The Devil's Playground_ A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square - James Traub [140]
Douglas, by contrast, is entirely sane, and yet one can see in him something of the same hesitancy, the same self-discomfort, that pathologically afflicted his older brother. He is a famously taciturn and private figure, uncomfortable in conversation, much given to pauses, which seem to begin in reflection and end in melancholy silence. Though unfailingly polite, like his father, he is prone to answer lengthy questions with a single word, often yes or no. He seems not to enjoy the company of his peers. He does not socialize, attend galas or, with a few exceptions, join the boards to which his money would give him access.
As a young man, Douglas had no intention of following his father into the family business. “I was in trouble in school, and I had problems dealing with authority,” he says. Douglas enrolled at Berkeley in 1962, at the very moment when the cultural revolution of the sixties was getting under way. By the time he graduated, he looked like Jerry Garcia, with a great curly beard; he planned to work as a developmental economist in the Third World. It is hard to imagine any profession that would have been further from his aspirations than real estate. Then Douglas got married and had children, and suddenly he found his horizons closing in. He agreed to work for his father, and made an utter hash of the building he was given to manage. And so he lit out for the territory: with his wife and baby daughter, Anita, he moved up to Newfoundland, where he hoped to make a new life in a setting where he felt more comfortable. But this second attempt to escape the family orbit ended as suddenly and ineffectually as the first. Douglas had a serious accident when a wood-fired water heater blew up; he was dramatically rescued by Seymour and flown back to a hospital in New York. “I decided that New York was the safest place for me to be,” Douglas says ruefully. And so he rejoined the family business, this time for good. It was, all in all, a rather sad story—a story of poor decisions, thwarted hopes, and a reluctant acceptance of an unavoidable destiny. It was Robert’s story, without the catastrophic trajectory.
Douglas ultimately carved out a life for himself, satisfying his counter-cultural impulses by buying a farm in upstate New York that ultimately became the largest organic farm in the state. By the eighties, he was very much Seymour’s partner. The Dursts had never built on their Times Square properties, and when the 42nd Street Development Project came along, they did everything they could to stifle it. Seymour had a longstanding philosophical objection to publicly subsidized and guided projects, and to the politicking that goes with them, though he and Douglas also had every reason to fear that the four heavily subsidized office towers George Klein proposed to build would swamp the market and thus depress the value of their own property in the neighborhood. And so, starting in 1988, when Klein looked as if he might be ready to build, Seymour, who was then head of something called the Real Estate Board of New York, regularly blistered the project in public as a shameless boondoggle, while the family mounted lawsuits against it and quietly funded a “grass-roots” campaign. In 1989, the Dursts even purchased long-term leases to the derelict theaters on 42nd Street and commissioned a plan designed to prove that the private marketplace could bring them back to life more effectively and cheaply than the city could. It was widely believed that their actual motive was to sell the properties back to the city in the condemnation proceedings, and thus to net a huge profit.
The Dursts