Real Estate

Four Seasons developer Zeckendorf dies at 84

Second-generation developer William Zeckendorf Jr., whose work includes the iconic Four Seasons Hotel and the Columbia condo on Broadway at 96th Street, has died at his Santa Fe, N. M., home.

He was 84.

Bill Jr., as he was known, was considered a more cautious developer than his father, William “Big Bill” Zeckendorf—who had assembled the land for the United Nations and developed Long Island’s Roosevelt Field along with Century City in Los Angeles, before he lost his fortune.

“Bill Jr. devoted his life to making his father at least halfway whole and vowed never to end up as his father,” his former public relations representative, Peter Model, said about 10 years ago, after Bill Jr. had retired.

“He became a mirror image of his father: His father sought publicity. Bill Jr. wasn’t after publicity,” Model said at the time. “His father was loud. He is quiet.”

Zeckendorf Jr. was nevertheless a pioneer in his own right, working first for his father and later developing the Ronald Reagan Office Building in Washington, D.C., assembling the site and developing the four-building multi-use Zeckendorf Towers project on the edge of the then-less-trendy Union Square, and reviving the Delmonico and Barbizon.

His most famous project, the full-block office and separate residential buildings known as Worldwide Plaza, was also in a pioneering location at Eighth Avenue and 50th Street that had been vacated when Madison Square Garden moved to Penn Station.

“Worldwide Plaza was extremely successful. It wasn’t because of us [that we had financial problems]—it was because the tenant went under,” Zeckendorf bragged a decade ago to a visitor to his Santa Fe home, where he had retired in 1992 with his second wife, Nancy.

He was also proud of his assemblage of all the land, the leases, subleases, and fee positions for the Four Seasons Hotel, and of having brought in I. M. Pei as the architect to tweak the original Frank Williams design.

One of his last projects was assembling the site for 515 Park Ave., buying the air rights from the Lighthouse. “We made the tactical move that put the residential on Park [Avenue],” he explained of the luxury condominium.

This was later successfully completed by his sons, William Lie and Arthur, whose mother was his first wife, Guri Lie—the daughter of former U.N. Secretary-General Trygve Lie—whom he had met on a blind date.

Zeckendorf was also active in the Real Estate Board of New York and was the board’s governor from 1986 to 1989.