We Love New York

My daughter returned home from a year long stint working in orphanages in Thailand and Vietnam on September 10, 2001. My wife was in Berkeley helping my brother get his kids organized for school while my sister in law was in the hospital. On the morning of the 11th I went to work, and agents began coming into my office urging me to turn on the radio as something unimaginable was going on. I did, and then we moved to the video screen in our conference room, tuned to CNBC. It seemed we had entered an alternate reality. My daughter called, totally disoriented, and said, “You have to come home.” I complied. I will never forget walking out of the office and onto Madison Avenue. There was not a single car in sight as I gazed downtown, but on the horizon smoke was billowing up toward the sky. New York, America, and the world were changed forever.

In the subsequent weeks, as all real estate activity ground to a halt and buyers, one after another, began to default on their contracts, I and all my colleagues had to contemplate our business going forward. What did it mean? What values underpinned it? The answer which emerged for me, and for Warburg, was surprisingly simple: we love New York.

Seeing our city wounded, and so many loved ones, including the son of one of our agents, lost, reinforced that love like nothing else. We were filled with admiration for the bravery of our police and firefighters. We mourned with all those who lost family and friends. We admired the way our arts organizations rose to the occasion with concerts and theater pieces celebrating and memorializing our city, its gifts and its losses. And we were filled with admiration for the indomitable quality of our neighbors, whose commitment to the city remained as strong or stronger than ever, who were not filled with despair, who rebuilt and rededicated themselves to a better world, with New York still at its vital center.

Over and over during those tragic and difficult first weeks I said to our agents “Forget about selling property for the time being. Our job in this crisis is to be the Chamber of Commerce for New York. Sell your love of the city – its glamor, its neighborliness, its cultural richness, its beauty (which seemed particularly poignant in the presence of the absence of the towers). “

Today, even in this time of economic uncertainty, that message remains compelling. The city is more beautiful and brilliant, more filled with food and fun, with art and architecture, with music and mystery, than it has ever been. And for me the message with which I walked away from that terrible day still resonates: in its diversity and cultural differences, in its striving, in its recovery, our city represents the best hope for a more tolerant, more peaceful world going forward. We live together here in raucous harmony. Why? Because we love New York.