William Zeckendorf

On September 30, 1976, William Zeckendorf died in his residence on 65th Street and Park Avenue after suffering a stroke.

Zeckendorf was married four times. His first wife was Irma Levy; they had two children: William Zeckendorf Jr. and Susan Zeckendorf Nicholson. They later divorced and she remarried to the music critic and historian Irving Kolodin. His second wife was Marion Griffin who died in 1968. In 1972, he married Alice Odenheimer Bache, widow of Harold L. Bache. They subsequently divorced and he married Louise Betterly Malcolm in 1975.

Before his company's bankruptcy in 1965, Zeckendorf became the embodiment of glamorous real-estate dealmaking, which included developing Roosevelt Airfield, where Charles Lindbergh began his transatlantic flight, and helping to advance and develop Long Island University. From the start of his career Zeckendorf had been able to use his dealmaking skills to acquire or build projects for which he lacked the funds, but in time the under-funding caught up with him, and "his overextended company crashed in a spectacular bankruptcy."

Still lacking sufficient money, Zeckendorf was forced to make US$1,000 per day penalty payments to Fox. In 1960, Zeckendorf solved his problem by partnering with Alcoa in a joint-venture relationship to finally build Century City, which by now had escalated to a US$500,000,000 (equivalent to $4,579,865,017 in 2021) project. The new owners embraced the studio's conception of Century City as "a city within a city" with the arc-shaped, 19-story Century Plaza Hotel to be the centerpiece. This joint-venture marked an increasing interest by large corporations with land "surplus" in order to create housing communities, industrial parks and office buildings; marking the first movement from traditional industry into real estate investing.

Zeckendorf also owned New York's famous Chrysler Building and the venerable Hotel Astor in Times Square. 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.

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 km) of its historic backlot in Los Angeles, California, into a proposed US$400,000,000 (equivalent to $3,756,862,745 in 2021) 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.

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).

Zeckendorf's most notable property acquisition, and potential development of a "dream city" to rival Rockefeller Center, was a 17-acre (69,000 m) 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 ($118 million in 2021) and Nelson's father John D. Rockefeller Jr. subsequently donated this land for the building of the United Nations Headquarters.

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.