The mind behind the mile - Westfair Communications

Lowell Schulman was in Texas, en route to Hollywood to take a job with an agent, back in 1951 when the untimely death of his father forced him to return home and help out with the family business ”“ a store selling women”™s clothing, including a bridal shop, since 1926 on Mamaroneck Avenue in White Plains.
But that wasn”™t how he wanted to spend the rest of his life.

“I hated the retail business. I hated it and did everything I could to figure out how to get out of it,” Schulman said in a recent interview. “I wanted to get out any way I could and I knew I had to make a living.”

So Schulman took up real estate, buying properties and building successful, small commercial buildings in downtown White Plains, first at 222 Mamaroneck Ave., then at 180 E. Post Road. Then in 1961 he bought 320 acres on Anderson Hill Road in Purchase from Leonard Davidow, the builder who turned East Post Road into a strip of upscale stores dubbed “Little Fifth Avenue.” In two years, Schulman obtained permits, then carved out the middle 150 acres for a golf course, now the Brae Burn Country Club, with the surrounding land sold off to developers who built about 170 homes there.

Davidow”™s financial backers ”“ Richard Maas, a former White Plains mayor, and his brother in-law Richard Lederer ”“ were impressed enough to sell Schulman additional property, namely 280 acres fronting both sides of the newly built Cross-Westchester Expressway. The land ran east to Red Oak Lane, Purchase Street and Bowman Avenue.

“They sold it to me on 100 percent credit,” Schulman recalled of the 1965 deal, in which he agreed to pay $3.2 million for the land along Interstate-287, starting with a $100,000 payment covering his first year while he ironed out potential roadblocks to redevelopment.

“There were deed restrictions. There had been flipping of parcels that were inaccessible. There was a variety of issues because there was no campus office park zoning in place. All of it was either unzoned or had limited zoning,” Schulman said. “Within the first year I was able to get all of those things resolved.”

To help pay for the purchase, Schulman sold off 10 acres on West Red Oak Lane in Harrison to the Berkeley School, now Berkeley College in downtown White Plains, and a 30-acre parcel at 400 Westchester Ave. to construction materials maker The Flintkote Co.

“Those two deals got me able to close the transaction,” Schulman said. “Between the two, I got $1.25 million of the $3.2 million I needed.”

According to Schulman, the corridor”™s “Platinum Mile” name originated in the 1960s with Nick Penna, who headed Harrison”™s building department at the time and helped Schulman in developing the Brae Burn property. The two would go out golfing with Penna”™s brother Toney, a pro golfer and later golf course designer who died in 1995 ”“ five years after another Schulman-designed golf course, the Atlantic Golf Club, opened in Bridgehampton.

“One day as I”™m talking to Nick after I acquired the Cross-Westchester land, I told him what I was planning because half of it was in his town. I said I was going to do office buildings. He looked at me cross-eyed, knowing he had to help me build the road to get into the (Brae Burn) golf course,” Schulman related. “He said, ”˜Wow, you ought to call it the Platinum Mile.”™ And I said, ”˜Yeah, it”™s a great name.”™ He kept referring to it as the Platinum Mile, and the name stuck. I never used it, but it certainly was the perfect name.”

The beginnings of corporate business
It was on Platinum Mile that Schulman built, developed and managed the bulk of his 3 million-square-foot portfolio of 24 office buildings built between the late 1960s and the early 1990s. First to open, Schulman recalled, was 1 and 2 (later renamed 101 and 102) Corporate Park Drive, with the former building and half of the latter entirely leased to JR Geigy SA, later Ciba-Geigy and now part of Novartis. Multiple tenants leased the rest of building 2.

Schulman”™s success in filling his new buildings, in turn, attracted additional office development, much of it by corporate giants.

“Companies were seeking locations in Westchester, and Lowell spotted that,” Alfred DelBello, Westchester”™s county executive from 1974 to 1982, recalled.
For those corporate giants, and numerous smaller businesses, Platinum Mile offered new office space at costs much lower than New York City, as well as proximity to the expressway or I-287, and amenities ranging from service shops to free on-site parking.

“Why did they come here? They came because our buildings were professional, they were beautifully landscaped. It was definitely catering to the tenants, which was not the custom. Landlords and tenants at that time were sort of like oil and water. I was the exact opposite,” Schulman said. “With my retail background, all I was trying to do was please my customers, the customers who would sign up for 10 and 20 years to be my customers. I thought, ”˜How dumb were these other guys?”™ I”™ll do whatever I can to please people that are committed to be my customers.”

Those customers, he said, were happy their executives had an alternative to lengthy commutes to New York City ”“ an alternative that didn”™t exist before the mid-1960s.

Harrison and White Plains officials helped, he added, by rezoning his properties for campus office park use: “I was able to get multiple-occupancy in that zone, so I started building several parks, clearly designed with a relationship but not copycats (of each other) and created a new kind of doing corporate business in Westchester.”

”˜A positive alternative”™ for companies
Frank Tomasulo, senior vice president with CB Richard Ellis Inc., said part of Schulman”™s genius was his ability to accommodate at Platinum Mile all sizes of business capable of paying the rent.

While the 1970s and ”™80s are considered the era of the single-user building, especially on Platinum Mile, several of Schulman”™s buildings along the corridor were conceived and developed as multiple-tenant properties. The need for them has increased since then, given the average size of an office tenant now stands at 8,000 square feet, said Tomasulo.

“There were lots of tenants that were small and mid-range, and what Lowell”™s Platinum Mile portfolio provided for them was an incubator, if you will, for companies in Westchester County, which very often grew, sometimes moved within the Schulman portfolio, sometimes moved out of it, but most of the time stayed within Westchester,” Tomasulo said.

“Lowell was smart because he understood that although it was nice to get a larger corporation (to) take a significant amount of space, you spread your risk and you spread your base for future tenancy, for tenants that might grow and have different needs, if you multi-tenanted those buildings with small and mid-range companies, with service companies.”

While today”™s owners are weathering the worst economy since the Depression and a chilly state business climate, Westchester was growing and companies sought the county when Schulman built his portfolio a generation ago. In part, Tomasulo said, Schulman benefited from the wave of companies that sought to escape the high rents and declining quality-of-life in New York City.

“It was a positive alternative that didn”™t exist before,” he said. “What it did was it gave credibility to the market, as people discovered that it worked: The (highway) access was good. The quality of life was excellent. The transportation routes worked.”

A ”˜tight-knit”™ community
Tomasulo, a three-decade veteran of Westchester”™s office real estate market, remembers when CBRE had offices on Corporate Park Drive, before consolidating in Stamford, Conn.

At 108 Corporate Park Drive, Tomasulo and colleagues would walk one flight down, to the ground-floor barber shop of Don Grasso, who to this day still cuts his hair. It illustrates, he said, how merchants, tenants and Schulman “formed a community that exists to a degree today, but back then, it was much more tight-knit. That Platinum Mile created the environment that later was the fabric of our commercial real estate community.”

Schulman sought to reinforce that sense of community by listing all the names of tenants within the brochures large enough to fit them, by leasing some of its space for service shops like Grasso”™s and especially by adorning the landscaped plazas between buildings with sculpture, a project of his top construction executive and Schulman Realty Group partner, Norman Adler.

“We would do sculpture shows every year, and we had sculpture throughout our parks as part of the lovely atmosphere, and it was all for free. We were more hoteliers than we were landlords of office buildings,” Schulman said.

Schulman”™s era on Platinum Mile ended in 1992, when he ceded control of his portfolio to two lenders, General Motors”™ pension fund and the Principal Financial Group. That followed losses he blames on the end of tax write-offs enjoyed by office owners under the Tax Reform Act of 1986, and a subsequent recession.
In 1994, he agreed with the lenders to give up title to the buildings. Four years later, he sold the last of his Westchester office holdings, 500 Mamaroneck Ave. in Harrison.

”˜The place to be for business”™
The last surviving tenant on Schulman”™s roster, engineering firm Malcolm Pirnie, relocated earlier this year to Westchester One (4 S. Broadway) in downtown White Plains from 104 Corporate Park Drive.

Westchester One is among the downtown office buildings renovated in recent years as landlords sought to capitalize on the area”™s revival. Today those buildings command Westchester”™s highest rents, in the low $30s per square foot, compared with the mid- to upper-$20 per-square-foot range for Platinum Mile buildings.
“There were tenants who moved from downtown White Plains out, and now the tenants in White Plains are not moving out, they”™re staying there. You may have a little bit of a reversal,” said Carl Austin, president of Austin Corporate Properties in Rye Brook, which is marketing 104 Corporate Park Drive for AVR Realty Co. L.L.C. of Yonkers.

Austin was 28 years old in 1968 when he began more than three decades of representing Hitachi Metals as it moved first to Red Oak Lane, then to 2400 Westchester Ave., and in 2002, to its current digs at The Centre at Purchase ”“ whose developer Related Companies L.P. of New York City was the first builder from outside Westchester to market multi-tenant space in the Platinum Mile vicinity, Schulman recalled.

Hitachi sold its 58-acre Westchester Avenue property to Demetriades Developers, which transformed the site into a luxury housing development.

Platinum Mile”™s first corporate arrival came years before Schulman. It was General Foods, which left Manhattan in 1953 for what is now 333 Westchester. Three decades later, General Foods vacated those offices for a new HQ about 4 miles east, at 800 Westchester Ave.

“In those days, the companies wanted to stay in Westchester. They wanted very badly to stay here, and the problem was getting them appropriate locations in Westchester. They were very happy here: Taxes were reasonable, they had a great work force, a convenient work force, great transportation,” said DelBello, now partner in the White Plains law firm DelBello Donnellan Weingarten Wise & Wiederkehr LLP. “It was 180 degrees from today, when Westchester was the place to be for business.”

A generation of real estate pioneers
Thirteen years after IBM”™s 1964 headquarters move from New York to Armonk, Texaco Inc. followed suit, landing within the Platinum Mile at 2000 Westchester Ave., a 107-acre campus in Harrison.

DelBello recalled discussing with John McKinney, who would be Texaco”™s chairman in the 1980s, how county government could help the company; and with Ogden Reid, then-commissioner of the state department of Environmental Conservation and later a congressman, how Albany could end its resistance to the oil giant building a parking structure on its property.

The county came through with economic incentives; the state, an environmental permit.

“I remember saying to (McKinney), ”˜Why would you, a worldwide company, be interested in Westchester County and New York state, when your natural home would be Houston, where you have most of your facilities. And he said to me, ”˜New York state and Westchester County have a mature relationship with business,” said DelBello, who is also chairman of the Westchester County Association board. “When you look at what”™s happening today, you say my God, can you imagine a company saying New York is the place to do business?”

After merging with Chevron in 2001, Texaco the following year sold its 750,000-square-foot headquarters and surrounding land in 2002 for $42 million to Morgan Stanley & Co., and exited the Platinum Mile. The financial firm built there a trading floor and moved in its individual investor and institutional securities groups.

In Westchester, Schulman was among a generation of real estate pioneers who satisfied a growing county”™s appetite for modern commercial space. Joel Halpern”™s office buildings changed the face of Route 119 in Tarrytown and adjacent Greenburgh. Robert Weinberg and Martin Berger brought office/industrial “flex” space to Route 9A in Greenburgh before shifting to office parks there, and in Mount Pleasant, Yonkers and White Plains.

“We all started within a year of each other. We didn”™t know each other. I”™m not suggesting collusion, but I would never go into their territory, and they would never go into mine. So I worked the east, and they worked the west,” Schulman said. “And we all prospered.”