David Tishman was a real estate developer and businessman.
Background
David was born on April 22, 1889 in New York City. He was the son of Julius Tishman, a Russian-Jewish immigrant, and Hilda Karmel. The upwardly mobile Julius Tishman rose from selling dry goods, to owning a department store, to constructing, in 1898, his first tenement at 519 East Thirteenth Street in Manhattan, thereby founding the family real estate dynasty.
Education
In 1909 he graduated from New York University Law School.
In 1960 he was given an honorary LL. D. degree from the New York University.
Career
David Tishman became the leader of the dynasty's second generation. He was the oldest son and the first of five brothers to join his father in the business.
David was the leader of Julius Tishman and Sons while it developed into the most successful of New York City's speculative owner-builders during the 19206. Following the construction of a successful luxury apartment building at 125 East Seventy-second Street, the Tishmans built seventeen more luxury apartment buildings along Park Avenue and its side streets running from the East Seventies to the Nineties, creating a line of elegant "prewar" buildings that remains prime real estate today.
By the mid-1920's the Tishmans were constructing buildings, as well as buying and selling buildings and building sites, all over New York City. As the family became richer, its members also became involved in philanthropy. During the 1920's David Tishman participated in the organization and construction of the Sydenham. Hospital, which his father had been instrumental in founding. After serving as vice-president of Julius Tishman and Sons under his father from 1912 to 1928, David Tishman took over as president in 1928 as the company went public and renamed itself Tishman Realty and Construction, Inc.
During the Great Depression, Metropolitan Life and various banks took ownership of many residential buildings away from Tishman Realty and Construction, but the Tishman Company continued to run the properties for them. As president of the family company until 1948, David Tishman's main achievements took place in the post-World War II period, when Tishman Realty and Construction pioneered the modernization of its residential holdings and led the renaissance of real estate development. Tishman was the first major New York City landlord to replace iceboxes with electric refrigerators. He then led his company from building residences to building more lucrative office towers.
Tishman's construction of an office tower at 445 Park Avenue at Fifty-seventh Street marked three firsts: it was the first new office building in New York City after World War II, the first office building located north of Grand Central Terminal, and the first office building in the world to feature central air-conditioning. This building spurred the development boom in office buildings on the East Side of Manhattan between Forty-seventh and Fifty-seventh Streets. David Tishman's creativity in financing also showed itself during this period. He persuaded Metropolitan Life to sell back to the family those Park Avenue residential buildings that it had taken over during the Great Depression. He then re-sold the buildings as cooperatives, in the process making a handsome profit.
David's concept of the Tishman Company was family-oriented. Of his three brothers who had joined the firm, Louis had died in 1931, but younger brothers Paul and Norman were active rivals for the succession to the presidency. After the war, David brought his sons Robert and Alan into the company from the United States Navy, where they had both served, and later brought in his nephews John, Edward, William, and Peter. In 1948, David made the decision to move up to chairman and chose his brother Norman, whose specialties were leasing and finance, as president, passing over his brother Paul, who had been construction chief.
A major achievement for the company under David Tishman's chairmanship was the construction, in 1956, of its new headquarters at 666 Fifth Avenue, a well-located building featuring clean vertical lines, an open lobby, a waterfall, and a penthouse restaurant. In the tight market for real estate loans in 1956, Tishman initiated a creative financing arrangement for the building, a "sale/leaseback" with Prudential Life Insurance Company.
As David Tishman became less active in the day-to-day management of the company in the late 1950's, he started a second career devoted to charitable activities, especially at New York University (NYU). His help in initiating its building drive following World War II. In 1958 he became a member of the university's medical board, and in 1961, he was made a trustee of the university. He became a life trustee in 1974.
In 1962, when his wife died, David stepped aside from the family business for a while; Norman took over as chairman, and David's son Robert became president. When Norman died in 1967, David resumed the chairmanship.
During the 1960's, the management of the construction arm of the company had passed on to David Tishman's nephew, John, who ran it as a service company, building for others. Its biggest job in the 1960's was the management of the construction for New York's World Trade Center. The completion of the World Trade Center created a glut of office space, contributing in the 1970's, to Tishman Realty and Construction's biggest loss ever: the forty-four-story office building at 1166 Sixth Avenue. When General Telephone and Electric backed out of an arrangement to lease it and decided to move to Connecticut instead, Tishman was left with an empty building, causing his company to lose $70 million to $80 million before the New York State Employees Retirement System acquired the $100 million building for $37 million through foreclosure. After this loss, in the troubled real estate market of 1976, Tishman Realty and Construction decided to liquidate and sell one of its three divisions, Construction and Research, along with its name and T-shaped girder logo, to the Rockefeller Center Corporation.
David Tishman's official retirement as chairman coincided with this sale. The other two divisions of the company continued under the leadership of his sons, with Alan Tishman heading Tishman Management and Leasing Corporation, and Robert Tishman and his son-in-law Jerry I. Speyer heading Tishman Speyer Properties. John Tishman continued to run Tishman Realty and Construction during the period of ownership by the Rockefeller Center Corporation. After David Tishman's death in New York at the age of ninety-one, John Tishman was able, with sixteen partners, to buy the company back from Rockefeller Center Corporation in 1981.
Achievements
Personality
He was tall, with an aristocratic bearing.
Connections
He married Ann Valentine in 1914; the couple had three children. In 1962 his wife died.
In 1966, David married Beatrice Levinson Rosenthal.