COLUMBUS AVENUE AND THE UPPER WEST SIDE
ORAL HISTORY PROJECT

Interview with George Beane

Columbus Avenue Business Improvement District
2019

Beane – Session 1 of 2

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PREFACE

The following is the transcript of the first of two sessions of a recorded oral history interview
with George Beane conducted by Leyla Vural on February 5, 2019. This interview is part of the
Columbus Avenue and the Upper West Side Oral History Project, sponsored by the Columbus
Avenue Business Improvement District.
George Beane (born in 1944) has been involved in real estate on the Upper West Side since
shortly after he moved to the area (where he still lives) in 1972.
In this interview, Beane describes New York as he has known it, from his first days in the city
chauffeuring people to the 1964 World’s Fair to the Upper West Side today. He recalls moving
to The Dakota in 1972, where he met a neighbor, Robert Quinlan (also interviewed for this oral
history project), who was becoming a real estate developer on the Upper West Side. In 1976,
Beane and Quinlan formed Walker, Malloy & Company to manage Quinlan’s growing portfolio
of buildings. In 1978, Beane formed A. R. Walker & Company to manage the buildings he was
buying. Beane talks about the changes he saw in the neighborhood in the 1970s and ’80s—from
individual families and small developers like the Brusco family (also interviewed for this oral
history project) buying and renovating brownstones on the numbered streets off of Columbus
Avenue to the new shops and restaurants that were opening on the avenue. And he describes his
experience as a hands-on building manager and landlord.
The interviewee has reviewed, edited, and approved this transcript. Readers should bear in mind
that this is a verbatim transcript of an interview and, therefore, does not read like a polished
piece of written work. Time codes have been included to make it easier for readers to match the
transcript with the audio recording of the interview. Time codes may, however, no longer be
completely accurate because of edits to the transcript. Where there are differences between the
transcript and the audio recording, the transcript is the final document of record.
The views expressed in this oral history interview are the interviewee’s alone and do not
necessarily reflect those of the Columbus Avenue Business Improvement District.

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Interviewee: George Beane
Interviewer: Leyla Vural
Interview date: February 5, 2019
Session: 1 of 2
Location: New York, N.Y.
Vural: [00:00:01] It is Tuesday, February 5th, 2019. This is Leyla Vural interviewing George
Beane in his apartment on the Upper West Side for the Columbus Avenue Business
Improvement District Oral History Project. Thank you, George.
Beane: [00:00:15] Thank you.
Vural: [00:00:16] I really appreciate that you’re here and have welcomed me into your home
and are letting me do this with you.
So, oral histories usually begin at the start of a person’s life. So, can you tell me where and when
you were born and something about how you grew up?
Beane: [00:00:32] Well, I was born in a suburb of Chicago, January 14th, 1944. My father was
working there briefly. And then we moved to Goshen, New York in Orange County, and I was
there until the age of five. Then we moved to Fairfield County in Connecticut and I lived there
until I moved to New York, when I think—I think I was about—I was 19 when I moved to New
York. I left college and came to work in New York City. And I worked just as a clerk in a
brokerage firm for a few years and—but I had a part-time job as a chauffeur in the World’s—
1964 World’s Fair, driving people back and forth from the World’s Fair marina to the fair. Then
that started my second career as a chauffeur, and I did that when I was at Columbia [University].
And then subsequently I graduated from Columbia School of General Studies and then Columbia
Law School and then I went to—got a job with a law firm, which was not of great interest to me.
And I moved to the Upper West Side in 1972.

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[00:02:10] I had gone to a party down in the Village [Greenwich Village]. It was the depth of
financial hard times in New York City, and the host had an apartment which—he had a really
nice, I think it was a floor-through in a good townhouse, a good-sized townhouse, and he had
paid $5,000 for his apartment. And I had saved $5,000 and I thought, well, I’m going to buy
myself an apartment because now I have a job. And my job was an—had an astronomical sum
of—or an astronomical salary of $16,000 a year, which is what the good law firms were then
paying, had just gone from $10,000 to $16,000.
[00:03:05] So, eventually I found an apartment. I looked all over and I found an apartment on the
West Side. I had looked when I first came to New York at an apartment on the West Side and it
was really spooky, really scary. All I remember, it seems to me—in probably what’s a very nice
building on Columbus Avenue—it just seemed spooky. Fluorescent lights, dim lights in the
hallway, dirty. It seemed like the end of the world to somebody who had just moved to New
York.
[00:03:41] But I found an apartment. I didn’t need a big apartment, but I found really a mess of
an apartment at The Dakota, and it had at one point been a public dining room and I don’t know
what else. But there were three rooms and it was on the ground floor. The ceilings were fourteen
feet high. There was a great, big paneled living room, another room, an entrance hall, and no
kitchen, except for there was a hotplate.
[00:04:22] And so the apartment was pretty expensive, though: it was $30,000. And it was a
thousand square feet, I know, although square footage didn’t mean anything to me at the time.
But I liked the apartment and so I had $15,000 and the seller, Mr. Blumberg I think his name

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was, took back a purchase money mortgage of $15,000. So, I paid that back over a period of
time.
[00:04:58] And I moved in and then I really made it into a wonderful apartment. I took the paint
off the woodwork and lo and behold there was this great oak and mahogany and ash and other
kinds of wood on the doors. And I made a really what seemed like then a very modern, cool
kitchen. And I lived there and became active in the building. And one of my—I was on the board
of the building—and one of my friends, new friends from the building, was Bob [Robert]
Quinlan, who had just started renovating the Upper West Side. And he was really hardworking.
He’d had real estate experience and had great ideas. As an example of how hardworking people
were back then—he wasn’t working from an office, he was working from his apartment, and at
that time he’d bought a building and he needed—and he couldn’t rent one of the—it was a
basement store, as I recall, and he couldn’t rent it to anybody, so he started a laundromat there.
Soap N’ Suds, it was called.
[00:06:16] And so Bob would go every Sunday—he had a coin counter—and he’d go and he’d
get the money and he’d come home and he’d count it out. That’s what people did back then. And
he was doing the developing, but he didn’t have a real—he didn’t have a good management
company to take care of the buildings that he—once he had tenants in them, and he did have
some buildings that had tenants in them at that point, maybe three or four. And so he asked me if
I would consider quitting the law firm and starting a management company in partnership with
him, and I did. I thought that was a great idea. I was ready to leave that anyway.
[00:07:03] And so we started a company called Walker, Malloy & Company. And so I managed
his buildings. I knew nothing about real estate. I didn’t—I’d never heard of rent control or rent

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stabilization. And I worked out of my apartment. You know, I didn’t need much money. I wasn’t
married.
[00:07:28] And, oh, going back to my purchase of the apartment, I had an interview and it was
with the board. It was pretty easy back then. They didn’t ask for letters of reference or financial
statements. And the board president or chairman, Peter Nitze—it was in his apartment, which
was a wonderful apartment.
[00:07:51] Just the week before, there had been an article in the real estate section of The New
York Times talking about The Dakota’s plan for a new roof and how expensive that was going to
be and it was going to be a huge roof, slate, and there was going to be this huge assessment. And
so I spoke to Mr. Nitze at my interview and I said, “Well, Mr. Nitze, I’m sorry. I’ve signed a
contract, but I can’t afford to live here if there’s going to be this big assessment.” And he said,
“Well, Mr. Beane, I know where you work and I know what your salary is and I know that you
can afford to live here and I’m not letting you out of this contract.” So, I was stuck. And
subsequently he said—I don’t know if it was the same meeting—he said, oh, maybe he said it as
I left the door, “And, by the way, we’re not putting on a new roof.”
[00:08:42] So it worked out very well and I really liked living there, but after I started the
management company with Bob Quinlan I had—you know, I worked all the time out and so I
wasn’t home in my apartment except at night. And I—oh, maybe this was the first, yes, the first
day—I was actually there on a Saturday when I had my job with the law firm. There was a
forecast for rain. And I heard the rain, which turned out to be the fountains in The Dakota
courtyard. My apartment was on the first floor, so I couldn’t see any sunlight. I thought it was

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going to be cloudy. And I walked out with my umbrella and my galoshes on or whatever it was,
and it was [chuckles]—it was the sunniest day of the year.
[00:09:33] So it was an apartment that was really wonderful and I loved living there, but it
wasn’t a place where you wanted to live if you were working during the day. But what really
changed things, in 1977 this was—I’d started, I bought the apartment in ’72 and we’d started
Walker, Malloy in ’76, and by ’77 Bob Quinlan said, “You know, you’re never going to be able
to make a good living just managing buildings. Now you’ve got to figure out how to buy
something.”
[00:10:06] And so I eventually sold my apartment and that’s how I—and I sold it for a record
price of $87,000, which was the highest price per share I think ever at The Dakota, which
showed, first of all, the apartment had been fixed up, improved really nicely, and the second
thing was that the market was—the West Side was starting to change. And the Upper West Side
was changing because of Bob Quinlan and a few people like him. And just the time had caused it
to—caused a change moving up from Lincoln Center. Everybody knows now really that that, and
also the economy, was the catalyst for the improvement of the Upper West Side. And the stores
that were coming here, encouraged by Bob, and really it was a new idea, were really innovative
and they were—the rents weren’t high. But all of a sudden this became, was becoming, the place
to have a store.
[00:11:17] Betsey Johnson started. There was a wonderful flower shop called The Cultured Seed,
and the guy—and he’s still on the West Side, I ran into him on the street, oh, a couple of years
ago, I don’t remember his name—but he had the most imaginative windows. People would walk
out of their way to see his windows. And he’d change them and they were—they were sort of

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dioramas. They were really cool. And there was something called The Sensuous Bean, too. And
there’s a store now that came around that time called Only Hearts, and that is still there—I don’t
know if it’s owned by the same people—in a different location. There were a few—there was
Jezebel, I think was one, and she sold really cool used women’s clothes.
[00:12:14] But basically Columbus Avenue was a place people did not want to go and they did
not want to live there. And when I bought my apartment at The Dakota and I told friends I was
going to move there they said, “Are you sure? That’s a really—well, I guess it’s okay because
it’s right by Central Park, but still, Central Park is not safe and you don’t want to go into Central
Park.” That was the prevailing feeling.
[00:12:40] And there were starting to be a couple of—well, maybe a little bit later—Ruelle’s was
a good restaurant, and there was a good Cuban restaurant, and there was an Italian restaurant
called Al Buon Gusto between Seventy-second and Seventy-third in a building I subsequently
bought with Bob Quinlan. But it wasn’t a place where you really wanted to walk if you didn’t
have to. Many people were scared. And Amsterdam [Avenue] was much worse even. And I
parked my car in a garage on Seventy-seventh and Amsterdam and you really didn’t see people
on the street when you were walking—when I was walking to get my car if I were going away
on a weekend or something.
[00:13:39] And this was reflected in the slow change in occupancy of apartments. The apartment
that the Quinlans and I bought, the building 100 West Seventy-third Street, had been a French
flat, a so-called French flat. That was the official designation of tenement buildings that were
nice. They weren’t like—they weren’t the kind that had no windows in the rooms, some of the
bedrooms, because the law had changed. And they were built—that building like many on

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Columbus was built probably around 1882. There’s a photograph of it. The West Side developed
really fast when the elevated train was put in and I think that was around 1880. Maybe it was
1882. And The Dakota was built supposedly—maybe it opened in 1884, it must have been
started before. And so that—and the hopes were that this would really become a nice place to
live.
[00:15:05] And the Clark family built The Dakota but they also built a row of houses on
Seventy-third Street behind The Dakota, which—really fine, one-family, single-family
brownstone houses designed by the same Henry Janeway Hardenbergh, who subsequently
designed The Plaza Hotel. And Hardenbergh and [Edward Cabot] Clark also built a row of
houses on the West Side of Columbus, northwest corner, including a building that Bob Quinlan
had bought and renovated probably around 1975 or ’76. And I think when Bob bought—to show
the difference between how, to show how the neighborhood has changed, I hope Bob will be
interviewed—but I think he told me that he—because he lived at The Dakota before I did. When
he was first married, he moved in there and bought a—he and his wife bought an apartment. And
I think he said that he saw a pimp hanging his prostitute off the fire escape by her arms, naked—
naked prostitute. I think that was it. But that was who was living in these buildings.
[00:16:40] Initially, wealthier middle-class families were living in the one-family houses and
then there were, I suppose, blue-collar, more middle-class, people living in—but lower middleclass—living in these five- or six-room apartments. Two bedrooms, generally, a living room, a
library—a living room, dining room and a kitchen and one bathroom. And I would imagine that
they had coal stoves then.

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[00:17:12] That—so the neighborhood I think was stable for, with probably pretty wealthy
people living in the single-family houses on the park block, until I imagine in the 1920s, when
with the automobile and the rise of the suburbs, that made—the suburbs became more desirable.
Certainly, in the thirties, during the Depression, many of the houses were—started to be—people
would rent out rooms. And of course the city was dirty: coal furnaces and incinerators.
[00:18:02] So, living in the city was less desirable as living in the suburbs became more
desirable. And so the rooming houses—one-family houses became—tended to become rooming
houses. At least this is what I believe, I wasn’t here for that. And it got worse in the—as time
went on in the forties and the fifties. After World War Two, some of the buildings that had
been—the apartment buildings, like the one that the Quinlans and I own on Seventy-third and
Columbus, were divided and that became—because there was a housing shortage. And that was
divided into studio apartments, and what had had—was a five-story building, commercial on the
ground floor typically, typical buildings like that, and on the four upper floors, they were two
apartments each. So, that would be eight apartments, half of the Columbus Avenue frontage for
one, half for the other, with four or five small rooms.
[00:19:24] And actually Bob Quinlan bought and owned another one prior to—I think he had it
probably 1975 or maybe ’74—100 West Seventieth Street, which is a twin to the building we
own. You wouldn’t know it because that one was never divided. They were when he had it, and I
think it still is, there were two—still two apartments per floor. And the adjacent building in
Seventy-first Street was the same and I don’t believe that’s been divided. But the one we have on
Seventy-third was divided and by the time I bought it with the Quinlans in 1977, it was—there
were twenty studio apartments, very nice, small apartments renovated in the very early 1950s.

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[00:20:19] And the people who lived there were single for the most part, although there was a—
there were a few old couples. There was a Mr. and Mrs. Nolan lived on the second floor in their
one-room apartment with a kitchen and a bathroom, and I don’t remember what they did but they
were very old. And they were just a lonely but very nice old couple who paid very low rent. And
eventually Mr. Nolan, a few years later, Mr. Nolan died and then Mrs. Nolan died. And I
remember she didn’t have anybody, I don’t think.
[00:21:00] Somehow she was in the funeral parlor around the corner, and I went, and it struck
me that she was probably—I went to visit her at the funeral parlor, just to pay my respects, and
there she was, no one had signed the guestbook, maybe one person, I think. And nobody had
really—she had nobody to care for her. And I remember—I’d never seen anything like this—the
undertaker had stitched her mouth together, as I guess they do, and you could see the cotton in
between the stitches inside her mouth. And I thought this is really—this is—there’s so many
sad—although she wasn’t a sad person—but so many people who live in New York City like
this, alone, with nobody. And many of the people who were living in that building, and in other
buildings that I subsequently bought at that time, who were living alone and lonely, and lives that
appeared just to have halted.
[00:22:14] I had to—it was my job as the managing agent for Bob’s buildings to rent them, so
I’d put an ad in the vacancies. And they were mostly studios or one bedrooms. And so I’d put an
ad in The New York Times. In 1976—I guess this was in ’77—and the ad would be on Sunday
because there was no internet and there was a Sunday real estate section, which was very thick
and it came out on Saturday. And so people would call my number and make an appointment to
look at the apartment.

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[00:22:48] Now, most people, or a great many, would hang up when they found out that these
buildings were all just—they were on Columbus and they—but they were on the west side of
Columbus and nobody wanted to live west of—on the west side of Columbus. But I made
some—I did make appointments. The apartments I think they were $130 for a studio, maybe
$150 for the new tenant under rent stabilization. And I would have to go out ahead of time to the
building just to move the drunks and the drug dealers away, to just ask them politely—they were
very nice about it, but they— I’d say, “Look, I have to rent an apartment here, would you mind
moving away so people—” You know, I didn’t say “so people won’t be scared”. And then they
were—but they were young, all young people who were moving to the West Side now. If they
were coming from out of town, their mothers and fathers often would not let them rent those
apartments because they were too close to Central Park and there was no doorman.
[00:24:02] But gradually— And Bob’s buildings were all renovated and the one that we owned
together was. Some buildings could be bought by a developer and vacated and then renovated
from top to bottom and renovated to suit the then market, which was sort of a low-income starter
market. But the building that we bought at 100 West Seventy-third Street had tenants. It was not
a building that could be vacated, nor did we buy it with the thought that we would vacate it. We
bought it with the idea that it had commercial space and the commercial space was undervalued.
We knew—we knew—that Columbus Avenue was changing, the demographics were, and we
knew that with these— They were long-term low-rent stores. For instance, in the building on
Columbus and Seventy-third that we bought, 100 West Seventy-third Street, there was a dry
cleaner on the corner, and the rent—it had a long lease, well, fairly—it was coming up the end of
a fairly long lease, and the rent was—it seemed to me it was pretty much nothing. However, the
owners of the store were not charging nothing for the services they provided, the service—the

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clothes—whatever the market rate was to have a shirt cleaned. And their business was getting
better because more people had their shirts cleaned and their clothing cleaned then.
[00:25:56] So, it was really at that point a goldmine for retailers. And what some were doing
with especially long leases, they were, to the extent that they were able, they were assigning their
leases to other people because they wanted to get out of the business and they didn’t live in New
York City. They were mom-and-pop stores, but typically they lived in New Jersey or Long
Island or someplace and commuted. But they found that they could sell their leases, really they
could capitalize the value of their leases, and they would sell them.
[00:26:30] So, the only stores that Bob—pretty much, with some exceptions—the buildings that
Bob, and it was very smart, would buy would be the—would be avenue buildings. And that’s
what I did subsequently, too.
[00:26:44] Other developers, the Brusco family and people like that, they bought the—they
would buy brownstones and renovate them. They were able to buy them vacant and they would
renovate them into studio or one-bedroom apartments, typical, kind of with brick walls—if you
remember back, that was the style and they were sort of cool—and maybe a fake fireplace still
there.
[00:27:15] So our building on Seventy-third and Columbus, I’ve had to renovate as people have
moved out, apartment by apartment. So, that’s really never been as just economically as good as
having a building that you could buy—that you bought vacant and you could get a construction
loan and renovate the whole thing and then you would have a finished product. But I couldn’t
buy buildings like that. There was a premium on those. And so I bought buildings that couldn’t
really be vacated and you didn’t, you wouldn’t, try. There were always some illegal tenants in

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the buildings, typically people who really didn’t have any right to be there and/or were
pretending to be somebody they weren’t.
[00:28:18] But so that has meant that I’ve been in the construction business for forty years. And
the other buildings I’ve bought—that Seventy-third Street those are very small apartments—the
other ones on other avenues have typically been larger. For instance, in the building I own on
Amsterdam and Eighty-second Street, those the rents were so low. I’m the third family that’s
owned it since it was built in 1880 and they were typically five or six rooms ranging, oh, say,
eight to—800 to 1,000 square feet or something like that with stores on Amsterdam Avenue.
And the average rent for those five or six rooms was $100 a month in 1978 when I bought it. The
highest, highest rent was the one—they were all rent controlled—the highest rent was one
apartment with—it was rent stabilized—which was $250 a month. And those people were not
going to leave under any—and you couldn’t expect them to leave.
[00:29:33] But it was a very difficult building. I knew that when I bought it because I could
see—and I found out subsequently that the tenants had terrorized the owners. The owners were
the four daughters of two brothers who had a shop downstairs. They were glaziers and the
daughters had inherited it. And the tenants found out—they had another management company
that managed it for them. But the tenants had located one of the daughters—she was a teacher in
Riverdale—and they called her in the middle of the night, at 2 o’clock in the morning, and would
say terrible things to her. I don’t know what they said but they would make her cry. And I mean,
they were just—and the people were—they couldn’t collect the rent. They owed back taxes.
[00:30:25] And so that was the kind of building that I could buy. And subsequently—and these
were people for the most part—there was a drug dealer, there was a man who owned a boy

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brothel in Yonkers. And they were really people who—there was one woman who paid $100 a
month rent. She was a nice old English woman. She had a house in Southampton, where I think
she went on weekends, and I don’t know how she’d gotten it—because I think she’d been a
nanny at one time and maybe to somebody famous. But she was hardly poor, although the City
was paying part of her rent. Once I bought the building, I could increase the rent, and I was not
popular because I began to increase the rent.
[00:31:10] The tenants—some of the tenants had actually connected their electrical—they
bypassed Con Ed and hooked onto the building’s electric. But that was the kind of fair game that
you found in many places, not all by any means, on the West Side. But the woman, the English
woman who paid $100 a month for rent, she rented to Columbia students from India. She would
always find a man or somebody who was at Columbia and rent one tiny room in her apartment
for either $100 a week or $100 a month, I can’t remember what.
[00:31:49] So, that was what I was dealing with early on. There was another building where—
that I had bought for maybe it was $5,000 on Amsterdam Avenue, but that job required me going
in and shoveling coal into the furnace [chuckles]. So, that’s what it was like in—that’s what it
was like in the very early—in 1977, ’78.
Vural: [00:32:27] So, let me ask you—can you talk a little bit more about how the troubled part
of the neighborhood, like drug dealers, and the sort of the everyday people who were still just
going to regular jobs and raising kids and getting old, how did those two parts of the community
navigate and live side by side?
Beane: [00:32:59] Well, people tended to live side by side. It wasn’t necessarily dangerous. It
might be dangerous for landlords who wanted to raise a rent-controlled rent that had never—

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hadn’t been raised for fifty years, but most buildings were not like that. They were on the block
that I live, on West Eighty-second Street, and I had to live—I moved into the building on Eightysecond Street and Amsterdam in 1979 because it was such a—it was so—the people were so bad,
and in fact, when I—after I moved in, shortly after, not long after I moved in, they hired a—the
tenants hired somebody to—they put a contract on my life and they hired somebody to—they
wanted me to leave. They didn’t want me in the building and they hired somebody to get me
with a metal baseball bat in the building and come after me swinging at my head. It didn’t work
and I didn’t move and I live here.
[00:34:10] But the people who were—there were, I guess, three kinds of people, three kinds of
new owners at that point. One, and earlier than the time I’m talking about, people with young
families or starting families would buy a brownstone with the idea of living in—having a garden
apartment or the bottom two floors and renting out the floors above. One of the—one friend, who
was a journalist, Roberta Gratz, and her husband owned a foundry in Long Island City. They
bought a building and they both worked and I think they had two young daughters. They bought
a building on I think it was the park block on Eighty-ninth, Eighty-eighth, someplace around
there, and they just—they could afford it. They were—they really had faith in the community
and the changes in the community. Eventually, though, it was too hard. They had a nanny for
their child and they I think were driven out because the nanny felt she could not take the children
out during the day. It was very—and the family just felt it really wasn’t a safe place. They
bought an apartment and as far as I know Roberta Brandes Gratz still lives there at The Century
on—just above 15—it’s 25 Central Park West, above the very fancy, expensive 15 Central Park
West.

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[00:35:55] But there were a lot of families that—I think that was in the sixties. But there were
people in the seventies who were coming back, owner-occupants. So, there was a bit of a
premium on those. Not much. Houses were selling for—brownstones were selling for, oh, $85,
$100,000 and maybe a little bit up, and the prices increased. And the other people were buying
buildings, which could be delivered vacant. And the Sackman family did that, and I think the
Brusco family did that. And Bob Quinlan did that. And then the other people were like me:
smaller developers—and everybody was pretty small at that time, I think, initially—would buy
these occupied buildings, which was really asking for trouble.
[00:36:48] Now, you read about landlords who would buy buildings like that and do whatever
they could to get rid of the tenants. You read about that a lot. Now, I don’t know to what extent
that’s an exaggeration. I’m sure there’s a lot of truth in it. But, you know, you really—anyway,
that wasn’t my experience.
[00:37:16] But Eighty-second Street was not atypical, and I know about it because I live on it.
There were a few of the—several of the Sackmans owned several buildings on the block and
they had renovated them in the late seventies—about the time I bought this, this one in 1978—
and they were renting to young people, studio apartments or one-bedroom apartments with brick
walls. And there were a number who had bought one-family—or formerly one-family—
brownstones and were living in one or two floors. In one case, there were two or three—there
was in one building, two or three people had gotten together and bought a building, a
brownstone, and they lived there with their two or three families.
[00:38:10] Now, those buildings, some of them were subsequently sold and turned into onefamily houses, very expensive, multimillion dollar, one-family houses. But back then, you know,

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you—and when I bought the building on Seventy-third Street with the Quinlans we also—it
came as a package with a very, a derelict, formerly a brownstone next door, which had, oh, six or
eight rent-controlled apartments. And we sold that. We had to sell it right away to get some of
our money back so we could— I don’t know how we’d gotten all the money for—these buildings
were never very expensive. By today’s standards, they’d be pocket change. But that didn’t—but
they certainly—didn’t mean they were profitable.
[00:39:06] But, so I think we sold 102 West Seventy-third Street for $85,000. It was rent
controlled and with a number of old people, and we sold that to one of the Brusco families. There
were three Brusco families in the real estate business. And I believe they still own it, and they
own a number of other buildings in the neighborhood. But the family—the people who lived on
the block, they did get along very well. The old typical—on the block I live on, they would
typically assume that a real-estate person wanted to come in and throw everybody out, which
was not, that was not my intent. But they were also very skeptical about—maybe for reasons of
self-preservation about gentrification. And you still hear that: how, oh, the neighborhood’s not
going to be the same, all the mom-and-pop stores will be driven out, where will the dry cleaners
go? there’ll be no more places to have your shoes fixed.
[00:40:14] That didn’t happen. It was a gradual change. But there were no children in any of
these buildings. You didn’t see children on the block. My children were— And there was
another family that had bought a one-family house and they had two children. They had
apartments upstairs and there— So I think there were four children on the block when mine were
born in the early- and mid-eighties. And they were born in this building.

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[00:40:49] But actually the dry cleaners thrived because there were more people going to work
who needed clean clothes. The shoe repair people they may have moved from great big, or
bigger, stores into smaller stores around the corner, but they were still there providing the
service. The bodegas stayed. What left were the stores like that you could buy prosthetics and
bedpans and walkers, all up and down Amsterdam Avenue, if I remember correctly. And there
were a lot of used furniture stores. Those gradually gave way to other stores, just as the whole
city changed. The rents went up and that was one of the reasons people moved out. But there
were hat stores and there was no market for hats anymore. In the building that—a hat store in the
building on Columbus Avenue in Seventy-third Street, 100 West Seventy-third—when I bought
the building in 1977 with the Quinlans, I think the store may have been vacant or just became
vacant, and I remember that it was a—I’m pretty sure it was a ladies’ hat shop, had been.
[00:42:10] And so I was talking to a friend who was a good cook, who lived at The Dakota. Oh, I
know, this was before even, when I was still working for a law firm. She had great parties and
good food. And I had to entertain some Japanese clients in my apartment. I think I was probably
told I should have them for dinner or something like that, some reason I did decide, and so I said
to Sheila Lukins, “Sheila, who’s your caterer? You have such great food.” And she said, “I’m my
caterer.” And I said, “Oh, I was—” “I cook. I do them myself.” And I said, “Oh, I was looking
for a caterer.” And she said, “Well, I’ll do it. I’m the caterer.” And I said, “I didn’t know you
were a caterer.” And she said, “Oh, well, I wasn’t, but now I am! And you’ll be my first
customer.”
[00:43:04] And so she did it, and she called herself The Other Woman. And then the hat store—
we bought that building—the hat store became available and she at the same time wanted to start
a catering business out of her apartment, but a gourmet food shop. So, she started with a partner

20

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something called The Silver Palate. And it was the first kind of—I think it was the first gourmet
food shop in New York City. She would make food that you could take out. She had these
wonderful jams and jellies and preserves and all kinds of really great stuff that people came from
around the city to buy. She subsequently expanded The Silver Palate line so it was sold in Saks
Fifth Avenue and other stores like that, she wrote The Silver Palate Cookbook, which was—had
a picture of her shop on Columbus Avenue, and then she wrote other—she and her partner wrote
other cookbooks. Eventually, it was sold.
[00:44:11] The rents went up because the demand for those spaces went up. Now it’s always
been cyclical and the rents have always gone up and they’ve always come down. And the rents
were very high, as they had been around the city, and now they have come down to a point where
they’re maybe, oh, 55 percent of what they were several years ago. And so the market itself in
my opinion has—at a time of great difficulty in retail, maybe because of Amazon and people
shopping online, for a variety of reasons—that’s sorting itself out.
[00:44:49] So, gradually the kinds of people who came to the neighborhoods, they became
interested in the neighborhoods. They formed block associations with the people who’d been
here before. But we got trees on West Eighty-second Street because the neighborhood, the block,
came together, kind of the homesteaders and the new owners, together with a handful of people,
really caring people, who’d been on the block for a long time. People who were, I suppose,
gentrifiers, or symbolized or that people who—they were people who actually had jobs and
children they wanted to send to local schools, and also work for the community. They were
working with other people who really had been here a long time and cared greatly about the
community.

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Vural: [00:45:44] So, I want to ask you, when—you mentioned where you grew up. So, when
you were here initially, what did you think of yourself? How did you make sense of coming from
Connecticut to kind of rough-and-tumble New York?
Beane: [00:45:59] Well, it wasn’t rough-and-tumble, it was just the way it was. And I lived on
the East Side. I think I came and I found an apartment with a roommate who was—I don’t
know—he’d also dropped out of college and subsequently did very well. He’s founded—it’s an
organization called Project for Public Spaces, which is an urban planning organization, which
does work all around the world.
[00:46:29] So, we sort of roomed together for a while in a walk-up brownstone on East Sixtyfirst between Park [Avenue] and Lex [Lexington Avenue], which sounds pretty posh, but the rent
was, I don’t know, it was a little bit above $100 for a tiny one-bedroom apartment, and that’s
where we lived. So, it wasn’t—it didn’t seem rough-and-tumble at the time.
[00:46:54] And then I rented an apartment—when I went to college at Columbia, I rented an
apartment on [East] Ninety-fifth [Street] between Park and Madison [Avenue] and that was like a
hundred and something a month and it was a studio apartment and it was fine. And I rode my
bike to Columbia and then I lived there until I moved to The Dakota in 1972.
[00:47:28] And Central Park was a place which was—until the Central Park Conversancy came,
stones were falling off the stone bridges, the metal was rusting on the metal bridges, the grass
was dirt patches, and you got mugged, people got mugged. I found a dead body one time or
somebody—I was going to—riding my bicycle through Central Park at dusk one night in the
seventies and on the other side, just off of Fifth Avenue, right under the windows of—practically
of Jackie Kennedy when she lived there—somebody, I came across somebody who had just been

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clubbed by two kids and clubbed. They knocked him out with a branch of a tree and he was lying
there. And so a couple of people came together and I stayed until somebody else ran to the
doorman on Fifth Avenue and they called an ambulance. And the poor guy died. I mean, this
was—this was—it wasn’t even dark in Central Park then. And he was—it turned out he was an
illustrator of note, a commercial artist.
[00:48:42] So, the park was used. There were basket—the baseball players were just starting to
come off the field. But that happened in Central Park then. So, it was raunchy. It was rough.
People I know who lived in the, even then, very nice buildings, like the Beresford, who sent their
kids to private school, to Trinity [School] or Collegiate [School], would give their boys mug
money so that if—so that— And that happened, I know, on the East Side, too, the kids would
have a couple of dollars. It was a racket, but that’s the way it was. And even when my sons were
at Collegiate, a private boys’ school on the West Side, there were gangs. The public school kids
were—they were—that’s not to say that the boys at Collegiate didn’t have their own kind of
gangs, but they weren’t out—it was not what we would consider safe in the same way it is today.
Vural: [00:49:51] So, what—how did you think about yourself? What was appealing to you?
What was it that made you as a young person say, oh, this is the place I’m going to, you know,
stake my claim and call home?
Beane: [00:50:09] You mean New York City in general—
Vural: [00:50:10] Yes.
Beane: [00:50:10] —or the West Side?
Vural: [00:50:11] Both. New York originally and then the West Side.

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Beane: [00:50:14] Well, of course where would you go if you were a nineteen year old after
you’d finished a year or so of college and you wanted to get a job? Well, you’d go to New York
City. And I had—most people, my friends were in college—but I had a couple of friends who
were here and I didn’t know any better. And I got a job with a—as an odd-lot clerk, which was
the lowest kind of clerk. If someone was making a trade that you would buy 125 shares of IBM,
well, I’d get the order for the twenty-five shares and put it on the conveyor belt and then I’d
execute the order, and that was my really low-level job until I then became a chauffeur, and that
was much more fun.
[00:50:57] And so living in New York was fine. And then—although I do remember going to
visit on a date with a girl whose family owned a—they lived in a one-family house in the [East]
Nineties, off of Madison Avenue. And I took the bus up there, probably in 1963 or 4, and, boy, I
thought I was going to Westchester County, it was so far away, going from Sixty-first Street to
the Nineties.
[00:51:22] And then the move to the West Side was because the West Side—the old storyline is
nobody goes to the West Side except on their way to get to the Queen Elizabeth, to the boats to
go to Europe. That was, you know, that’s what some people said.
[00:51:43] So, it really wasn’t—it was down—it was really down on its heels. The East Side
apartments were very inexpensive. You could buy a Fifth Avenue apartment for under $100,000,
with four bedrooms, and really in a very, very nice building then. So—but it was still—it had a
different feeling. So, coming to the West Side was very different but, you know, I had—I didn’t
have any choice. I found an apartment I liked in a building that I liked and so the neighborhood

24

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was—but I was young and it didn’t make any difference to me, really. And then it was step by
step.
[00:52:31] And I knew, as did others, like Bob Quinlan, that the West Side was changing and it
was moving and it was not going to be abandoned. I knew. I walked every single block from like
Sixty-fifth Street up to maybe Ninetieth Street, every single one, looked in every single building,
and I could see from the mailboxes, the new mailboxes, maybe the brick walls. I could see which
ones were really run down, but I could also see how many new ones there were and I could see
that there were some families somewhere where there were maybe not six names on the mailbox
but maybe there were two or three now of people who were moving into it. So, I felt that these
were stable investments, and that told me that if I put my, what little, money I had into a building
that the neighborhood was not going—the bottom was not going to fall out of this neighborhood.
And I really could see the change in retail, too. I knew people were putting money into the
neighborhood and they weren’t going to abandon that. They weren’t just camping out here and
were going to be driven out, the way that happened in the sixties.
[00:53:58] And I know a building I bought on Broadway was owned by an estate, which—and
the executor was Chase Bank. And so of course banks would not lend money for buildings like
that, but I took a purchase money mortgage from the executor of the estate managed by Chase.
But they very much wanted to sell another building that the guy, the dead person, owned, Mr.
Petrus, Solomon Petrus, in Harlem. And I went up and looked at the building and it was a lovely
building. It was a really nice building. You could see that it’d been one of the grand boulevard
buildings. And I knew from what I’d been told that it had nice apartments in it and I knew that I
could have—I could do something with that building, but I knew I couldn’t do anything in the
short term.

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[00:54:52] Today, that building would be a wonderful building. You could really make it a great
family building. But I knew that I could not manage the—I couldn’t manage—I had my hands
full with difficult people. And there’s always a tension between a landlord/developer and—even
though I’m more hands-on than most—and the people who either feel threatened or don’t feel
threatened but just are stuck and don’t want any change.
[00:54:52] And so I didn’t buy that building, but I could see that it was—this neighborhood
was—it was—and it was correct; the neighborhood is changed. Now the people who live here
come to live here for the public—because of the public schools. Back then it was very—it would
be hard for—well, I think if you had a very bright kid you could—there were gifted and talented
programs and you could. But children learn from other children, and so that was the—it wasn’t a
racial thing. It was—to me it was people didn’t—first of all, there weren’t very many families
here. There weren’t middle-class families. There weren’t so many. There were—more and more
it started changing rapidly in the 1980s—but now there are families who come here, they’re very
active in the schools. The schools are very competitive. All the public schools are, they really are
wonderful. People want to live here for that.
[00:56:36] So, the neighborhood—these are people who are active in the community. They have
jobs. They don’t necessarily have scams. Not to say that people here before all had scams, but
many of the people didn’t. I’m kind of skeptical as a landlord because I do believe in the balance
of neighborhoods and I believe in, I think, the importance of supported housing. However, I’ve
seen so many—so much abuse; people who, for instance the woman I described who took City
money to pay for her rent increases and she didn’t have to, she had income that she didn’t
declare. And this has not happened just once, it’s kept happening multiple times, and rented
rooms and stuff. So, it’s—that is maybe a one-sided point of view.

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Vural: [00:57:39] So, when you—was there a time that you realized oh, I live here, I’m here to
stay, or did you ever think about it that way? Because it was a big deal to start to have a family
on the Upper West Side.
Beane: [00:57:53] Oh, I had no choice. And I was not about to—no, I was here. I was hands-on.
I was—this was—and luckily my wife was great. And people didn’t really believe that—because
she was very sort of attractive and here was this attractive woman living in a shambles walk-up
tenement building on Amsterdam Avenue. But she did and we’ve lived here for—I came in 1979
and she came in 1980. So, no, there was—
[00:58:37] Oh, and actually my sons going to a private school where the demographic was—it
didn’t really represent the neighborhood. Collegiate was a—you had to pay tuition. And one day
in the fourth grade, my son—and a lot of the kids lived on the East Side—and my son came
home from fourth grade and said, “Dad, dad, why can’t we live like normal people? Why can’t
we live in a duplex on Park Avenue?” which is where his best friend lived [chuckles]. And I said,
“No, this is where I want to live and this is where your mother wants to live and this is where
we’re living. You can live wherever you want when you grow up.” But the fact is that we had
established a life and I liked the neighborhood and I still like the neighborhood. I like it even
more.
[00:59:35] I like the old, what people refer to as mom-and-pop stores, but they refer to it often
with a nostalgia, which is misleading. Because the mom-and-pop stores in, for instance, in the
building on Amsterdam Avenue that I have, there was a TV repair shop, which was huge. And
people say, “Oh, for the good old days”, but who goes to a TV repair shop anymore? They don’t.
And then I had in another building a video store and people didn’t go to video stores anymore.

27

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So, what the neighborhood—the neighborhood really decides. Unfortunately, the neighborhood
has decided that they like Duane Reade and they like these big kind of chain stores, which I
feel—but that’s all part of—there used to be big banks all over the place. Well, now there are not
so many anymore. And people think of the Upper West Side and the commercial parts of the
great years of the Upper West side as static, but they never were. They were always changing
and reflecting what people wanted to buy, what they wanted to wear, what they needed, and
that’s—and I see that. But I’ve seen it closer up than other people, so maybe my opinion’s not
quite as—is not representative.
Vural: [01:01:13] Well, tell me about being a hands-on landlord. Why is that the style that you
have followed and what has been sort of the upside of that for you?
Beane: [01:01:26] Well, I don’t know if there’s an upside [chuckles]. There’s not necessarily a
financial upside, although I’ve been in the right place in the right time for a long time. But I feel
that—and I don’t know to what extent this is shared, it probably is by many—but I provide a
service to tenants. And there is a tension, of course, between the service that the tenant wants and
that the landlord is able to provide. And some people want the landlord to put the toothpaste on
their toothbrush every morning, and there are other people who don’t want anything. But I do
very high-quality renovations and I’ve been building for—instead of making smaller apartments
for more people I’ve been, where apartments have been divided, I’ve put them back together.
And as the market has expanded, or as people with higher incomes want to live here, I have been
able to provide really good-quality, low-service buildings. Because there’s no concierge, there’s
no gyms or swimming pools or things like that. But very good-quality renovations, better quality
than most people, which is not economically, I mean, it’s pretty foolish economically if you’re
just thinking in terms of—

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[01:03:12] But I do feel that I want to leave—the West Side has been very good to me and my
family and we are from here. Now my kids have—one lives on the West Side now, the other
doesn’t, lives in England. But I want to leave it better than I found it, and I can do that and not
everybody can do that. And so that’s sort of my philosophy. Now, it doesn’t make me the best
landlord in the world in everybody’s eyes, because I do things that I think are right and they
might not necessarily—other people might not necessarily agree. And I can’t provide everything
that everybody wants. But basically, I have wonderful tenants who stay put longer than they
expect to and typically, except for the Seventy-third Street building with studios, people come
because most of them, most of my apartments are two-bedroom apartments and they’re not huge,
and people come without children as a couple. It used to be they would come before they were
married and then they’d get married and then—but now they come and they’re planning; they
come now more with the idea of children because of the schools. So, they have a child and they
have two and they’re planning to leave earlier than they do leave because it’s really—first of all,
housing is expensive elsewhere, but they really find that the quality of the housing that I can
provide is better than what they can find, even though it’s not bigger.
[01:04:49] So, that’s kind of my philosophy: Do as much as—make the place as good as I can.
That’s my job, and I’ve been rewarded for it.
Vural: [01:05:04] And where do you think that your sense of responsibility of wanting to leave
it better than you found it comes from?
Beane: [01:05:12] Oh, I have no idea. I don’t know. I think it’s—I mean, how—it’s—I really
don’t know. I just think that—I think people are instilled with—I mean, this is an old kind of an
American philosophy of the importance of community, and that in a really productive

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community, going all the way back to the early days, if people worked together then and make
the community stronger, together they can make the community stronger than any single person
can, and in a strong community, everybody does better.
[01:05:59] Now, it’s a very flawed concept, as we’ve seen, because it’s certainly not what’s
happened in this country now, to a great extent. But in general, it’s worked. And it’s sort of an
old-fashioned thought in some ways, thinking back about factory owners, mill owners, they—
this is my impression anyway, and it might be Pollyannaish to a degree—that owners felt that
they had a responsibility to their workers and to the community. And in turn if their community
thrived, then they thrived and they had the loyalty of their workers.
[01:06:46] Now, that’s—it’s not the universal—it’s a flawed concept, but I think it’s been a
guide. It worked more in this country until I think maybe the 1970s and ’80s and then with—and
it seemed to me that just making a lot of money, more money than anybody could possibly need,
became— That’s a different conversation. It’s not really an Upper West Side history
conversation. It’s more of a philosophical thing about integration, segregation, economical—
economic, universal stability and what makes for a strong country.
Vural: [01:07:32] Well, it is relevant, though, because it’s how you think about your role and
what you were doing to build and support this neighborhood.
Beane: [01:07:45] Well, yes, but what I’ve done is build to a market that’s not the old market
here. These are not—they were the people who lived here and didn’t have high-paying jobs, they
didn’t have children, they didn’t have lives that I can compare to my current tenants, lives that
move. There was a rent-controlled tenant who lived in this building for a long time and she said,
“You know, people just move in and out of this building. They never used to do that.” And the

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idea was—the point that she was making was they were moving in and out because they were
unhappy and they didn’t like it. And that’s not why people moved in and out. They moved—the
people who were here before were static, they didn’t, their lives didn’t change.
[01:08:33] Many didn’t go to work at all, or many did something kind of—I think there was one
woman who was a social worker who was legit, and there was somebody else who lived here,
she was a maid on the East Side. But other people, I don’t know, I don’t know what they did,
quite. I know that, you know, the one guy had a boy brothel in Yonkers and the other ones were
drug dealers, and a couple of people rented rooms to make their living. But the people who she
was talking about who were moving out were not moving out because they were unhappy, they
were moving out because their lives were moving and they had jobs that were bringing them
extra income. They had children who were growing and needed more space. And they’d started
here and then they were going to the next step and the next step.
[01:09:32] Now, maybe that kind of—maybe that’s not so important to move on in life, but I feel
that those people had goals which—and they were contributing more to general society then. So,
they were moving not away from something, but they were moving to something. And to me, I
hate losing tenants whom I like and whom I enjoy living near and seeing and whose children—
there were no children in this building when I came and I love having the children here, the
noise, but I understand when they leave, they’re going to something, the next step for them.
Vural: [01:10:18] So, I think we should stop for today—
Beane: Okay.
Vural: —because we have a couple of things to take care of. And hopefully when we come back
and we can talk some more another day.

31
Beane: Sure, sure.
Vural: Great.
Beane: If you’re up to it.
Vural: I am. Thank you.
[END OF SESSION]

Beane – Session 1 of 2