William Zeckendorf

William Zeckendorf Sr. (June 30, 1905 – September 30, 1976) was a prominent American real estate developer. Through his development company Webb and Knapp — for which he began working in 1938 and which he purchased in 1949 — he developed a significant portion of the New York City urban landscape. Architects I. M. Pei and Le Corbusier designed structures for Zeckendorf's development projects.

Zeckendorf was born to a Jewish family in Paris, Illinois, the son of a hardware store manager. His family moved to New York City when he was three years old. He attended New York University but dropped out to work at the real estate company of his uncle, Sam Borchard. He soon left his uncle's firm to work for Webb & Knapp, a small New York building manager and brokerage.

Zeckendorf's most notable property acquisition, and potential development of a "dream city" to rival Rockefeller Center, was a 17-acre (69,000 m²) site along the East River between 42nd Street and 48th Street. In a now celebrated transaction in December 1946, the prominent architect Wallace Harrison and Nelson Rockefeller bought the site from him for $8.5 million ($140 million in 2025) and Nelson's father John D. Rockefeller Jr. subsequently donated this land for the building of the United Nations Headquarters.

Zeckendorf also owned New York's famous Chrysler Building and the venerable Hotel Astor in Times Square as well as the Commodore Hotel, the Drake Hotel, Hotel Manhattan and the Chatham Hotel. He purchased Chicago's famous Robie House in 1958, before transferring ownership to the University of Chicago. He developed two of I. M. Pei's early skyscrapers — the Mile High Center (now part of Wells Fargo Center) in downtown Denver, and Place Ville Marie in downtown Montreal.

Zeckendorf also partnered with Chicago real estate titan Arthur Rubloff to develop a stretch of Michigan Avenue into what Rubloff dubbed the Magnificent Mile. The Rubloff Company was eventually acquired by Prudential and subsequently has become a division of Berkshire Hathaway.

The real estate tycoon and his company, Webb & Knapp, also were involved in theme park investment following the successful debut of Disneyland. Zeckendorf came to know C.V. Wood, who first helped build Disneyland as a Disney employee and then developed theme parks in Colorado, Massachusetts, New York (on Zeckendorf's property) and Texas under his own Marco Engineering company. Zeckendorf and his company enjoyed various connections to the Marco Engineering parks.

In New York, Wood created and built Freedomland U.S.A. on marshland that had been owned by Zeckendorf since the early 1950s. The property was located in The Bronx, a borough of New York City. The park lasted just five years (1960–1964) and it was under various layers of management that included Zeckendorf and his son. According to Zeckendorf in a newspaper article that appeared during 1970, the theme park, unknown to the public at the time, served as a "placeholder" for the land to obtain variances that permitted the construction on the marshland of the world's largest co-operative housing project known as Co-op City. Zeckendorf's ownership of the land and his role in Freedomland are documented in the book Freedomland U.S.A.: The Definitive History (Theme Park Press, 2019).

In December 1958, Zeckendorf entered into a deal with Spyros Skouras, head of 20th Century-Fox, to purchase Fox's project to develop 176 acres (0.71 km²) of its historic backlot in Los Angeles, California, into a proposed US$400,000,000 (equivalent to $4,463,667,820 in 2025) Century City. The studio had suffered a string of expensive flops, culminating in the box-office disaster Cleopatra (1963) and was in dire need of money. The project, conceived under the direction of Edmund Herrscher, the studio's director of property development, had been announced the first week of 1958, with construction said to begin in July 1958.