LeFraks Envision Even Bigger Skyline Across Hudson

 

By CHARLES V. BAGLI, New York Times
Published: June 1, 2006

www.nytimes.com

Standing atop a condominium tower under construction at the Newport complex in Jersey City, Richard LeFrak looked south at a forest of green-glass commercial towers and brick residential buildings that seem to leap from the waterfront. His family and their partner built them, 20 in all.

Although the LeFraks cannot lay claim to the tallest tower (the 800-foot Goldman Sachs building at Paulus Hook), they have built more than a third of the high-rise skyline that has grown up along Jersey City's once dilapidated waterfront. And today, exactly 20 years after his father, Sam, embarked on a seemingly quixotic bid to transform these rusty old railroad yards into Newport, Mr. LeFrak is announcing plans for another hotel and four more apartment towers.

The announcement comes on the 20th anniversary of the start of Newport and calls attention to the part that the LeFraks have played in the current Jersey City housing boom. The new plans represent a $750 million investment, on top of the nearly $2.5 billion that the LeFraks say they have already plowed into Newport.

Mr. LeFrak, 60, said the family is making good on a promise by his father and Melvin Simon, the shopping center developer, to build a community where dilapidated piers, warehouses and railroad tracks stood.

''We're celebrating that we got this far,'' said Mr. LeFrak, who was involved with Newport from the beginning and has now been joined by his sons, Jamie and Harry. ''We're celebrating that the vision of my father and Mel Simon is pretty well complete.''

The scale of the undertaking is hard to imagine. At 600 acres, Newport is twice as big as Co-op City in the Bronx. There are 11 residential buildings containing 4,135 apartments, eight office buildings with 5.5 million square feet of office space, a 187-room hotel, a marina, a 1.2-million-square-foot mall and many other buildings and stores. Across the river from Chelsea, the complex stretches the equivalent of about 14 Manhattan blocks. Samuel J. LeFrak, who died in 2003 at 85 and built more housing in New York City during his life than any other private developer, saw the possibilities in Jersey City when most builders turned up their noses.

''Sam was bigger than life,'' said Bob Cotter, director of planning in Jersey City. ''His dream was to build this city on the left bank of the Hudson River. He came over and did it. The waterfront has given Jersey City a panache that it never had.''

But some urban planners, neighborhood advocates and residents have complained that Newport has a suburban sensibility. Many of the buildings stand alone, with little connection to one another, or to the older, grittier sections of Jersey City to the west, they say. There is a public esplanade along the Hudson River, with sweeping views of Manhattan, but it is bordered by Newport buildings, giving it the impression of a private enclave.

''I love living in a place that takes your breath away,'' said Monica Coe, an architect who has lived at Newport for 10 years. ''At night you see the sparkling lights of Manhattan, rather than the brick walls you'd get in Manhattan. But it's a little like living in a feudal holding.''

Dan Falcon, a 15-year resident, said: ''Newport has been malled off from the city. We wanted the city to have access to the waterfront.''

Mr. LeFrak does not dismiss the criticisms. ''It's a valid point,'' he said. ''We're trying to address that now that we have some density.''

The company is filling in some of the empty space between buildings and adding street-front stores, to create street life, and small parks, if not the larger park-on-a-pier that some residents wanted. On a recent morning, office workers and women pushing baby strollers could be seen on the streets.

The LeFraks are known for a kind of efficient, if unimaginative, boxy building that provides the maximum space for the rent. But the buildings in the next round are more interesting, with one, the Ellipse, a sleek, elliptical residential tower designed by the well-known Arquitectonica of Miami.

In the late 1970's, the Jersey City waterfront was a web of train terminals owned by bankrupt railroads. Newport began not with Samuel LeFrak but with Mr. Simon and another mall developer who wanted to build a shopping center anchored with a Stern's department store.

Mr. Simon's bankers urged him to find a partner to build housing. He put in a cold call to Sam LeFrak, persuading him to travel from his office in Queens. The developer then called his son.

''He said, 'Richard, you'd better take a look at this,' '' Mr. LeFrak recalled. ''I've been dreaming about something like this my whole life.''

Sam LeFrak, in characteristic fashion, vowed to undertake ''probably the largest job that has ever been built since the pyramids'' and create the ''experimental prototype city of tomorrow.''

Mr. Simon built the mall and the first office building, while the LeFraks built several apartment towers. ''He built all the other buildings with cash,'' Mr. Simon said. ''We couldn't afford to borrow the money.''

Progress was slow and a devastating recession in the early 1990's sent the nascent ''Jersey gold coast'' into a tailspin, and the LeFraks say they had huge losses in the first 15 years.

But since 2000, they have built seven office buildings, attracting financial tenants from Manhattan like J. P. Morgan Chase, Knight Securities and Insurance Services Office with cheaper rents and tax breaks, surprising brokers who doubted that the New Jersey waterfront would ever attract office tenants.

The LeFraks have the option of building more commercial space, but the vacancy rate is 14.1 percent, according to the brokers Cushman & Wakefield. And new housing is what's hot. K. Hovnanian and Equity Residential recently bought a commercial site on the waterfront, where they plan to build a 900-unit apartment complex.

Even Donald J. Trump has found Jersey City, lending his name to a $415 million project to build two residential towers, one 50 stories and the other 55 stories.

Mr. Cotter said there are 7,000 apartments planned or under construction within a mile of City Hall, two or three times the number five years ago, fueled by the soaring sales prices and rents across the Hudson River.

''It's not Manhattan,'' Mr. LeFrak said on a recent walking tour of Newport. ''But it's not bad. And it just might,'' he paused, raising a finger, ''might, be better than Brooklyn.''