Builder “gave the people what they wanted, at a price they could afford.” Fund at The Trust supports a variety of New York City causes.
Samuel J. LeFrak (1918-2003)
“If you build it, they will come,” Samuel J. LeFrak liked to say. And build them, he did. In his lifetime, The Lefrak Organization constructed nearly 200,000 “moderate and affordable” apartments in New York’s five boroughs, Westchester and Nassau counties, and the New Jersey waterfront.
From the 1948 to 1975, Sam led the company founded by his grandfather, Aaron, in 1905. His original signature buildings were six-story walkups that dotted the Brooklyn and Queens landscape. Then in the 1960s came the humongous Lefrak City in central Queens, home to about 15,000 people in 4,600 apartments. The 20 buildings, each 17 stories tall, dominate the skyline.
“I gave the people what they wanted, at a price they could afford to pay,” Sam said. “I took them out of public housing, out of the ghettos. I was the only [builder] who put my name to it. I wasn’t hiding behind a ‘Realty.’”
Samuel Jayson LeFrak was born in Manhattan February 12, 1918, to Harry and Sarah Schwartz Lefrak. He once explained why his name had a capital F, unlike other family members. His father had Americanized the name after moving here from France in 1904, Sam said. But on his birth certificate, his mother’s French-born physician wrote “LeFrak,” and Sam never changed it.
Sam grew up in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. After graduating from Erasmus Hall High School in Flatbush and the University of Maryland, he studied finance at Columbia University and Harvard Business School.
Sam’s father and grandfather had both been builders in Europe in the 1800s; Harry, Sam’s father, started the Lefrak Organization in 1905. Sam often said he grew up on construction sites. At age 8, he carried buckets of water and nails for the workmen, he said. He built his first building in 1938, while he was in college. Over the summer, he supervised completion of a 60-family, 16-story project in Williamsburg. A two-bedroom, two-bath apartment rented for $70, he said, but he had to give three months free rent to fill the building in that Depression year.
Sam married Ethel Stone April 22, 1941, in Manhattan. They had three daughters, Denise, Francine, and Jacqueline, and a son, Richard, who succeeded his father as company president in 1975.
In the early 1940s, when Sam started working full-time for the family firm, it was part of an army of construction companies building barracks, mess halls, and other facilities in Brooklyn for soldiers heading to the front lines during World War II. When that work slowed, the company built apartments on hundreds of acres of farmland Harry had purchased in the 1920s. In 1948, Harry turned the company over to Sam, who built wherever he could find reasonably priced land.
As housing construction exploded in New York after the war, the Lefrak Organization built “an apartment every 18 minutes,” the company’s chief financial officer, Arthur Klein, said. They stockpiled materials by the train carload and used their own contractors to keep construction costs down.
In Forest Hills, they built the New England Quadrangle for 1,000 families. In Flatbush, Prospect Park West, Sunnyside, Elmhurst and beyond, they built buildings named for states, from Alabama to Vermont, and Ivy League schools—Harvard, Princeton, Dartmouth—and presidents—Washington, Adams, Madison, and Lincoln.
Then in early 1960s, Sam chose a 40-acre site in Queens for Lefrak City that he knew was well-suited to hard-working, middle-class commuters. ”If we lived here, Daddy, you’d be home now,” read a Lefrak sign along the Long Island Expressway. It was the largest privately financed apartment development in the world, and the rents were reasonable–two bedrooms for $220 a month, efficiencies for $102. The apartments were rented as soon as the buildings were completed.
In 1975, Sam stepped down as company president, turning day-to-day operations over to Richard, but he stayed on as chairman. In the early 1980s, the LeFraks built 1,700 apartments at Gateway Plaza on the waterfront in Battery Park City, a major landfill project in Lower Manhattan. “I went through 18 years of pain,” Sam said in an interview with Family Business magazine, “filling it, developing it, building the infrastructure, building the esplanade, putting up the first group of buildings.” For the next phase, New York State opted for another contractor.
Across the Hudson River from the Financial District was the site of Sam’s final project—a 600-acre tract in Jersey City, then a wasteland of abandoned rail tracks. Sam and Richard envisioned a $10 billion retail, residential, office, and entertainment complex just minutes from Manhattan.
Today, Newport features a shopping mall, 17 high-rise apartment and condo buildings, two hotels, eight office buildings with more than 6 million square feet of space, a PATH station, even the LeFrak Lighthouse. And the company has more plans on the drawing board.
In his later years, Sam explored other business ventures: Lefrak Oil and Gas Organization (LOGO), and Lefrak Entertainment, which produced movies, TV and Broadway shows, and owned the record label LMR that launched Barbra Streisand’s career.
Among his more unusual interests was underwater archaeology. He helped finance a search for seventh-century Byzantine shipwrecks off the coast of Israel, a futile expedition for Noah’s Ark, and the team that located the Titanic in its Atlantic grave.
Sam died April 16, 2003, from complications of a stroke. He was 85.
Many endowed buildings and sites bear the names of Samuel and Ethel LeFrak, including a concert hall at Queens College; a gym at Amherst College; a meadow in Flushing, a sculpture terrace and art gallery at the Guggenheim Museum, a learning center at Temple Emanu-El in Manhattan, and a building at the University of Maryland.
The Lefrak Family Foundation established the fund in 1999, which supports education, arts and humanities, and/or health and people with special needs.