By Katherine Brooke Daly • 6 December 1925 • The Brooklyn Daily Eagle
Rents Netted Him $1,200,000 in One Year; Sees Big Chance for Development of Labor Saving Machinery In House-Building Field
Leaving the office of Dr. Charles V. Paterno, the interview with the great doctor-builder still fresh in mind, one begins to realize how little significance Dr. Paterno attaches to the fact that fate made him a builder when Charles Paterno would have made himself a physician. One reaches the conclusion before one reaches the elevator of the business building in the midtown business section of Manhattan [Note: probably The Chainin Building at 122 East 42nd Street] that he would have achieved this same success in any profession.
Shakespeare once said, “‘Tis not the world, dear Brutus, but ourselves that make us underlings.” At least he said something like that, and Sir James Barrie came along and wrote a play called “Dear Brutus” to prove that men are intrinsically failures or successes.
That seems to be true of Dr. Paterno. Though all interviews with him must be brief, he being really busy, one is shown in fifteen minutes three qualities which would have made this man a success in any calling.
My appointment with Dr. Paterno had been made several days in advance.
A few minutes before the hour set, I was in the anteroom of his office. There was someone with him, and three men waiting. The telephone operator rang his bell, and reported conditions in the outer office. She did not tell him that an insurance salesman of the “super” type was straining at the leash, or that the fat man with the heating device took up so much room on the bench that only he and a third man who had dozed off could sit down. She just said, “Three men and a reporter from The Eagle, with whom you had an appointment, to see you.”
The door leading to Dr. Paterno’s office opened instantly. He led his visitor into an adjoining room to wait and turned to the assembled crowd who might actually have been patients awaiting medical advice. His manner was professional – decisive, but tinged with an air of courtesy.
The insurance salesman might wait. The heater man had better come back another day, though there was no indication that Dr. Paterno was interested in his product. The sleeping man? Well, what is it they say, “Let sleeping dogs lie?” The reporter was usher in.
Dr. Paterno was busy, but he had made an appointment and the little clock on his desk verified the fact that time set for the interview tallied precisely with the time at which the interview actually took place.
Dr. Paterno is a wiry little man. His hair is wiry – gray and black like salt and pepper tweed. His movements are wiry. Vitality seems to exude from him, and since he is of Italian parentage, I suppose this should be attributed to his Latin blood. But then, the mustache and Van Dyke beard might be attributed to his leaning toward the medical profession.
Dr. Paterno did not bother to repeat the story of how he became a builder nor did he recite the list of his subsequent achievements. Time was precious, and the reporter already knew how he had graduated from the Cornell Medical School with a heartfelt desire to practice medicine. That was back in 1899. The story of how, on the death of his father, the two boys, Charles and Joseph, had taken up John Paterno’s work and completed the apartment house on 112th street, has been told before. Charles gave up his dreams of a career to finish that job. At that time he thought the sacrifice a temporary one. But when they had finished the work and sold the building, the adjoining land came to them in part payment.
Charles was still a contractor. With about $3,000 capital the boys went to work on a new job which was to net them an equal amount in profit.
Here was a young business yielding handsome returns. If he returned to medicine, Charles Paterno would have little or nothing. He would have the expense of an office, a place where he would sit for several years reading his own magazines while waiting for patients. He considers his next step carefully.
The building industry won.
Paterno Brothers erected a seven-story structure on West 105th street, at a profit of $40,000. They built a larger one, and so it went, each project enlarging the scope of their work until Manhattan was dotted with their buildings.
The panic of 1907 brought difficulties, but Paterno Brothers were able to withstand the inroads made upon business, and 1909 found them functioning normally.
Charles had made up his mind to go back to medicine. He had stood by the building industry in its trouble, but now, when the storm had been weathered, he felt free to leave.
The Paterno Brothers assets were divided, and Charles prepared to find patients. But fate again cheated the medical profession. Dr. Paterno was offered a building site on West Eighty-third street, between West End avenue and Broadway. This offer held great advantages, and Charles Paterno knew it.
[Note: this address is either incorrect or the building project wasn’t pursued. There is no known Paterno building on this block.]
He accepted the inevitable – that he was not intended to be a physician. He bought the site, let his contracts, and forsook his dreams of surgery.
In 1914 Dr. Paterno began work on the $10,000,000 apartment house which occupies the block between Madison and Park avenues and Forty-seventh and Forty-eighth streets. This was in the early part of the year when the idea of a World War seemed ludicrous. Dr. Paterno finished his apartment in the early part of 1918, when the World War had not only swept Europe, but had torn into this country. His job was finished – finished under the most trying wartime conditions by the expenditure of enormous sums of money and herculean energy. But there were no tenants. Park avenue apartments were going begging and Dr. Paterno was begging like the rest.
Then with the alacrity characteristic of wars and summer storms, which blow up out of apparently cloudless skies, spend themselves and vanish, the struggle was over.
There was peace and the return not only of men from abroad, but of whole families. New York boomed. Prospectors to this new Yukon were without houses. They struck gold, but there seems to be no place on Manhattan where they might build shacks. Dr. Paterno’s apartment house was a real claim which brought in $900,000 in rent during 1919 and $1,200,000 in 1922.
Two other projects of Dr. Paterno’s are familiar to New Yorkers. One is Hudson View Gardens, which extend from 182d to 186th streets above the site of old Fort Washington. The other is the fifteen-story apartment house which he is now erecting on Riverside Drive between 100th and 101st streets. This will be finished next spring, when 200 families will move in.
But Dr. Paterno did not talk of any of this in the interview.
He compared the medical industry with the building profession. And it was while he talked that he revealed himself as a practicing physician whose patients are buildings instead of human beings.
“Building has not advanced,” he complained. “In all other fields great strides have been made. Doctors have wonderful methods of sustaining life now which they did not have a hundred years ago. But building is the same. We plaster walls the way they plastered walls in Roman times, by hand. We lay brick the way they laid brick centuries ago, one by one. We should have a research department, like the medical profession. Then we might discover why we do not advance, and knowing the seat of trouble, might apply remedies.
“Our only progress has been made in methods of excavation. We have cranes and shovels, but then, when there is rock to be drilled, we drill in the same old way.
“To effect progress labor must be eliminated. Building is hampered by lack of labor-saving inventions, and inventors are hampered by labor organizations which discourage any devices which will eliminate labor. It seems to be a vicious circle.
“But devices are being invented, in spite of this. I know of one to plaster walls which is being perfected. How brick can be laid by machinery, I do not know.”
The telephone rang. It was one of the foremen. Doors on his job which should have been hung several days before were not yet in place. “Why didn’t you tell me this before?” Dr. Paterno sternly reprimanded. “It is now 4:30. You will have those doors hung by tomorrow at 10, and you will apologize to our client.” There were other things said, and other things implied which I felt might have been said had there been no feminine auditor. Dr. Paterno listened to this man’s excuses, credited none of them, and made it felt that nothing would be acceptable to him but a report of the finished work. One had a feeling that he was right, and that the man at the other end of the wire knew it, and that the report in the morning would be finished work.
So Dr. Charles had demonstrated that no matter how busy, he could be prompt; no matter how harassed or busy, he could be polite, and that he could be prompt and polite, as well as stern, when the occasion warranted.
Dr. Paterno apologized for the intrusion, and we continued our talk. He confessed that he still has moments when he regrets his choice. “But I am too old to go back,” he added. “I must content myself with lending emergency aid when there is an accident on a job. For a time I was on the board of directors of the Italian Hospital on Eighty-third street at the East River. But building is my profession. It is what I was made for.”
The broad desk boated one picture. It stood in an easel frame aloe a litter of papers. Dr. Paterno was me squinting at it, and turned the easel to afford a better view.
“My boy,” he explained.
“And what will you make of him?” I inquired.
“I will make nothing of him beyond the fact that his is my son,” was the reply. “I hope, however, that he will make a great deal of himself. Just now his is at Yale.”
“Taking medicine?”
Dr. Paterno smiled broadly before answering. “oh, no, he’s taking structural engineering. But he might yet be a surgeon. Whatever he chooses, I hope he does it well.”
