COLUMBUS AVENUE AND THE UPPER WEST SIDE
ORAL HISTORY PROJECT

Interview with Robert Quinlan

Columbus Avenue Business Improvement District
2019

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Quinlan – Session 1 of 2
PREFACE

The following is a transcript of the first of two sessions of an oral history interview with Robert
Quinlan conducted by Leyla Vural on February 28, 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.
Robert Quinlan (born in 1932) is a real estate investor and developer who bought his first
building on Columbus Avenue in the early 1970s. He is the founder and principal of the Quinlan
Development Group and owns Walker, Malloy & Company.
In this interview, Robert Quinlan recalls the experiences that helped educate and shape him, from
growing up in New Britain, Conn. to spending nearly two years in Italy with the U.S. military.
He talks about coming to New York City and getting into real estate consulting (at Landauer
Associates) and recalls how years of market research had prepared him to see the redevelopment
potential on Columbus Avenue when he moved to The Dakota as a newlywed in 1969. Quinlan
describes what Columbus Avenue was like in the late 1960s and early 1970s. He tells the story of
how he bought and renovated his first building on the avenue and how he rented out the
apartments and retail spaces (which initially included him filling a space by opening a selfservice laundromat). Now with 130 retail spaces in New York City (many still on Columbus
Avenue), Quinlan talks about how the rental market in retail spaces works. The interview
concludes with The Endicott, the last property that Quinlan bought and renovated on Columbus
Avenue. Quinlan describes the condition the building, which was an SRO, and the terms under
which he bought it.
Readers should bear in mind that this is a transcript of an interview and, therefore, does not read
like a polished piece of written prose. The transcript has been edited by the interviewee and is the
final document of record. The audio recording of this interview is not available.
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: Robert Quinlan
Interviewer: Leyla Vural
Interview date: February 28, 2019
Session: 1 of 2
Location: New York, N.Y.
Vural: It’s Thursday, February 28th, 2019. This is Leyla Vural in the office of Robert Quinlan
on the Upper West Side to talk to him for the Columbus Avenue and Upper West Side Oral
History Project. Thank you, Robert.
Quinlan: You’re welcome.
Vural: Oral history interviews usually start at the beginning. So, could you tell me where and
when you were born and something about how you grew up?
Quinlan: Sure. I was born in New Britain, Connecticut. It’s about eight miles west of Hartford.
It’s an industrial town, about 60,000 people. December 15, 1932. My father had been originally
from Vermont, as was his family, and before that his parents came from Canada. And before
that, well, it goes way back to after [chuckles] the Battle of Waterloo. But anyway, he came—my
father came south after getting a degree in college in Vermont and was what they then called a
reporter for the Hartford Courant. So, I was brought up in the town where he worked.
My mother was born in New Britain. Her parents had emigrated from Austria and Bohemia, but
there was no language issues in our home. Roman Catholic. German parish. I remember Father
Reiwinkel praying the mass in German. I never knew what he was saying, and as I grew up, I
realized it wasn’t very positive, mostly fire and brimstone.
I went to the local high school in New Britain, Connecticut and was Number Two in my class of
600. What’s interesting is that Number One was a lovely young girl called Lorraine Gresh,

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changed from Gretzky. Many New Britain residents were immigrants from Poland,
Czechoslovakia or Germany. The group was skilled in machine-tooling, the economic base.
They made up the majority of the population of New Britain.
Lorraine Gresh was brilliant, but she was a woman and it was a time when you paid for college
and she couldn’t attend. There was no money for that. Now when I think of it, she should have
risen to the top of whatever field she chose and would have today. But at that time, there was no
chance of it. She worked in the factory as a secretary the rest of her life.
So, I was lucky. I got a scholarship to Yale, which paid tuition. But I had to— anybody who got
a scholarship had to take what Yale called a bursary job, which meant you worked for the
university for, I think, two hours a day in exchange meals.
Growing up in New Britain was quite uninteresting, I did not feel that that was a place I wanted
to stay in. Being dyslexic, something that people didn’t know about in those days, I always found
my own solution to solving a problem, because the way we were taught, being told how to learn
math, for example, was not my way. I learned and saw facts differently, resulting in a contrarian
attitude. And one of the things that came from that was how much I did not want to be part of the
environment where I grew up. Blame Father Reiwinkel.
On the home front, my parents were very good people. My father was like a philosopher, a
brilliant guy, who had won school prizes in Greek and Latin. My mother was a loving person
who worried. It was a good family, a good background, nothing to complain about. Let’s call it
“normal,” whatever that means. [chuckles].
I wasn’t so anxious to get away from them so much as I was to get away from the environment.
Yale was the way out, or any college, but it happened to be Yale. Eyes got opened wide. Instead

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of being told what or how to think at that time, the Socratic method, raising questions was
predominant in the Liberal Arts. Every student’s answer raised another question. That fit in
perfectly with my own temperament and personality.
After graduating I went to—well, we had to go into military service at that time for two or three
years. Two years if it was ordinary Army, three years if you went to officers’ training school
To defer, I went to Harvard law school for a year, where I quickly realized, along with some of
my Yale friends with whom I shared an apartment in Cambridge, that law, at least as it was then
taught proudly by the Harvard law school, was not for us. I mean, it was a matter of knowing the
written law. I don’t think anybody who’s dyslexic, could actually be the kind of lawyer that
Harvard trained people to be.
After a year at law school, my grades indicated I should not stay. While I was waiting to be
drafted, I got a job at the Hartford Courant in Hartford, Connecticut. I remember the publisher—
who was a good friend of my father, Colonel Reitmeyer gave me a desk seated with other
reporters in the newsroom, a fascinating place because of the many stories, from other reporters,
all twice my age or more. I was the obituary editor and I also covered the Grange meetings in
western Connecticut Weekly I received in the mail hand written minutes on lined paper.
Putting together the notes of the Grange meetings was simple. I also thought, that being Obituary
Editor was easy because of the Courant’s so-called morgue where prominent persons pre-written
obits were kept., I would call the morgue located in the basement of the building and ask for the
obituary of someone who just died.,
So, a Dr. Stevens had died and I called down to the morgue for Dr. Stevens’s obit —I forget his
first name—and up came Dr. Stevens’s life. A very nice obituary appeared in the Courant’s

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morning edition. Except he hadn’t died, his wife, also a doctor, had died. I got a visit from
Colonel Reitmeyer that day. Very nice gentleman. He leaned over my desk and asked, “When do
you think you’ll be called up for the Army?” He said nothing about the obituary. My fellow
reporters thought it was very funny. About two months later, I got called up—it was a
February—to go to Fort Dix, New Jersey for infantry training.
And we arrived, I remember, in a bus, all of us freezing cold and all of us scared kids. I was
probably the only college graduate, and a few years older.
We got out of the bus. There was a lot of snow, and it was bitter cold. It was also 2:00 am. Out
comes this huge sergeant—I mean an enormous African American—and he—I won’t—well, I
guess I’ll say what he said because I thought it was quite funny at the time, not everybody did.
He said, “Okay, you guys.” He said, “You betta drop your pants right here cause from now on,
you ass is mine.”
There was a lot of fear and trembling. And then he said, probably this is a bad imitation, [said
very quickly and mumbling] “All you men who name I call, come up here.” No one understood.
It sounded like a single word.
So, the first person whose name was called in that group didn’t respond because he didn’t know
what he was supposed to respond to [chuckles], and then he got yelled at. One after another we
all got assigned to a barracks, which wasn’t heated, and so on to a whole history of two months,
which I won’t go into now, but it’s really interesting to me to think back about it and how it was
such a change from Yale University and Harvard Law School, and my wonderful and loving
parents and Sunday mass and—this was a whole other education process. It was another graduate
school.

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Once settled into infantry training, I met our Company clerk, who happened to also have been
drafted and was the only other college graduate. He told me that after two months of training, we
were all to go in a pipeline, which is what they called it, coming from Washington [DC]—to go
to Korea, where the war had ended. I said, “I don’t want to do that.” He said, “Well, why don’t
you sign up for advanced artillery training and stay here?” He said I had tested well as an
intermediate speed radio operator. I said, “Where did that skill come from?” In war that meant
you were in the front lines radioing back that the platoon could move forward because the
shelling had stopped, whatever. There was a high mortality rate.
I went into advanced artillery training and a major asked me, “Why do you want to do that?” I
said, “No, I’m going to make a career out of the military. I want to do it.” So, it meant an
extended stay at Fort Dix. Artillery training taught me a lifelong lesson. You were assigned to a
group called a squad. Being interdependent under fire, you bond in a much closer and more
emotional way than you do at a college or at any other time. You are basically sharing your lives.
Each life depends on the integrity and skills of the other. You learn what friendship is.
So, I never was in a war, but I understood later on when all these war movies and documentaries
came out about Vietnam, about the bonding that takes place under war conditions. So, okay.
Vural: So, let me ask you a question.
Quinlan: Yes, go ahead because I’m probably yapping too much.
Vural: No, it’s lovely, it’s lovely.
Quinlan: Yes, oh, thanks.
Vural: So, when you think about your military time—

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Quinlan: Yes.
Vural: —and you said how it was like another graduate school, are there things that you learned
then that you look back and you think, oh, that helped me later as an adult?
Quinlan: Absolutely. I always thought that my military experience, which included, as I was
about to say, my eventual assignment to Verona, Italy, was much, much more important to me in
life than any university or schooling that I had. This is real: How to work around a rigid system
that didn’t always make sense. There’s a French word—Système D—the D stands for débrouille,
which means working around the system. They’re very good at in France with its bureaucracy.
So, I learned how to, I don’t want to say beat the system, that’s not nice, but it was sort of like
when there’s something stupid and there’s a much easier way, without hurting anybody, you go
there and you ignore what the book says. You don’t learn that at school. In fact, you learn the
opposite. Even though there were no didactic teachings in the Liberal Arts at the University
level, at that time, there still is a rigidness born of conformity, like of mind and convention.
Everybody had to dress a certain way and so on. I mean, when you’re with other soldiers—some
of them in my barracks even came from Puerto Rico at that time and had never had slept under
covers in their lives. Even though it was freezing in February, they were sleeping on top of the
blankets fully clothed. At the time I thought, well, maybe they don’t want to make their beds in
the morning [chuckles], because—no, they had not slept under covers because they came from a
very warm, tropical area.
So, you learn—that’s just one little thing, but, I mean, it’s the real world. When I finished
artillery training at Fort Dix, I was sent to Verona because I had learned that assignments came
down in the pipeline from Washington as to where each training group would go. The company

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clerk told me the new assignments included several for Italy and Germany and the rest for Korea.
I said, well, how can I get to Italy, or Germany? They had a lot of GIs in Germany. So, I didn’t
care—Europe. And he told me the name of the officer, a lieutenant, in the headquarters building
in charge of company assignments. You could get a cab at Fort Dix for twenty-five cents and go
anywhere, unless you were on a bivouac up in the hills in the rain [chuckles].
So, I went to see Lieutenant Ralthie—R-A-L-T-H-I-E—I’ll never forget her. Who ever heard of
a woman officer in the Army in those days? I never had. In the whole five months at Fort Dix,
I’d never seen a woman officer, or even seen a woman there. And so I had a speech prepared for
Lieutenant Ralthie, classification and assignment officer, and cabbed to the headquarters
building, which I’d never been to, actually from the field, because I remember coming in from
bivouac dressed in fatigues, dirty boots.
And I had a whole thing prepared about how I was fluent in German and I knew Spanish,
basically not fluent in either of those, and I went in and I saluted and I forgot everything I was
going to say. I had no idea Lieutenant Ralthie was a woman. She was extremely attractive
actually [chuckles] and youngish and I just gagged. And she said—we had our names imprinted
on our clothes—“Private Quinlan, what can I do for you?” And I said [gagging sound], “I’d like
to go to Europe.” [Chuckles]
Nothing asked, nothing gained. I mean, I’ll never forget. So, she’s one of the great heroines of
my life. Lieutenant Ralthie asked me to return to headquarters in a week. I went back to the
headquarters building a week later and ran into her in the parking lot. She asked, “Would Italy be
alright?” “Lieutenant Ralthie, I’m going to fall down [chuckles] on my knees and worship you
and thank you.” She said, “That’s not necessary, Private Quinlan.”

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Vural: What year was that?
Quinlan: That was 1957 or 8. I was in Italy for twenty-two months, something like that, in
Verona. We weren’t supposed to wear uniforms because it was a group that had come down
from Vienna when it became neutral. Before that time, Vienna had been occupied by the allies as
was all of Austria. It had been divided up into four pieces with Russia having a piece, France
having a piece, Britain and the US having a piece of Vienna. So, it was like a pie with wedges.
And, you know, you’d go to Vienna, at that time they didn’t have lights at night or anything. But
all occupation troops had left. It was decided that, okay, Austria can be neutral. Forget the reality
of that. Let them be neutral. Everybody had to leave. So, everybody left. But the US, instead of
going home, sent its troops down to northern Italy. It was a big secret. We had missiles, nuclearheaded missiles, in the caves facing east. I had top secret clearance, so I knew about these, but so
did everyone else in Verona, especially the local land owners who rented their mushroom
growing caves for storage of 40-foot-long corporal missiles.
So, here we were in an Italian camp, Caserma Passalacqua, which had been used by the Italian
army for a century. We became a branch of NATO, it was kind of a front. I became one of two
reporters based on my job at the Hartford Courant. I didn’t tell them about my obituary
mistake—but I did get a good job. We weren’t supposed to wear uniforms in town, which was
across the Adige River, on a fourteenth century bridge, to a place where the U.S. Army’s Public
Information Office was located. I walked to it from the camp.
That was a good job and, you know, we got to mix—I got to mix with the Italians and shortly
had a group of local friends.

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So, most of the time I spent in Verona was with Italians. I learned Italian at the School of Berlitz,
which was in a lady’s small apartment, over almost two years. I was quite fluent. The close
quarters in which we worked helped in the learning process. Those years were well spent.
Memories and funny things, but that’s not for this.
Vural: Okay. So, when did you come back to the States?
Quinlan: When that time was up, I came back—in 1958 or 9, I mean, it was like twenty-two
months or twenty months in Italy—a different person.
Vural: What were you like? How do you remember yourself? What kind of a young man were
you when you returned?
Quinlan: I felt Italian. I understood the mind, the fluidity of the Italian personality. The
easygoing morality. No proscriptions. We’re all human. And, you know, it came from knowing
Italians and hearing stories and just being in Italy, being on the street and travelling around Italy.
It was—I became Italianized or I guess you might say Europeanized, because it wasn’t just the
influence of Italy. So different from New Britain, Connecticut. So different from Yale
University, where we all wore ties and dressed like each other, went to one store and all
conformed, because that was how we could fit in. Even though I recognize now, being part of my
Yale Class’s council, I mean, that no one really fit in, we all felt the same way. But at that time,
you didn’t know we were pretending.
So, you come out of Italy, what’s there to pretend? I mean, so much more of a social animal, at
least in my mind, which gave me more courage to not go back to Hartford [chuckles]. I mean it
wasn’t even a question in my mind. I don’t know if I’m continuing right, correctly, but I didn’t

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know what I wanted to do, but I knew I wanted to go to New York. I had a few classmates, not
many, who were actually born in the city and still lived there, but I didn’t have many social or
any business connections here in New York.
So I went to Columbia graduate school and I majored in what? Italian Renaissance literature
[chuckles], because I was now quote unquote so fluent, which I thought translating an ancient
Italian Renaissance tract by a famous poet would be good training for me to perfect my Italian.
Plus, I could get a master’s degree and maybe teach. I didn’t know, but I just wanted a place to
be for a year to look around.
I was at Columbia staying in the graduate dorms looking around, going out and meeting people,
partying and what have you. So, I had two lives: one the scholar and one was socializing and
getting a little more involved in city life.
Another thing—I skied as much as I could, almost every weekend, with people, and that served
as an entrée into where I am today, the fact that I was part of a ski group.
Vural: Tell me about that. When did—what year did you come to New York?
Quinlan: Well, I’m trying to remember when I got out of the Army [chuckles]. I was at home
for about two months, I think. It’s around ’58, between ’58 and ’59.
Vural: And so you came to Columbia partly as a way to get to New York?
Quinlan: Yes, to have a vantage point to look around. Ironically, it’s at Columbia Heights. I
mean, so, ironically, it was a height overlooking the city. On the Broadway line. You could be
anywhere in fifteen minutes.
Vural: Tell me about skiing and how that turned into a—

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Quinlan: Well, you know, skiing is not a group sport—I wasn’t good at group sports because,
well, partly dyslexia, partly because I had double vision [chuckles] and half the time you catch
the ball, the other half time you missed it because it was the wrong eye, whatever [chuckles]. I
always joked about that. But I love skiing. It’s a kind of a single sport, which you do by yourself
and not want to offend fellows on a team by letting the other down. I think a lot of people feel
that way. They become track stars or something else. I did skiing, and I skied from my teenage
years on.
So, I would go up north and take trips and ski by myself. My parents had a farmhouse at a place
called Sugarbush, which was very hot and trendy at that time, so I could stay there. But I would
go up on weekends with people I would meet from New York who were working in New York
or just coming in to town looking for a job. And, you know, we’d chat in the car. It was a sixhour drive. You would think nothing of it. You’d leave Friday and you’d get there around 11 at
night and you’d come back Sunday afternoon at 4.
We were all crowded in these cars and we all chatted and then we’d ski together, or not—but we
stayed in a—at one point I remember having a house for the winter. It was right around that same
time, and I’d just graduated from Columbia with an MA—I’d gotten the master’s degree or
slightly before that—and we’d chat about what to do.
These were all Harvard boys, as a matter of fact, because they all knew each other and they—
that was part of the house rental that winter. So, that sort of led to where I—where the story
begins in a way, because this rambling is a Columbus Avenue BID [Business Improvement
District] reminiscence and history.

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Vural: So, I’m going to take this so you stop fidgeting [chuckles and moves pen and paper]. Tell
me what happened after you finished at Columbia?
Quinlan: Well, on one of the ski weekends, there was a fellow who was a beautiful skier and
very much liked by everybody, kind of nerdy in a funny way, but awfully nice, and he said to
me, “I just got a job.” Because it was like these were people who didn’t have the MBAs and
degrees that you get nowadays. He was just out of college, which like nowadays it’s not quite
enough to get a good job.
I said, “Where?” He said, “Well, there’s a real estate company called Brown Harris Stevens,
which is now headed by a fellow who has a Harvard MBA. He has brought a training program
into this real estate firm and has—” I don’t know if he said this, but as everybody knew, real
estate firms had really no training programs. There was no course you took to go into the real
estate business. But if you could get a job with a company that during six months put you in
every department of a multi-department real estate firm, as Brown Harris was and is, that’s like
grad school. John White, an MBA, had brought this concept to a very, very old-school firm.
I asked my ski friend, “Well, would you mind if I went there?” He ended up not hired by White
but became a very successful developer.
What was I going to do with a master’s degree in literature? I could teach. So, you know, at that
point I thought if you really want to make some money, I mean, New York City’s about making
money and living. And first of all, if I taught I probably wouldn’t teach here; I’d probably be
teaching in some little New England boarding school. And also the people I’m around in the
dorm at Furnald Hall are all going to do something and they’re all a little off. There’s something
about the weirdness of the people on this floor, and I just didn’t feel comfortable with academic,

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aspiring people, who all had some reason—it wasn’t really a love necessarily of what they were
doing—to go in that field.
So, real estate seemed like a way to make money, but I didn’t know much about it, except I did
have an instinct for—the only course I ever did well in at Harvard Law School was Property Law
[chuckles]. So, I did have an instinct always, all my life, for entrepreneurial stuff and somehow
related to property. I guess one could see a lot of people who made—who lived very well from
that, even in Connecticut, New Britain, Connecticut. New York was no exception.
But real estate was not one of the established professions. In fact, developers were looked down
upon. Many of the big family companies, highly reputable, had Jewish backgrounds. They
couldn’t get jobs in banking when they immigrated. They couldn’t own property in parts of
Europe where they came from. And they were families who all stayed together, helped each
other. I recognized the industry was not disreputable but in Ivy League vernacular, not white
shoe. So what? I mean, there’s always, in any industry, people who come up out of nowhere and
then they disappear. But three or four generations later family ownership give back to the
community in big ways. This happens in New York in spades.
So, I felt if anything we are going to be that type of family. But anyway, look, people you deal
with are nice or they’re not nice. You stay with one, avoid the other.
After Brown Harris—I’m just re-remembering—John White, who had founded the first real
estate training program, was invited to run a real estate consulting firm, which was called
Landauer Associates. He asked me to join the firm. We were eighteen people working closely
together. Not quite an artillery squad but there was interdependence. So, here I was—it was a
great learning period. John White was a born teacher and Jim Landauer the principal, was a very

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charismatic man with connections all over the place—salmon-fishing camps in Maine, club
memberships. He knew everybody. Consulting business came in from banks corporate
headquarters and financial institutions . We would do market studies, financial analysis and
submit recommendations based on that. And a large fee would result.
Landauer Associates never took commissions. It was a very pure and objective analysis. And
that’s where I cut my teeth and really got to learn the economics of development and the market
research that should be done before jumping into a project or a purchase.
Vural: And you went there I believe in 1961, is that right?
Quinlan: I think so. Yes, I think so. I was there—yes, I think that’s probably right if it said that
on my [chuckles]—
Vural: It says it on your website.
Quinlan: —website, yes. I’m probably referring to dates that are contradicted on my website.
Vural: And do you remember when you were getting your start what you thought, like did you
think to yourself, I’m beginning a long-term career? Did you think I’m experimenting and maybe
next year I’ll do something completely different? Do you remember how you thought about what
you were doing?
Quinlan: Well, early on, probably before Landauer in 1961, the only reason I did what I did was
because I planned to make the incredibly unbelievable amount of a million dollars and quit and
go and teach school at Andover where I would write a novel or something, Well, that was kind of
a joke because, well, first of all, a million dollars was to me a lot of money. You could live well
off the interest—whatever. But when you get into something, no matter what it is, no matter

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what your motives were, and if you’re good at it, and you like it, and you like the freedom,
which would have been the case in real estate but not necessarily in Wall Street for me, or the
J.P. Morgans of the world, where my classmates and also all of these Harvard guys that I skied
with ended up going. Bob Wilmers, one of my ski house friends, started at Morgan and ended up
founding M&T Bank.
But real estate was really freelance, so kind of exciting. And I was dealing at thirty with both
David and Laurance Rockefeller’s personal investments as a consultant from Landauer
Associates, as well as other family members, and the Goelet family, a number of prestigious
banks. I remember a big bank in Birmingham, Alabama, a State Street Bank in Boston and so on.
I felt quite important and useful.
And I did handle myself well and was promoted. And I learned from John how to be a little more
disciplined in analysis. He taught me how to cut to the chase. You know, in a report, all the client
wants is the advice from an impartial source. Following pages of supporting data, often it
supported what the client intended to do anyway.
So, I did a lot of client studies, lots of bound reports. I think I still have them in our big barn
upstate.
Vural: So, you were looking at would this property be a good investment, or those kinds of
things?
Quinlan: Well, yes. I mean, I did the economic analysis. You know, you’d go into a town,
particularly one which you hadn’t been into, so you have a pure view, you’re not prejudiced.
They always used to joke that to be objective, consultants have to come from at least five
hundred miles away. You can’t always see objectively what’s in front of your face. They

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couldn’t see that there was a huge office space requirement in Boston and no one local thought
so. Boston is staid, I was told and office tenants don’t want to be in flashy high rises. I was just
doing the step-by-step analysis of what’s the demand for office space, how great is the demand,
and what floor sizes are ideal? I mean, it could have been office space; it could have been retail
space or something else. In Boston it was office space.
I was having an important learning experience. That was a real graduate school. It was like an
MBA.
Vural: And real estate is a mix of dealing with formal people but also, like you were saying,
kind of a freer, looser way of working.
Quinlan: Well, freer, yes, I mean, entrepreneurial. I didn’t feel that I’d be particularly successful
in one of the banks. You know, I could look the part, I could sound the part, because you absorb
that at Ivy League colleges [chuckles]. That doesn’t mean you are the part. I see these young
people and want to know, “What would you really like to be doing?” I’ve become a little more
understanding [chuckles], because you look at middle aged people now and you can see them
when they were thirty and you can see them when they were forty. I think that’s one of the few
benefits of my present age of eighty-six. You’re more empathetic with people who are referred to
as “suits.” T.S. Eliot comes to mind.
Vural: So, I know that you were at Landauer throughout the sixties.
Quinlan: Well, yes, I guess six or seven years would have been the total.
Vural: Yes. When did you actually move to the Upper West Side? Because I know you lived in
The Dakota. When did you move there?

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Quinlan: Good point. I was married in 1969, after two years’ engagement, to my wife Encarnita.
We’ve been married fifty years this month.
Vural: Wow, congratulations.
Quinlan: I don’t understand why people get married and get divorced so quickly. I mean, it’s
like the average marriage lasts ten years. But anyway, that’s a whole other unrelated story. So,
that was—married in ’69, moved into The Dakota.
Vural: Do you remember why you picked it?
Quinlan: Yes. I was earning at that point $38,000 a year, which was a very good salary,
probably equivalent to $250,000 today, I’m not sure. But I still didn’t have any money in the
bank. My wife’s father was a banker and a businessman in Puerto Rico and he said, “I’ll pay for
an apartment because you have to live somewhere when you’re married.”
Now, the reason I jumped ship from Landauer Associates at that time was that Landauer, James
Landauer––had an offer from a huge insurance brokerage company in Chicago to buy his firm.
He owned it. We were salaried employees, including John White. So, we were going to be
employees of a Chicago company. We all of us jumped ship, which was kind of a surprise to Jim
Landauer. So, he said, “Well—” No, I won’t get into all that [chuckles]. He tried to sort of buy
us back. “I’ll give you up to ten percent of Landauer Associates to stay.” Up to ten percent could
be one percent. It was one of the later real estate lessons I learned. When people say “up to
something”, it could mean zero [chuckles]. It was appealing until you thought about it.
So, we all jumped ship at the same time. Time to do something on my own. Columbus Avenue
was no man’s land, a block from where we lived on Seventy-second Street crossing Columbus

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Ave, you walked fast. Columbus Avenue below Seventy-second was pretty good because of the
recent Lincoln Center development. Columbus between Seventy-third and Eighty-second Streets,
you walked fast. Ruskay’s was one of the early pioneers to open a restaurant on Seventy-third
Street and Columbus. An instant success among East Siders who wanted to go slumming. I don’t
know if you’re going to speak to them, but you should if you can.
Vural: Well, the owner died. I looked him up.
Quinlan: Oh, yes, one of the partners had died during the AIDS epidemic. Both upbeat guys
with a sense of style. Mirrors everywhere. Rex Reed commented on Ruskay’s Windex bill being
more than their rent. The Dutchess of Marleborough came and others followed.
Vural: And I haven’t found anybody else.
Quinlan: When I looked at Columbus Avenue, a block from Central Park West, I’d been
analyzing Birmingham, Alabama’s under realized office space demand.
Vural: So, let me stop you there.
Quinlan: No one would go there. No one would buy there. No one.
Vural: So, let’s go back for a second before we get to that. What was it like to move to The
Dakota in 1969? Maybe this is all part of the same thing.
Quinlan: Well, in a way it is because a new group of younger people were moving in when we
did. All our age. Sheila Lukins of The Silver Palate had the apartment next door to us on the
third floor. Rex Reed had recently moved there. We were all very friendly. A couple of other
people—it’s not necessary to mention their names—who were around the same age group, came
aboard. So, we sort of bonded. Because the older crowed were getting older: Lauren Bacall,

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Robert Ryan, Leonard Bernstein, a fashion columnist from The Herald Tribune whose name I
forgot. I can’t remember all their names, but they were the older more famous crowed who’d
been there for decades and knew each other, too. And we were a younger separate crowd.
So, we formed a group there, and one of them was George Beane, who you interviewed. He had
bought a large studio apartment, which was perfect for a bachelor. George had been working for
a law firm—I won’t mention it if he didn’t—a high-level law firm.
The Dakota was kind of a fun place, party place. Important in my life because it was a block
from Columbus Avenue.
Vural: And did it feel like you were doing something daring moving to the Upper West Side?
Quinlan: A little bit, yes. Well, not to the Upper West Side so much as to The Dakota.
Rosemary’s Baby had just come out. And our apartment was huge. The dining room could seat
twenty-four, yet we had two small bedrooms and one bath. It was designed for a rich bachelor in
1882.
The Dakota layout wasn’t appropriate for a growing family, but it was appropriate when you
were newly married and, you know—oh, you live in Rosemary’s Baby’s building. And it was
kind of fun to entertain because the apartments are so unique and beautiful and untouched by
time.
Vural: So, after you left—
Quinlan: It was a party time, you know, party time. We reminisce about that.
[INTERRUPTION]

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Vural: Alright, so after you left Landauer, was that when you bought your first building?
Quinlan: Yes.
Vural: Can you tell me about that?
Quinlan: Well, it was of course on Columbus Avenue, and as I said, Columbus Avenue was
literally no-man’s land. Just to give you the background, most of the retail spaces were empty
and those that were served the drug and prostitution trades in the evenings. It was also a center
for the wholesale sale of surgical devices, prosthetic equipment, medical supplies. This did not
occupy a big area, but it was several buildings together. That was the Avenue’s day business. So,
wholesalers would go there. I keep thinking of prosthetic devices because during the day when
the metal window screens were up all you saw were these bizarre pieces of plastic body parts and
bedpans of all designs.
So I mean, Columbus Avenue, day or night, had nothing that really served the neighborhood.
There was one store open on the corner of Seventy-third, which is a building I later renovated. It
was a restaurant that sold nothing edible. They had, I remember, a bunch of bananas on the
counter as you entered and nothing else. Flies on the bananas. Drugs were sold in the back. That
space became Ruskay’s shortly after.
Columbus Avenue from Seventy-second to Eighty-second was no man’s land. And at night time
it was shuttered—except for the bars. Cars all had New Jersey license plates, or many did. They
were coming in from New Jersey for drugs and hookers. Years later the Jersey plates were the
wives who came to the Avenue to shop.

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Everybody stayed away from Columbus Avenue. You crossed over and got to Broadway as soon
as you could for the Embassy Theater to see the movies or for Zabar’s, which was further north.
No one from the neighborhood walked on Columbus Avenue. What better opportunity for
someone who has no money to speak of but has had seen opportunities in a lot of different towns
which no one nearby saw?
All the great New York apartment buildings and high-end pricing were a block away. Where do
these people shop? You didn’t have Amazon then. And they couldn’t shop on Columbus. There
was no opportunity and they wouldn’t even shop there if they could because it was scary. I didn’t
have to do much market research to realize that once change started, it would continue, it would
be contagious, a nice virus.
I had, I remember, $15,000 cash in my personal bank account. Columbus Avenue pricing offered
an opportunity. My wife was very supportive, always has been. Just take a chance. You know,
out-of-the-box way of thinking. [chuckles].
I looked for properties for sale, not hard to find places. A seller offered three adjoining twentyfive-foot tenements on the block between Seventy-sixth and Seventy-seventh [Streets], which is
now 326 Columbus Avenue. To buy it $30,000 cash was needed. Why? I think the price was
about $230 000 for the three buildings. Why so little cash? Because the seller had many
mortgages on it [chuckles]—a second mortgage and I think a third. So, I bought it for $30,000
cash. I got the other fifteen, as I remember, from someone at the gym, basketball player and we
chatted in the locker room. “What do you do?” he asked. I said, “Well, I’m trying to buy this
property, but I need $15,000 more.” He says, “I have $15,000.” Just like that. And for a while we
were partners. He was a wildcard, personality-wise.

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So, he gave me $15,000. Hardly knew me. For $30,000, we bought these three tenement
buildings. They were mostly vacant, but there were some tenants. At that time, rent-controlled
tenants could be moved, with payments or without payments, to other rent-controlled apartments.
There was a gentleman, who I learned about, called Mr. Littman. He was your classical
grandfather type. Short and round. He carried a big shopping bag from Zabar’s in which he had
his files. Mr. Littman was a charming, funny old guy in his seventies or eighties, a real New
York character. He told me he was head of a family of a hundred relatives who were orthodox in
Brooklyn.
Mr. Littman was a senior member of this family and they stuck together because they had to and
it was an ancient tradition, all new to me. We worked together on relocating tenants to upgraded
apartments on the West Side for several years and I never knew Mr. Littman’s first name. He
was a specialist in obtaining, through the various upper west side landlords, apartments that were
also rent controlled by offering the landlord, say $1,000. He would say if you’ll give me your
vacancies to place my people. Always after laying down new linoleum. It was a specialty and
only people like Mr. Littman could do it because of his kindly disposition as pater familia and he
knew all the landlords. You could not not like him. He’d knock on the door of one of these
apartments and introduce himself. More and more were Hispanic. Nobody felt threatened, and
pretty soon he’d get them to move to one of the buildings he had, let’s say on 85th Street Mr.
Littman would say, “We’ll give you brand new oil cloth and we’ll paint the apartment and we’ll
pay your moving costs.” An offer hard to refuse if you were living on Columbus Avenue at that
time.
So, that’s how we vacated the remaining tenants at 326 Columbus and other decaying buildings.
You could do that and there was no law broken. Everybody was happy. No vacancy decontrol in

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those days. And 322-324-326 Columbus was falling apart from neglect. People couldn’t wait to
get out, particularly when they got heat and new linoleum.
Now, you couldn’t do that. I mean those days are gone. So, I had three empty buildings to
renovate.
Vural: And when did you buy those? Sort of early seventies?
Quinlan: ’71 maybe. It was shortly after I jumped from Landauer Associates.
Vural: And what did you do? How did you renovate those buildings?
Quinlan: Well, I ran into an architect called Steve [Stephen] Jacobs. Steve lived in one of those
blocks in the West Seventies, below Seventy-seventh Street, between Columbus and Central
Park West. And he knew and I knew that most of those SROs [single room occupancy
residences] on the side streets had already been converted back into private homes for younger
people who didn’t want to move to Westchester, who could buy them for fifteen or $20,000 and
could vacate them legally. They were rooming houses, SROs, so it wasn’t like apartments.
Several families shared their homes with former tenants.
I remember, it was February, it was freezing, Steve and I went out for a walk one night. As a
young architect, he too was just getting started. He also had great skills in visualizing how the
interior of an existing building could be revisioned and redrawn. It’s a special skill, seeing in
three dimension instantly.
So he and I went out one February evening, street after street after street, starting above Seventysecond to Seventy-sixth Street, and we saw how many houses from their lighted living rooms.
had actually been renovated for private use. These were the homesteaders who would normally

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be in the suburbs, but who decided to stay in New York. When you see what was happening on
the side streets with the SROs closing, speaking of market research, this was what I’d been doing
in other U.S. cities at Landauer, it convinced me that Columbus Avenue had to follow sooner
than later.
As an architect, Steve Jacobs merged my three Columbus Avenue 25 footers into one building
with one façade. It’s probably the least architecturally distinctive façade on Columbus, with its
fire escapes, but we had to think in terms of rents of $250 a month and stores still to be rented.
Even that was a reach, because nobody wanted to live on Columbus Avenue.
Now, we made sixty-one apartments out of the three buildings. Since there were eleven-foot
ceilings in those old buildings based on the need for air circulation in non-air-conditioning days,
we made six floors out of five by lowering and replacing beams. Apartment ceiling heights today
are eight feet. They’re fine for studios and one bedrooms. Today they’re exactly the kind of
apartment that young people want and can afford in Manhattan. It doesn’t have a doorman, a
concierge, any of that—and they’re rented all the time, jumping way forward to today. But that
was then, the first of a group of renovations on the Avenue
So, with that layout, I needed financing to—then I found—well, I’m not sure of the sequence,
but there was a builder call Louis Evangelista, Italian, whose crew was all Italian, and he was
going to be the builder. He agreed to build from these plans at a certain fixed price. So, it was
like a contract. Basically a handshake, as I remember in those days, but we had contracts, also.
So, we had the vacant building, we had the new design, now where am I going to get the
financing? I mean, no white shoe bank is going to lend on Columbus Avenue in 1972. There was
a private family, who made construction loans with their own real estate cash buildup. Ironically,

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Quinlan – Session 1 of 2

we do the same thing today as a company on a slightly different level. We go into distress
situations when we have capital and ability to see a project to completion.
So, I remember David Luria—David was about my age. The Luria family, which made private
construction mortgage loans, David understood the imminent changes about to occur on
Columbus. I had meanwhile found a replacement for my first partner from the gym. Personally,
and of course I had no assets, really. But also, what you really are doing is that you guarantee
completion of a building. So, with my contract, with a contractor, and this young architect, Steve
Jacobs, who’s now gone, we were ready to go. Steve became very well known for his special
visualization skills, he got very famous. Long after we met, he mentioned that from age five to
twelve, he lived as an inmate at Auschwitz with his father, who survived because he was a
doctor. On the way to school each day, he passed piled up corpses.
Partly through the job I needed more money, more equity, on my side. The first partner who had
put his $15,000 in said, “I really want to get out. Is there a way that I can get my $15,000 back?”
And someone I had just met through an introduction filled the gap. He’s still my partner and one
of my closest friends. Loyal, you know, great integrity and that’s all you want. Honesty, integrity
and mutual trust.
So, he came in with the extra money that we needed and the person who introduced us also
wanted in, someone who is a famous greenmailer today, but not then and we then had enough
money, with the Luria additional construction funding, to go ahead. And we did. We never
needed other partners after that that. The now infamous greenmailer soon wanted out but only if
he would double his $15,000 investment. We paid him and got rid of him fast.

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Completion in twelve months. We had store space but no one legitimate wanted to rent a store. It
was the only renovation within ten blocks of Columbus Avenue. Conditions were still as they
had been.
Nothing open—our building had been the wholesale medical supply center in New York and was
no longer there. How do you rent a store? How do you rent an apartment when you’re starting
out in a slum? Since then lessons have been learned in that respect. Soho, TriBeCa, Lower East
Side, DUMBO.
Well, the rentals had to be right. I hired a German woman with a German shepherd––huge. She
had a scar down her cheek like a saber scar and she—seriously! I’m not making this up. She and
her dog shared an office right on the ground floor.
Vural: The dog was huge?
Quinlan: The German shepherd was always by her side. She may have been a professional
dominatrix on the side. Still no one rented. This is where ingenuity came in. When the
stewardesses came off the planes at Idlewild, my agent was there. She knew the foreign airline
arrival schedules. Many needed a place to rent and they had no idea about the reputation of
Columbus Avenue. And she’d say, “You’re right on Central Park. You’re right near Lincoln
Center. Everything’s there.”
So, she rented—I remember the first group of tenants who moved in were mostly airline
stewardesses [chuckles] because they didn’t know any better. But we had a great super—live in,
and his wife, the Gatabonis—and you could feel safe in the building. The stewardesses weren’t
always in residence. They shared with other stewardesses. So, we got all sixty apartments rented,
and in a year, other young followed.

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Vural: So, I have a question. When you vacated a rent-controlled building, what were you
allowed to do rent-wise once you had renovated?
Quinlan: Once you gut renovated, the apartments became free market. There was no rent
control, no rent stabilization.
Quinlan: Because rent control was continuing in existing buildings, even when tenants left, you
could relocate tenants in other rent-controlled apartments. That changed after 1973. There
weren’t any more rent-controlled apartments once an apartment was vacant.
Vural: So, when you rented the renovated apartments, were they free market?
Quinlan: Free market.
Vural: Okay.
Quinlan: So we got the apartments rented. There was turnover. Tenants stayed longer. We got
more young people who knew New York and a lot of the theater people from Lincoln Center,
artists. They’re good tenants. The whole neighborhood was sort of looking toward the Lincoln
Center growth northward at that time. Lincoln Center was built about ’66, I think, so it wasn’t
much after that Columbus Avenue was a place that if I hadn’t looked at it, someone else would
have, because Lincoln Center was already reaching up into the Sixties [Streets].
Now, the stores—renting stores was more of a problem. So, I opened a—my wife suggested
this—we opened a self-service laundry, because there were none in the neighborhood. We
realized most of the people living in that area didn’t have laundry services, and tenants didn’t
have their own washing machines.

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So, we got a Chinese guy with a ferocious temper and no English to run it and the building
contractor and I owned it—Soap N’ Suds—still out there with that name. We rented and it was
doing very well. One had to think what services are needed in the neighborhood? What’s basic?
It’s still the same throughout New York City. You know, not boutiques and high fashion—which
went through a phase on Columbus, and if you read this [referring to an article about Columbus
Avenue], you’ll see that there was great rise in Columbus Avenue rents when it became a media
darling for high end retailers and then a drop when they left. It failed when all the high-end
people realized they couldn’t sell thousand-dollar dresses on Columbus Avenue or anywhere on
the West Side. Designers thought it was great to have the Avenue’s name on the bag. And then
they left, and now we are stabilized with what we have, as you can see on the Avenue.
So, I forget how we got a second tenant at 326 Columbus [chuckles]. I think it was two young
Korean sisters selling women’s clothes they designed and sold in the right price range—they are
still there since the 1970s. We like to keep our tenants. That’s another story about the process.
You don’t lose retail tenants if you don’t have to. It’s usually their choice. They’re retiring.
They’re ill. I mean, the press nowadays makes it seem like they’re being thrown out. A smart
owner does not throw out an existing tenant who’s doing well. The market is the market is the
market. So, you—I’m getting off the point, but it’s sort of a contemporary issue. Do you mind if
I mention—
Vural: No, this is important. Go ahead.
Quinlan: —that part? Because it’s controversial right now with the attempts for commercial rent
control. Ninety percent of the time retailers leave not because building owners make them leave.
Only remote corporate-type owners will do that in order to carry higher rents on their books,

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even if the space is vacant. “We can get twice as much rent,” they tell their investors because
someone told them they could. Well, they found when they don’t renew a lease that they’ll sit
empty for years having promised their investors a higher rent that they can’t deliver. It’s
apparently better to have it on the books as being available at that higher amount than the truth
that if they did rent it, they’d be getting less than what they had been getting due to a depressed
market.
So, that’s one of the problems that brings the politicians into the picture. In addition to the fact
that there are always more renter voters than owners, so politicians aren’t particularly friendly to
owners. Political careers are not made by siding with property owners.
All this talk about rent control that is coming up is a whole other subject. Except I will say, if
you have a good tenant, you don’t lose them.
And we’ve been good—they’ve been good to us. They’re just decent people. I mean, they’ve had
their ups and downs personally and they’ve—you see the entrepreneurial spirit and the decency
of people who want to make a living in retail. You don’t lose those people.
Vural: What is their business?
Quinlan: It’s what I don’t get about some of the premises of today. So, we have kept them. I
don’t remember—we’ve had turnover. I remember one store, which is now a coffee shop, we had
a very high-level English design firm paying $2,000 a month rent more twenty years ago than
we’re getting today for that same space. They didn’t last. No one bought their dresses. I mean, it
was a dress store.

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Liana [women’s clothing store at 324 Columbus Avenue], in the same building, had the right
price and they’re still there. So, it relates too on people moving out because it’s not working or
because they’re growing and there’s no more expansion space. A lot of reasons. Not all because
there’s some landlord gouging them. You just get the market rent. And usually you can build in
increases on longer leases, I’m getting off the point here, but you build increases into the lease
each year, like cost of living type increases. So, by the time the lease expires, it’s very close if
not at market. Now, if it’s less than market, look at the alternatives. You lose a tenant because
you’re offering the space at market, but you lose a tenant. You pay commissions. You have
vacancies before finding a tenant. It can take months. Ain’t worth it.
So, there’s a practical side to keeping a tenant at a somewhat lower rent than what the market
perceives it should be. You appreciate your tenants. You know if they haven’t been playing
tricks. And we don’t do unethical things in return. So it’s—I guess that’s our philosophy and
that’s why a lot of stores are empty on Madison Avenue. Not so many on Columbus, if you do a
count. Very little. We have thirty-five stores and there are no vacancies.
Vural: I want to ask you about residential and retail. So, which direction do you think we should
go now?
Quinlan: Well, residential has never been a prime consideration of mine. It’s been focused on
the retail. At one time we counted that our ownership in eighty-five retail stores covered six or
seven city blocks, but all over, including in Brooklyn now, not just Columbus.
Vural: So, before we talk about that, though, I do want to talk about residential, because The
Endicott was so important.
Quinlan: Yes.

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Vural: And so I want to ask you if you could tell me about The Endicott, and as part of that I
believe that the J-51 tax abatement is something that you know about.
Quinlan: Oh, yes. Oh, that was why one renovated. It was a good program and improved whole
neighborhoods in all boroughs until it was restricted to a very few areas.
Vural: So, could you tell me about The Endicott and how you got it?
Quinlan: Well, I’ll try and remember the latter part. I remember the early part. There was and I
think still is a company called Fred F. French Company. Fred F. French was a big developer, in
the twenties and thirties who built and owned a lot of mid-town real estate. Well, the son-in-law
of the company’s then current owner, Ed Malloy , a soft spoken, mild mannered person, not
really cut out for real estate, he ran the company at the time. And one of its big secrets, was that
it owned The Endicott Hotel on Columbus Avenue, between Eighty-first and Eighty-second
Street. The Fred F. French Company net leased this hotel property to operators who ran it as an
SRO rooming house.
They had net leased the Endicott decades before. It had been a successful hotel, until it wasn’t.
Bathrooms down the hall, stuff like that. It was okay for rooming houses in the ’50s and ’60s.
A lot of these rooming-house operators would get a twenty-five, thirty-year lease and by the time
the lease was expiring, the last three or four years—they had no reason to put any more money
into a building they didn’t own so they had allowed the building to be run down by not doing
anything and in that state it came back to the owners. It could have been any number of other
families in New York who would have been terribly embarrassed to have it be known that their
name was attached as owners of the worst SRO in New York City.

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Ed Malloy asked me, if I remember correctly, if I would take over this embarrassment and
renovate it because of my Columbus Avenue renovations. I said of course. We bought it on a
contract, which only went into effect when vacant. I didn’t want to buy a building with the kind
of horror stories that had been long connected with Endicott’s tenancy and the murders and the
this’s and that’s in that building. It was undoubtedly the worst SRO in the whole city, and only a
block from Central Park West and the Beresford. Maybe you’ve heard from George Beane
because he was more, at that point, involved. He joined me after I had renovated a few buildings
and there was enough money in the cash flow to pay for a managing agent. That’s how George
could make his escape [chuckles] from his prestigious law firm into the adventures of the Upper
West Side.
George has a lot of stories about the Endicott vacating process which fascinated him. A far cry
from his roots in Greenwich and Connecticut boarding schools.
And I had a purchase contract. The agreement was that during the period of that contract, I
would vacate it, so the Fred F. French Company would not have to be identified publicly. Have
you heard stories about the vacating process from George Beane [chuckles]?
Vural: I haven’t asked him about that expressly. I’m going to see him again next week also.
Quinlan: Bring it up. Say I told you that he had some stories about Gladys Turnipseed and
Alfonso Turnipseed, the plumber.
Vural: Okay.
Quinlan: And the French lady with the veil—
Vural: Okay.

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Quinlan: —and her petit coin de paradis [little piece of paradise]. She was a tenant in the
building, an SRO tenant, oblivious to all that was happening around her. He was at the building
frequently during the vacating period.
Vural: And at that point, did that require helping the people who were living there find another
place to live?
Quinlan: Yes, that’s a perfect question. SRO buildings existed all over the city but most were on
the Upper West Side.
Vural: I think it was 1979.
Quinlan: Yes, it was like later. SROs were common and they had turnover. So, we could
theoretically place the tenants in other SROs, which by definition would have been much better
than the conditions at the Endicott, no matter how bad they were [chuckles].
There was one on Seventieth Street, where my office was at that time, a former hotel, which was
now an SRO, which specialized in housing alcoholics, indigent alcoholics and offering in-house
social assistance.
They were all over on the West Side. So, I had hired for locating a very kind but cynical person
and one of my great memories, Irving Kissin. Irving grew up playing basketball on the concrete
courts at a Brooklyn high school. He was a big hulk, a member of a more distinguished law firm
than he himself was distinguished, and he didn’t care. He knew how to deal with street stuff.
Irving was guiding the Endicott relocation process for me. One of the political people, whose
name I won’t mention, was trying to rally the building tenants to fight the relocation—totally
unsuccessfully because it was a nightmare place. Toilets hadn’t worked for months and people

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Quinlan – Session 1 of 2

were still using them. I am serious. Photographs exist of a toilet wall, which was black. Now,
why was it black? They were houseflies. You could not see the actual wall.
Different social welfare cases were grouped on separate floors to assist the social workers who
were supposed to offer assistance. I’ll try and remember a few of the groups. There was a floor
of indigent alcoholics, homeless parolees, men on one floor, afro American lesbian parolees on
another, mental cases from the shuttered state facilities on a separate floor. Now, if you think of a
welfare worker’s job, typically they’d have to go all over the city to the various places where
their clients were located. The Endicott offered one stop shopping with all clients at a single
address. There’s a reason for mentioning that. And Irving recognized that, too.
As I said, he was a street lawyer and my kind of lawyer in this situation. He didn’t have a mean
bone in his body and never spoke badly of anyone, except local politicians. We remained close
for many years afterwards.
New York State’s attitude was save money, close the state welfare facilities, ship them to the
SROs in New York City. So, now all these SROs in New York at that point, including our SRO,
had a lot of these people who should have been institutionalized. Case workers would slip a
check under the door. Some wouldn’t go in but speak through a crack in the door from the
hallway. The check was endorsed and cashed by the caregiver.
The Endicott had five floors above the ground level—let’s say five social workers attended to
everybody in that building, according to their special skills. Am I making myself clear? I’m not
sure.
Vural: Yes, yes.

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Quinlan: I see it visually. I’m not sure I’m verbalizing it correctly. Irving brought in Gladys
Turnipseed and her husband, Alfonso, as on-site building managers. Gladys Turnipseed had to
have an IQ of 170. Chunky, polite African-American from Harlem, who sat at the desk and
brooked no nonsense. The Endicott was a challenge and Gladys and Alfonso were up to it. There
were five murders in one year. The sidewalk on Columbus Avenue had body outlines in chalk
after what were not accidental falls.
Alfonso, who was a plumber, carried an oversized monkey wrench—it must have weighed five
pounds—but being a plumber, it was okay to walk around with it. He was a massive person.
Gladys and Alfonso were a long married, close-knit couple. You didn’t fool around with
Alfonso, or Gladys.
Gladys came in every morning promptly with her towel wrapped shotgun in tow. She’d place it
right behind her desk so tenants would see it. I mean this was theater, but it kept the building in
line while the vacating process was being sorted out.
So, getting back to how do you vacate a collapsing SRO while respecting the human needs.
Irving said, “Well, we could look at it two ways, Bob. We could move everyone out the fourth of
July weekend when the social workers are in the Hamptons”—that’s almost a quote. He couldn’t
resist smiling because he didn’t mean it. “Or we could get them to move their clients out, and
that’s what I suggest doing.” “How are you going to do that?” “We’ll rent a pickup truck for
each worker and we’ll supply each of these social workers with garbage bags for their clients
belongings. They will move their clients to individual SROs where they will be accommodated
all in one place. One place to check on them weekly.”

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It worked. For example, on Seventieth Street—I think it was called Stanhope Hotel—that was
where the indigent alcoholics were delivered from Eighty-first Street. They were brought down
on a weekend, in pickup trucks driven by either the social workers themselves or someone they
hired and we paid for. All their clients’ belongings were put in these huge, black garbage bags,
tagged with their names, and they were settled into an attractive hotel, which had been renovated,
with all the social services located in-house. The other groups were escorted to their respective
hotels on the West Side.
And the social workers were well off because they still could go to only one address instead of
twenty different ones to assist their clients. Ironically, the city employees had moved their clients
out because they didn’t want to lose them. They could have been lost just by us moving them
into other SROs, one here, one there. They may have been placed in group housing.
Well, that’s how the renovations started. I took title to a shell ready for a gut rehab. And it was
quite painless. The Endicott was so decayed, no city official or neighborhood organization could
reasonably oppose relocation. I bought the building with a savings bank partner from Long
Island whose name I won’t mention, because it turned out to have some disreputable outside
partners. Ironic. These were the guys with white shirts and ties versus my new world.
So, that’s how we built 145 rental apartments and nine stores, which have become part of the
neighborhood.
Vural: So, can you tell—
Quinlan: After renting the apartments, we then converted the Endicott to a co-op, and that’s
what it is now. We own the retail.

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Quinlan – Session 1 of 2

Vural: Oh, cool. So, it’s two o’clock—
Quinlan: Oh.
Vural: —and we had committed to that, so I’m aware of that, too.
Quinlan: Well, I think it’s a good time to end because I’ve talked about The Endicott, and that
was the last project on Columbus. We’ve gone other places. We have the company website
[chuckles], that’s not part of this dialogue, and a second generation family company. Tim
Quinlan’s running it and it’s in excellent hands.
Vural: So, I’m actually going to be back next week—
Quinlan: Yes.
Vural: —so, we can talk more about commercial and—
Quinlan: Well, give me some things to think about.
Vural: So, how about if I say goodbye and we turn this off and I’ll give some thoughts.
Quinlan: Sure.
Vural: Alright, thanks.
Quinlan: Goodbye. [chuckles]
Vural: Bye.
[END OF SESSION]