How they got to the top: Peter Kalikow

Peter Kalikow, president, H.J. Kalikow & Company

As told to Melissa Dehncke-McGill

I grew up in Forest Hills, Queens, which was rural at the time. We were well off, although to my family’s credit, I didn’t know that at the time. As a kid, I remember walking around without any money in my pocket.

I went to school at Hofstra University [on Long Island]. By my junior year, I didn’t know what I wanted to do. That year I did really well in my business courses, so by the end of the year I told Dad I wanted to come into the business with him. He was very excited about that.

I was once told, “You don’t know what you know.” I didn’t know that I was learning from my father just by being around him as I was growing up. You don’t really know what you know until you are in your 40s. That’s the advantage of growing up in the business.

I had a leg up, two legs up, and I didn’t have to compete with all the people in my generation who were off experimenting with drugs and protesting. Starting from nothing is very different. My grandfather started from nothing. I admire that.

My grandfather founded the business in 1927 and built the best buildings with the best amenities. My father and his brothers built buildings that made a lot of money.

I was 24 when I built my first building in Great Neck, a mid-rise that had a lot of amenities. On the job, guys were saying that the plans wouldn’t work; they were driving up the cost and creating more problems. After that I just said, “What does the plan say?” And even if they said it wouldn’t work, they followed the plan anyway.

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Then I realized that for the same time and effort, I could make a lot more money in Manhattan. But I had to learn first. After that, I never had another job that wasn’t on budget — excluding interest rates, which I have probably guessed wrong more times than I want to think about.

In buildings, there is a pecking order; the top is the office building. Like the big builders at the time — Helmsley, Durst, Tishman — I wanted to be there. There were hundreds of pitfalls, but sometimes you get there in an odd way.

Being in the real estate business gives you a clear understanding of the importance of transportation. I took the subway all the time to high school and hockey games. I took the Triboro bus to junior high school. Today, everybody takes the subway, but in the ’70s and early ’80s, it wasn’t like that. Dad built one of his buildings in a two-fare zone and always had trouble keeping it full. My life with the MTA [Kalikow stepped down as chairman in May after six years] was informed early on by how important it was.

Visionaries are what make the society. Those are the people that change our lives. I am one of the practical ones. I’m OK at getting things done. Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, but Theodore Vale made the company into something people couldn’t live without.

I always wanted to do something else besides real estate. I was in the car business for a while some years ago. They were manufactured in Italy, but they were sold for $13,000 and cost $20,000 to make. So I bought the New York Post [in 1988 and sold it in 1993 to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation] stupidly, on a whim, with no clear understanding of what the problems were going to be. All my best people tried to make it work. If I could have done things differently, I would not have bought the Post. It was a difficult thing to do.

I decided that I was not going to devote all of my time to making money. I am interested in philanthropy and public service. That’s what I do with New York Hospital, the Holocaust Museum and Hofstra.

My advice is to show up on time and return your phone calls. Returning phone calls seems to be a lost courtesy. Real estate is a good business, but it’s going to be different in the future world economy. In the old days it used to be insular, local. The foreign buyers were not the factor that they are today.

Leadership is important; I learned that at the Post. Whether it is a family-owned real estate business, the Post or the MTA, you have to make people do what you want, but you have to lead them, you can’t make them. I try to convince the board, and if I can’t, then maybe they are right. That is something I had to learn.

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