Tony Goldman

Tony Goldman, chairman and CEO of The Goldman Properties Company, has been transforming declining historical districts into popular, thriving global destinations for over thirty years. He was the driving force behind the transformations of Soho in New York City, South Beach in Miami, and now Center City in Philadelphia.

His multifaceted approach to community revitalization–preserving historic architecture, establishing local community organizations and business improvement districts, and finally re-branding neighborhoods–has served as a model for many other urban entrepreneurs. Goldman is also a member of the National Board of Trustees of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. 

TNAC: How do you identify neighborhoods that are ripe for transformation or a new use?

Tony Goldman: Are you looking for the exact recipe? Because that I don’t give out. I identify an area for my niche. It’s not only opportunity–you can never exhaust the inventory of available product. That’s everywhere. It’s a matter instead of how much time you want to put in and how many resources. But my interest is urban, pedestrian historic districts, and in those cases there are a few things that are vital. I need to know that there is a critical mass of historic architecture. What’s unique in [Soho] and South Beach and the Upper West Side is that there is a critical mass of a similar kind of architecture. Soho and South Beach were very similar in that the impact of the critical mass even exceeded the individual great pieces of architecture. The power and the vibe of cast iron architecture everywhere read an energy into the street life, establishing a scale and a power in and of itself that doesn’t exist in areas like Philadelphia that I’m also involved in. So primarily historic districts or areas that should be designated historic districts.

I also need to know that there is a potential customer mass that I can draw from. By that I mean customers that are in the vicinity and that can visit my neighborhoods, once they’ve been enhanced. The other part is infrastructure–transportation accessibility, cultural infrastructure, and institutional infrastructure–to draw on and that can be reinvented.

Looking at your work in Soho, South Beach, and downtown Philadelphia, there can’t be an infinite supply of interesting historic districts to build from. Or could there be?

There’s certainly enough to keep me in my lifetime and my children in their lifetimes and probably their children. It depends how far my company and other companies are willing to go to revitalize urban America and rural America, and even suburban America.

But what’s the real potential of profitably redeveloping cities other than New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and the like?

Let me answer in three pieces. The first piece is the major cities, the second piece is the second and third tier cities, and the third piece is the small towns. For the big towns, we have the opportunity to clean up after urban renewal over the next couple of decades. We were left with the remnants of urban renewal and fortunately, it didn’t completely obliterate our past. But that time did obliterate a great bit of American architectural history. But there are cities like Detroit, Newark, and Oakland–at least a dozen–that I would play in if I had the time to work everywhere. There’s definitely opportunity there, but it’s a ten- to twenty-year job, and it would take many people like me out there who were well trained in the whole package. This is the easiest piece, because in the bigger cities, you have the opportunity to draw on the regional population and bring the middle class back.

The next piece is the second-tier city, like Bridgeport, Connecticut. There must be hundreds of these cities. New York State and Connecticut are loaded with them. There are also places like Baltimore and Wilmington [Delaware], then Norwalk [Connecticut] and Newburgh, New York. These are places that lost their supporting industrial infrastructure and that have to be reinvented. They have to be reinvented because they can become regional centers that can help slow sprawl. You need smaller urban places so that everyone doesn’t have to be in the big cities. But what’s essential is that we preserve what remains of the existing infrastructure (by which I mean the really good buildings that still stand) while using infill to “complete the smile” in a complementary way.

What would you say to developers who say, “I don’t want to deal with that kind of complexity. I’ll just demolish the whole block and start from scratch.”

I think that is an ignorant, greedy bastard who is taking an easy way out, who couldn’t give a damn about community, and who is strictly interested in convenience and the profit margin. Period, end of sentence. I think that creating historic districting is vital. In South Beach, a handful of us created the restrictions that we would then live by, and would be prepared to live by because we knew the greedy bastards would eat it up otherwise. The essence is, you can knock down and do anything to any old place, but then there is no sense of place. If you have no sense of place, you have no differentiation. And without that, you’re just a commodity, and you’re going to lose out. So the smart guy understands that not only is there soul to this, but there’s good, solid economic reasoning. If you do the differentiation and sense of place right, you can actually get a premium!

On the other hand, all architecture is not worth saving. Some of it doesn’t contribute to the fabric of a neighborhood and can be pruned. There is also plenty of opportunity for great new architecture. Miami is going to be the city of great new architecture. If you look at this interview twenty years from now, you’ll see that other than New York and maybe San Francisco and Los Angeles, Miami will be the next great international city of this country, without a question. It is so clear in my kaleidoscope. That city will have the opportunity to define itself through its new architecture while still saving the relevance of the old architecture. 

The urban thinker Joel Kotkin has talked about “genteel decline,” in which places like Paris and the Upper East Side in Manhattan become so wealthy and prosperous that they lose their urban vitality. Is this a danger for some of the neighborhoods you’ve worked in?

There is always a danger of losing the vitality. It’s a concern I have in Soho. The problem is when national tenants [like Gap] come in; they seduce every building owner. After all, that’s what you’re waiting for: the credit tenant. In South Beach, I had two deals on the table: Gap, and a great, creative boutique called Intermix. Obviously, 99 out of 100 people would take the Gap. It’s a credit tenant. But I took Intermix–it’s not even a choice. The reason is that I want to ensure a one-of-a-kind identity for my neighborhood. There’s a time for interplaying some of those national brands, but never as more than a third of my retail tenants. I also think that you cannot displace the really great historic tenancies that are in place. If they’ve been there twenty years, they should stay to preserve that sense of community.

When you’re looking at new cities to work in, whether Philadelphia or a small city like Bridgeport, Connecticut, how important is crime?

When we set up a special service district in South Beach, we took down crime by 61 percent in the first year. The major types of crime to deal with are burglary, vandalism, and muggings, but not murder. That is to say, there is murder, but that’s not what primarily destroys a neighborhood. I think the three easiest ways to immediately combat crime are to light up the streets, clean up the streets, and create a sense of physical human presence (cops, security guards, or information officers). Information officers are helpful because they’re a little softer than cops. You don’t need someone with a badge on to make sure that people do the right thing on the street.

So would you say that revitalization is possible anywhere, even in places with high levels of crime?

If there was a community with all the ingredients (urban, pedestrian, historic districts) and a high level of crime, that’s manageable. But a place with none of those things and a high level of crime–that’s another question altogether. But there are real solutions to that kind of question as well. Take Camden, New Jersey. Camden should be the Garden City of the Garden State. The whole city can be bought for under a billion dollars! I’m taking about nine square miles.

Why did you start looking at Philadelphia, home to your new “B3” neighborhood, as opposed to Baltimore or other cities?

Philadelphia was a pedestrian-based urban city with great architecture and great street life in terms of its scale and relationship to the pedestrian. Most importantly, it is the only one of the five great American cities that has not realized some of its great potential in the last ten years, unlike New York, Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco. Philadelphia has always lagged and has the lowest self-image in terms of the size of its population. The whole city has an inferiority complex. The real estate was very cheap, and the inventory and infrastructure were fantastic. Center City also has natural borders with the rivers on the east-west axis. It’s also the center of the great city of the next hundred years–Washington-Wilmington-Baltimore-Philadelphia-New York-Boston. It’s the Amtrak City. Everything on that line is up for grabs. It’s the corridor of opportunity in the Northeast.

I bought twenty-odd buildings in Philadelphia. My challenge has been to connect neighborhoods that have been torn apart. How do I rebuild the natural and normal pedestrian flow on a grid system? Our piece of Center City was out. Pedestrians wouldn’t go through 13th Street, even though it was the natural corridor. They would walk around it because of the tenants. It was like a red light district, or a bad zone, but it didn’t even have the coolness of a red light district! There’s a sexiness and mystique involved in red light districts, but there was none of that in Philadelphia.

I felt it was critical that we create an identity and a brand for this nondescript area. We actually went through a very scientific approach to the essence of branding, looking for the soul of the community. You have to dig into the roots of what was there under the ground, and we went through a real search. We went through some 300 names, including everything from an old stockade to a corner of the neighborhood where Benjamin Franklin flew his kite, but we couldn’t find anything that wasn’t just grasping at straws. So what we short-listed and came down to was “B3,” to which none of us said, “A-ha–that’s a great name.” [B3 stands for “Blocks Below Broad.”] But none of us were offended by it, and it provoked the question, “What is B3?”, which created an opportunity to converse.

We also did video interviews on the street in Philadelphia to test various names before deciding. “Have you been to Rittenhouse Square?” “Have you been to Old City?” “Have you been to B3? What do you think of it? And it turned out that people were so into impressing you that they would say, “Of course I’ve been to B3.” They wouldn’t admit that they had never heard of it!

Of course, the neighborhood also had to be more than a Goldman invention. Even though we created the concept, the finished picture had to be a shared vision and a shared interaction. Everyone had to own it and partake in it. So I’m confident that it will stick over time. It’s a matter of how well we continue to market it.