D’town memories: Kalikow
Downtown’s on a roll. The population’s booming. The new World Trade Center is coming together and Brookfield Place’s stores and restaurants have banished memories of the dull World Financial Center.
Yet, Peter Kalikow — the head of real estate firm H. J. Kalikow, who played a significant, largely forgotten role downtown before and after 9/ 11 — remains so haunted by the terrorist attack, he’s avoided the area ever since.
“When I go there, it’s emotional for me,” Kalikow said.
“I was on the Port Authority board for seven years. I was chairman of the MTA when we had to do the cleanup” after the attack.
“It has a sadness for me,” Kalikow said Monday. “I wish I could get over it, but I can’t.”
Kalikow, of course, is also a former owner of the New York Post ( 198793). We thought we’d catch up with him after last week’s news that The Post parent News Corp. and separate company 21st Century Fox are talking to Larry Silverstein about anchoring 2 World Trade Center — right across the street from the Millenium Hotel, which Kalikow built.
His words are a reminder of the sorrow, which will always shadow downtown’s sun, no matter how stirring its recovery.
Kalikow can boast of three other major downtown accomplishments besides the pioneering, 56story hotel ( today the Millenium Hilton) which opened in 1992 and narrowly survived 9/ 11.
He bought the landmarked but neglected former AT& T Building for $ 74 million in 1983 and beautifully restored it before selling it to L& L Holding Co. for $ 270 million in 2005 — paving the way for L& L’s lobby redesign which has lured famed restaurant Nobu.
He was a founding trustee of the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Battery Park City. And construction of the MTA’s recently opened, $ 1.5 billion Fulton Center started on Kalikow’s watch as MTA chairman, against difficult odds.
Kalikow is delighted, but amazed, at what’s taken place downtown.
“I am surprised,” he said. “I thought it would do well, but I had no idea it would become the hit that it’s become.”
Yet, he said, “I haven’t even gone to see the Fulton Transit Center”— a project that consumed him for three years. Nor has he been to 1 World Trade Center or the Memorial Museum.
His memories of 9/ 11 and the day after are indelible: “I walked by my hotel. My watchman was there. He took me inside. There were airplane parts in the rooms. I said, ‘ Call the FBI.’
“Walking through the dust was like walking through snow up to midcalf. Then you’d pick up a shoe.”
Kalikow says the development itch hasn’t returned: He’s content to run his management company and takes pride in 101 Park Ave. which he built in the 1980s.
The Darth Vaderlike tower has a surprising tenant: Condé Nast. When the media firm moved to 1
WTC, its finance division “didn’t want to go there,” Kalikow said. “They have 50,000 square feet at 101, and they built themselves a very avantgarde design.”
And Kalikow is still weighing whether he wants to go there.
“My father was a World War II marine,” Kalikow said. “He and his friends never spoke about it. Now I see why.”
The Memorial SloanKettering/ Hunter College uptown drama isn’t quite over.
Although the city EDC finally closed on the $ 226 million sale of the farEast 73rd Street site to the cancer hospital and college last week, foes of the institutions’ planned 1.2 million squarefoot complex are pressing a court appeal — the last hope for neighborhood residents opposed to the project.
We reported last October that the sale had yet to go through more than two years after it was announced. A lawsuit against it by a group called Residents for Reasonable Development was thrown out of court last July. But the group’s lawyer, Al Butzel, said he’s taken the case to the Appellate Division and a hearing is set for April 26. Opponents argue that the sale was improper because the city didn’t consider other alternatives for the site. They also claim that relocating a sanitation garage, which previously stood there, to other neighborhoods entails environmental risks that the city has failed to assess.