David Custis Kimball - blog

Fable, Hegel, History, Real Estate

Well, I couldn’t exist (Freudian OopsieDaisy.. resist), the CFO of Freddie Mac just committed suicide, and now taxpayers are giving a sweetheart deal to Senator Feinstein’s hubby. Is her middle name Madoff?

Well, coincidence in big money deals usually means a few lousy rounds of golf (tennis you have to shout your insider-trading scams and the ball boys might end up serving you.)

On the other side CBRE is a big, fancy firm and perhaps their name alone will better represent the properties. A higher sale amount means that the FDIC has less money to cough up when the rest of the flippers and 125 percent borrowers give up their dreams of personal largess.

This article makes some good arguments; coincidence is the more unlikely when all coinciding parties have a lot to gain. But what is the alternative; give one Billion to each of your 25 favorite minority or women owned real estate liquidators, and then a prize for the top sellers both in $/sf and payable bi-monthly? Oh wait, do we have to dance thru the fraud of minority-owned, mom and pop? It would be easy if you could just take the 200 top firms dealing in this and make them a proposal … that they all would compete, like the old days … and give each a fair share, work out the detail design so that the early winners would grow faster and be able to overtake the smaller ones properties at a certain time. Oh, that’s unfair, that’s competition … it’s cruel … why can’t I just take a bribe from one of the biggest and give it to them, kapish?

Or a system, financially like my great granddaddy, George, did when he was in charge of digging a big ditch from the Caribbean to the Pacific, called Panama Canal. President Taft had asked him to see if he could do something. George had been the chief engineer of the underground sewers in his early days, and then been asked to design and build the underground subway system for Boston. I think it was the first tunnel under a river, the Charles, that brought some acclaim to his name. According to my daddy, who never was allowed to say the word engineer, because his mother was married to George’s son, also an engineer who was in Panama while she was birthing my daddy and didn’t come home until my daddy was almost 3 yrs. old. (I forgot to tell you, my granddaddy, Ernest I, was with my great granddaddy, George I, while my daddy, Ernest Jr. was being borned.

Now back to the point. George had the enormous steamshovels set up on great steps of dirt and rock. Fast digging was the key in the tropical rain forest. He put the experienced diggers at the lower steps and the less experienced above. The upper level guys got really motivated or they lost it (their job that is), and George replaced them with someone who could do it faster, better.

They say that the Panama Canal was equivalent to a 12 ft. x 12 ft. tunnel dug through the equator of yours and my mother: Earth (ouch). George and Ernest1 came home, to find their engineering company without need of their services … in other words they lost just about everything. George died in the Fall of 1912, aged 64.

Meanwhile, Ernest1’s wife’s younger brother had graduated from MIT, and growing up next door neighbors to George, he too had a great sense of competitive spirit. He had designed the bridges for the Norhwestern railroad, a commuter train from northern suburbs to Chicago. Then he was working on the underground city in Montreal, where he met his wife, Claire. But he was a civil engineer who really loved the wind. A sailor who was raised in Arlington and Edgartown, taught me the love of getting nature’s energy for free and all the excitement with the free willies. Uncle Harry, aka Henry Vose Spurr, finally got himself to the Big Apple, and became the design engineer for what was so briefly the tallest building in the world, 40 Wall St. It was constructed in one year, including the demolition of the existing structure (I have the journal where he wrote how the building was done.) 2600 people worked on the structure, and they were going in both directions, up and down. The foundation was being completed as the superstructure rose. It was completed in 1930, just after the Great Crash of the stock market. His wife, Claire, as he finished writing his book Wind Bracing, which described the optimization of engineering bracing for strength and weight, was dying of cancer. Uncle Harry never thought that anyone would want to build another skyscraper again, much less afford it. His company, Purdy and Henderson, the consulting engineers for the builder, Starrett and Eken, went out of business. They were a good company and were the first to hire a female engineer, in the 19th century. Harry wandered around, and after diving in a pool somewhere in Long Island (which didn’t have any water in it), and didn’t break a bone, he joined AA.

But then Starrett and Eken were building a great building, much taller, called the Empire State Building, but didn’t need a design engineer or consulting firm, because they had Harry’s book, and all the notes from 40 Wall St., including ‘Civil Engineering’, 3/1931, vol. 1, no. 6 pp.472-7, which described the building progress. Uncle Harry never mentioned this, except that he did shout out a few times what a ridiculous idea the large spire was on the top… for a Zepplin. He told them it would never work, but the idea had captured the public, and the building was completed. They tried the Zepplin and sure enough, the wind turbulence was too unpredictable …. It didn’t work. But the good news was that they fully rented the Empire State building in only about 27 years —- not so good. Where was Feinstein and a few billion when you needed her (I bet you didn’t expect that segway.)

The government did hire Harry for the structural design review of the Perisphere and the Trylon, the first two twenty-first century structures, so called - for the 1939 World’s Fair in NYC.

Harry ended up later as VP of Starrett and Eken, designed the Struyvasent (sp) property along the Hudson that recently sold for the highest price of any multifamily complex. It was built for the boys coming home in the early 40s or so. Harry also designed some ships for the Navy during WWII (I think they were probably the Essex class), but haven’t been able to get much there since it’s the Pentagon, and they don’t publish that much. In the early 50’s, he designed a T stop for a major department store in Boston. I’m sure he was thinking about his neighbor George, whose son married his sister, who lived across the street from Emily Post and they would smoke cigarettes together, my grandmother being a widow, then. Harry lived not far away and we all had picnics at the beach in the summer, my dad having the only beachfront property … we sometimes met there. (I’ll post the pix if requested). Then we sold the place when both of them passed, for $19k, 2 houses and a garage, 2 acres with a beach on The Lagoon, fully furnished. (See, it’s a real estate story) So dad went out the next year and bought 600 acres in the Ozarks for $15/acre. And shortly thereafter, started the Residential Home called Easy-K. It’s still going and I get email from Claude, with a lot of wisdom and heart. They just printed a great cookbook, if anyone wants one…..

I remember Uncle Harry as the captain of the Whisper, an Edgartown 18, that was still being sailed in the 1990’s. He designed the sails and the stays were on cleats so they could be adjusted as well. I remember him sailing under the wind of a large Sparkman and Stevens sloop (where one of the designers as skipper called out ‘Harry, you got a motor in that boat?’) Harry hated motors, and had a large sloop in NYC without one. He drove a 1949 Mercury, paint faded, because it had a good wind design.

As a footnote: I have been able to get Uncle Harry’s book in every library I’ve been to, except one. MIT’s library. But they have a PhD Thesis of the same name, published a year later.

So the moral: when you do something or things really amazing, you get the crap kicked out of you most probably, but you have some fun and a thrill doing it. Feinstein, CBRE, and other people that prey on the many without giving anything back may have a blast, be able to buy the amazing stuff of some genius slub (that’s where they have purpose) … but they are not remembered or revered, or written about with praise of their sacrifice and heart.

If you want to get Hegelian about it, it’s that Thesis Antithesis and Synthesis, except for the twist of the greedy, there’s the Nothesis, Notantithesis, and Notsynthesis .. just kind of a blank hole left to fill.. kajing,kajing… their single moment of wealth is gone and forgotten … kind of like Tyco president’s million dollar birthday party … wow what a blank.