Just compare that with all the hundreds of respectable guys who make careers out of boasting about their uncompromising integrity but have absolutely no loyalty. They think only about whats best for them and dont think twice about stabbing a friend in the back if the friend becomes a problem. What I liked most about Roy Cohn was that he would do just the opposite. Roy was the sort of guy whod be there at your hospital bed, long after everyone else had bailed out, literally standing by you to the death.

In any case, I got to know a lot of people when I moved to Manhattan, and I got to know properties, but I still couldnt find anything to buy at a price I liked. Then, suddenly, in 1973 things began to turn bad in Manhattan. Id always assumed the market would cool off, because everything runs in cycles and real estate is no different. Even so, I never expected things to get as bad as they did. It was a combination of factors. First, the federal government announced a moratorium on housing subsidies, which they had been giving out by the bushel, particularly in the city. At the same time, interest rates began to rise, after being so stable for so many years that it was easy to forget they could move at all. Then, to make things worse, there was a spurt of inflation, particularly in construction costs, which seem to rise even when theres no inflation anywhere else.

But the biggest problem by far was with the city itself. The citys debt was rising to levels that started to make everyone very nervous. For the first time you heard people talk about the city going bankrupt. Fear led to more fear. Before long New York was suffering from a crisis of confidence. People simply stopped believing in the city. It wasnt an environment conducive to new real estate development. In the first nine months of 1973, the city issued permits for about 15,000 new apartments and single-family homes in the five boroughs. In the first nine months of 1974, the number dropped to 6,000.

I worried about the future of New York City too, but I cant say it kept me up nights, Im basically an optimist, and frankly, I saw the citys trouble as a great opportunity for me. Because I grew up in Queens, I believed, perhaps to an irrational degree, that Manhattan was always going to be the best place to livethe center of the world. Whatever troubles the city might be having in the short term, there was no doubt in my mind that things had to turn around ultimately. What other city was going to take New Yorks place? One of the pieces of property that had always fascinated me was the huge abandoned railyard along the Hudson River beginning at 59th Street and extending all the way up to 72nd Street. Every time I drove along the West Side Highway, I found myself dreaming about what could be built there. It didnt take a genius to realize that one hundred acres of