Sitting in William Macklowe's corner office on the 21st floor of the General Motors Building, the most expensive slab of real estate in the world, it is easy, peering out over the green coppered heights of the Plaza hotel and the flight paths of red-tailed hawks, to summon comparisons between mountain climbing and ascending Manhattan's corporate towers. Or maybe it's just the aluminum figure-eight belay/rappel device sitting on Macklowe's desk.
Eight years ago, in what he refers to as his "summer of disaster reading," Macklowe ("Billy" to everyone — the puzzled doormen didn't know a "William") dipped into Jon Krakauer's book Eiger Dreams. "He talks about climbing ice waterfalls in Valdez, Alaska," says Macklowe, who used to play competitive ice hockey and, at 40, pulses with a quiet athletic confidence. "I don't know why, but as the consummate urban kid it just appealed to me." He signed up for climbing lessons on the indoor wall at Chelsea Piers and was hooked within 20 minutes.
Enlisting a friend, he began hitting peaks all over the world — a favorite is the "Snaz" in Jackson Hole. "It's an incredible feeling," Macklowe says. "It's a noncompetitive sport, and there's a great intellectual moment to it where you have to figure out the problem — how to get up, how to get down, how to be safe, how to make sure your partner's safe." Several "life events," including the birth of his daughter, Zoë, have recently conspired to keep Macklowe off the bluff face. But his climbing skills will no doubt prove useful in his new post as CEO of Macklowe Properties (he was formerly president). He's replacing his father, Harry Macklowe, who founded the firm in the mid-sixties and has such an outsize profile in New York that, if he didn't exist, Tom Wolfe would have had to invent him.
A little over a year ago, Macklowe Properties was near the pinnacle of the real estate scene, but then the foul weather of the credit crisis blew in and the company was left exposed on a mountain of debt. The cost of rescue was high: The very building in which Macklowe is sitting, a storied landmark of high corporate modernism, was dealt for about $3 billion to a consortium led by Boston Properties. With the real estate market floundering, Macklowe is taking over the family empire in trying times. "We've just come off a very long battle, in a very hostile environment," Macklowe says, tersely and carefully. "We had some issues, we've addressed those issues, and we're moving on. We like to think of it around here as Macklowe 2.0." A Wall Street Journal article enclosed in Lucite on Macklowe's desk notes the younger Macklowe to be "more sociable" than his father, and there are sartorial differences as well: Harry is more Paul Stuart, while Billy wears Prada suits and shirts and ties from Charvet.
The differences between father and son run deeper, though, all the way to their business models. While his father "built a colossal business," Macklowe explains, "his focus was never really on building the company so much. It was always on the next deal, the next deal. I've spent a considerable amount of time institutionalizing our business." By broadening their capital sources, Billy is looking to spread risk, just as climbing partners belay out rope to each other so one cannot fall too far.
Not surprisingly, the art of the deal was imprinted on Macklowe at a young age. "My dad was less the throw-the-football-around kind of guy and more the let's-walk-building-sites-together," he says. "If my father was a lawyer, I might not have identified with him as much as a developer. Because you walk right outside and see it, and touch it. It's more real."
Although Macklowe's nine-month-old daughter is still too small for a hard hat, she will no doubt participate in other family traditions, like sailing. A model of Macklowe's boat, a Luca Brenta-designed 38-footer called the Abraxas, is perched on a stand in the corner. "Sailing is very much a second language," Macklowe says, raving about the Abraxas's largely automated rigging systems, which enable him to single-handedly sail the ship. "I still get into a couple of regattas every summer," he adds. He and his wife, Julie Lerner Macklowe (an Aspen native who manages a multibillion-dollar hedge fund at Sigma Capital Management), are both avid skiers. Macklowe, who is also a long-distance runner — and who, to the eternal amusement of his friends, does nothing athletic without his heart-rate monitor — has lately even taken up golf, suggesting he's finally fully embraced the trappings of a CEO. "They're all seasonal sports!" he jokes by way of defense.
But from his perch high above Manhattan, on his way up yet mindful of the risks, it's climbing more than golf that exemplifies Macklowe. "There's something very pure about it. You're really relying on your fingertips and your toes. You set your own glass ceiling."
