William Zeckendorf Quotes
103 William Zeckendorf Quotes
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It is always wise when dealing away from home to have influential local partners.
William Zeckendorf
A citizen of a small town can, through circumstances or design, come to know almost everyone in the community.
William Zeckendorf
Howard Hughes, an industrial genius and paradoxical man, has been phenomenally successful. He has also produced some disastrously costly movies. He was known as a famous Hollywood Don Juan who collected and discarded beautiful women the way boys collect and discard model airplanes.
William Zeckendorf
[On Howard Hughes] The first time I met Hughes, in the early 1950’s, was in Florida, where we had talked about his buying the 63,000-acre Indian Trail Ranch that Webb & Knapp controlled.
William Zeckendorf
[On Howard Hughes getting him to appraise a range of properties without selling] One of the best ways to determine the value of vast holdings is to have someone make you a bona-fide offer for them.
William Zeckendorf
The stars must have been right when we met, for each of these men had individual visions about Montreal which matched mine, so we could work together.
William Zeckendorf
Any real-estate man is interested in twenty-two acres of singly owned midtown city property. What was frightening most people off was its size, plus the owners insistence on an overall rather than a piecemeal development. But it was this very aspect of the situation that intrigued me…
William Zeckendorf
Much of the intricacy and interest of Montreal flowed from the curious, unwritten rules of coexistence between the French and English of Canada, and we soon learned how important these rules were.
William Zeckendorf
I was principle troubleshooter for Webb & Knapp and would not have it any other way.
William Zeckendorf
A prime requisite for a successful program is a mayor strong enough to control the local demagogues and predators who inevitably rise up to attack or to fatten off a great development.
William Zeckendorf
Through lack of imagination and of boldness in execution the project died stillborn.
William Zeckendorf
It takes much more than the razing of slums and putting up of clean new apartments to revitalize a great area stricken with a combination of social and economic ills: revitalizing parts of a city’s core calls for a change in its human chemistry. The best way to achieve this is through new or better land use…
William Zeckendorf
[On the L’Enfant Plaza project in 1966 almost a year after the fall of Webb & Knapp - ‘Bill, how do you feel about all this; you conceiving the whole thing, bringing it along almost up to this very point, then having to watch other people take over your job and take the profit?’] Can I talk off the record? [‘Of course.’] Well, what I say, and I don’t think you will want to repeat, is: ‘I’m the guy that got the girl pregnant. Those fellows you see around here are merely the obstetricians.’
William Zeckendorf
Architects, as a group or guild, are at least as restrictive in their trade practices as doctors or plumbers, while as artists they are at least as jealous of each other as painters.
William Zeckendorf
Although private building complexes, urban-redevelopment projects, and massive land deals constituted the visible bulk of the Webb & Knapp empire, we had never given up our original business of assembling properties and packaging deals.
William Zeckendorf
There is a tremendous satisfaction to individuals and corporations alike in leaving an important constructive mark in their trail.
William Zeckendorf
It is dangerous to design a speculative building with only one prime tenant in mind…
William Zeckendorf
[On excavation for a great forty-eight story, sixty-six million dollar Zeckendorf Hotel] We had also spent two million dollars in making this hole and were discovering that building-construction costs had taken off for Mars.
William Zeckendorf
This will be the greatest boom town in the world, right here! You must help me finance it.
William Zeckendorf
Like buds on a prize rosebush, all these and dozens of other projects had not fully, profitably blossomed as yet. It would take generous watering, careful pruning, and delicate spraying to bring them forth, but it was obvious that that when they did blossom it would be a glorious show.
William Zeckendorf
[On interest rates] I’d rather be alive at eighteen percent than dead at six percent.
William Zeckendorf
When you cross the ocean on a steamship, you will notice that on some days, though there may be a prevailing wind, the ocean waves may actually come from five or six different directions at once. As these waves move by and through one another, they sometimes cancel each other out. At other times they augment each other and can create high crests and low troughs in the ocean… however the sudden appearance of the wrong combination of waves in such a gusty sea can spell disaster.
William Zeckendorf
If I had to do over again, I would – only bigger and better.
William Zeckendorf
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