![]() ![]() LeFrak grew up in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, a predominantly Jewish area with the highest concentration of synagogues in the city. įor years, LeFrak had felt out of place among the business elite in New York City. ![]() ![]() For a first-generation American, whose parents had immigrated to the United States from Palestine just decades before, LeFrak was excited by the prospect of establishing himself among this esteemed group. Purchasing the property would mean placing himself and his family firmly in the ranks of New York City’s real estate elite. Over the centuries, neither the Van Burens nor the Astors had developed the property with homes or industrial construction.įor LeFrak, the regal legacy of the place was almost tangible. In the late 1800s, John Jacob Astor had purchased the land from the estate of Martin Van Buren, the eighth president of the United States, whose family acquired the property when New York was still a Dutch settlement. For several decades, the Astors had used the property as a country estate, a place of relaxation and respite far outside of what were then the city limits. LeFrak was particularly attracted to the site because it belonged to the estates of John Jacob Astor and his son, William Waldorf Astor, two formidable real estate barons of their time. Flat as a board and covered in weeds, the parcel looked like a midwestern farm. Several years earlier, while driving out to a development in Forest Hills, Queens he had noticed an enormous 40-acre lot of swamp and marshland in nearby Corona at the intersection of the Long Island Expressway and Junction Boulevard. To build a neighborhood, though, LeFrak would need a substantial area of land, something quite difficult to acquire in an increasingly densely packed city. ![]() The famed real estate developer was on a mission to scout out a property where he could build the project he had been dreaming of for the past three years: a city within a city, a set of nearly two dozen uniform buildings surrounded by enough green space to rival a suburban area. On a warm spring morning in 1954, Samuel LeFrak walked out of his luxury pre-war building overlooking New York’s Central Park and jumped into the driver’s seat of his navy Cadillac El Dorado. Chapter One – Building the City of Tomorrow ![]()
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