions with Depression-strapped renters to fill the site.
His first full-time job with the company came in 1940, building housing for the Army. Just eight years later, he assumed the presidency of the LeFrak Organization from his father, Harry, who founded the company in 1901.
LeFrak went on to produce massive amounts of affordable housing for middle-income families during the postwar baby boom.
Beginning in the mid-1960s with LeFrak City in Queens, he launched a series of large-scale projects that prioritized utility over aesthetics. Under his leadership in the 1970s and 1980s, the LeFrak Organization put up some 150,000 houses and apartments in the metropolitan area, mostly aimed at renters.
“Sam wasn’t a builder who sold multimillion-dollar duplexes,” said Tom Shachtman, the author of “Skyscraper Dreams: The Great Real Estate Dynasties of New York.”
“His buildings were less polished, but rental-ready,” Shachtman told The Real Deal. “He made a little bit of money on each apartment — and he built lots of apartments. In a time when other builders were developing Manhattan, Sam mass-produced in the boroughs.”
LeFrak’s signature six-story apartment buildings proliferated in outer-borough neighborhoods. LeFrak built them wherever he could buy inexpensive land with what he called the four S’s: subways, schools, shopping, and security. He used security officers and elevator cameras before they were popular.
”I gave the people what they wanted, at a price they could afford to pay,” the New York Times quoted him as saying. ”I took them out of public housing, out of
the ghettos.”
LeFrak was fiercely proud of his namesake development, the 5,000-unit LeFrak City, which he built without tax abatements and called ”one of my children.”
In the 1970s, however, the brick mini-city ran into problems when the Nixon administration sued, charging the LeFrak Organization with discriminating against
African Americans when renting its apartments.
LeFrak, for his part, always disputed the suit’s charges. The suit was dropped, and the company pledged not to discriminate and to help 50 black families move into buildings with predominantly white residents.
After the suit was dropped against the LeFrak Organization, minorities became the majority, and whites left in droves. LeFrak blamed the federal government for forcing the company to revoke a requirement that renters pay no more than 25 percent of a family’s annual income. The income requirement was reinstated after several years.
LeFrak followed LeFrak City with the 92-acre Battery Park City, New York’s first major waterfront landfill community in more than 100 years.
“It was somewhat adventuresome,” said LeFrak’s son, Richard, who is the current CEO and chairman of the company. “At the time, Battery Park City seemed out of the way. ‘Nobody will live downtown,’ people said. But my father believed in developing inexpensive land and driving the value to the customers.”
Creating a neighborhood from scratch took vision. It meant buying a large tract of land, building, and then attracting ‘pioneers,’ as LeFrak described his middle-income tenants.
“He built at a price, then rented at a number that would allow a community to grow,” Richard LeFrak said. “In 1983, a Battery Park City two-bedroom rented for $900 a month — which even then was a good price.”
Back when the Jersey City waterfront was rundown and forgotten, LeFrak decided to take a chance on it. In the 1980s, he started a $10 billion, 20-plus-year project to make Jersey City’s Newport one of the Northeast’s biggest mixed-use developments. “When I first saw this land, it was desolate and had deteriorated,” he said. “Here was a site on the harbor of New York City, on the west bank of the Hudson, facing that marvelous skyline. And I said to myself, ‘How could they let this land lie idle?'”
Richard LeFrak noted that his father “saw the obvious potential of Jersey City — namely, that it is close to Manhattan. Still, it was a big stretch of the imagination when he started the project.”
Citing Newport as his “greatest vision” and “his legacy,” LeFrak invested heavily there.
“Newport is a completely new thing,” said Shachtman. “Sam dreamed very, very large. LeFrak City is a big complex, but Newport is a city — it has everything.”
Jerramiah Healy, the mayor of Jersey City, told
The Real Deal that “Sam was one of the first big investors in the Jersey City river area. His vision, courage and wherewithal began the miracle that is the
new waterfront.
“Before, it was one of the worst parts of Jersey City with abandoned, rotting buildings.”
LeFrak invested in oil and gas exploration, synergetic businesses that helped keep his company’s building costs down. He also invested in the entertainment business,
trying to outbid Michael Jackson for the rights to more than 200 songs written by former Beatles. He even took credit for discovering Barbra Streisand, telling the Times, “She was a tenant of mine in Brooklyn, and I gave her her first booking.”
An ambitious collector and explorer, LeFrak amassed an art collection that included works by Renoir, Monet and Picasso, and financed searches for sunken shipwrecks, including the Titanic.
He even sponsored a search for Noah’s Ark, though the Turkish government derailed it.
Since LeFrak’s death, his company has begun expanding its reach beyond greater New York. The company sold about 2,000 apartments in Brooklyn and Queens last year for $250 million, and bought office towers in Beverly Hills, Calif. It plans a luxury residential tower on Hollywood Boulevard and is also looking for a large development site in London.
Meanwhile, the ambitious development of Jersey City’s waterfront continues. LeFrak recently completed a 370-unit rental building there and is finishing a 220-unit condominium. When completed, the project is expected to house 35,000 residents, just as Samuel LeFrak had planned. That would bring the company’s total holdings to 5 million square feet of office space and 7 to 8 million square feet of rental properties. “We have a lot of room to run,” said Richard LeFrak.