Joseph Paterno (21 April 1881 Castelmezzano, Italy – 13 June 1939 Manhattan, NY, USA)
Newsboy’s Dreams Become Realities • The Sun • Sunday, September 29, 1912 (source)
Joseph Paterno, Starting With Nothing, the Creator at 31 of Flat Houses Assessed at $22,000,00
“Papa, why do they make the building so high?”
A poor little Italian newsboy stood shivering at his post in Park row one raw, gusty day late in November in 1889. He looked sharply at his father as he asked the question. Across Park row a derrick on the topmost steel girders of a new building was just hoisting a huge block of stone into place.
The elder Italian buttoned his overcoat more tightly about him.
“Because it pays, my son,” he explained. “The higher they make the building the more rent it brings in to the owner. That is the American way. It would not do in Naples, where I was a building contractor before you were born.”
The bright eyed lad pocketed a coin from a cutomer. Then he wrinkled his brow and frowned.
“But, papa,” he protested, “if that is so why don’t they make the houses and the tenements high too, so they will bring in more rent?”
The father smiled sadly.
“You have an eye for business, I see, my son,” he said, patting the matted curls of the youthful newsboy. “Perhaps some day when you are a grown man you may build some high houses and then we shall see.”
A decade and more was to pass before the shivering little newsboy, whose father four years before had come to America a broken spirited foreigner, was to take the first steps in the realization of the idea first conceived on that wintry afternoon of November 1889. But never during that time was the determination to carry into execution his youthful dream put aside for something which seemed to promise greater returns. And like every man who has an idea combined with the proper amount of sticktoitiveness the little Italian newsboy arrived.
Today in his luxuriously furnished private office in one of his latest build apartments just off Riverside Drive the former newsboy can show you pictures of forty-two skyscraper apartment houses built by him whose total value is computed in the tax list of the city of New York at $22,000,000 and whose actual value in the real estate market is estimated at from four to five million more. This, briefly, is the story of Joseph Paterno. You have heard of the Paterno apartments? You have seen the Coliseum [sic]? If you live on Morningside Heights you may be reading this in one of the apartment houses that Joseph Paterno erected.
Don’t think, however, that the newsboy of the 1889 bounded at once into his millions. Only in the pages of Horatio Alger do newsboys do such things. The early 90’s found him working afternoons in a dentist’s office. Then there came an end to school days. He found that he couldn’t attend school in the morning and work until late at night helping the dentist to make artificial teeth. In order that he might keep his health and still earn his share of the household expenses of a family of ten he gave up school.
Then through his father came his first opportunity. Back in Naples the elder Paterno had been in the building business. Fortune had smiled upon him for a few years, but an unfortunate contract on a public building in Castelmezzano near Naples, which was all but finished when an earthquake shook the city and destroyed Paterno’s work of a year, ruined the gray haired contractor and first turned his eye toward America.
One Sunday morning John Paterno took Joseph to mass in a little Italian church. There the elder man met “Signor” McIntosh, a well to do Irish American building contractor. An acquaintance sprang up, and from it resulted the partnership of McIntosh & Paterno. The combination of the man from southern Europe and the son of Bonnie Scot – and proved a happy one. The firm put up its first building at 151 West 106th street. So favorably did the work of the partnership impress the corporation for which the building was erected that contracts for four more buildings were given the firm of McIntosh & Paterno. Then John Paterno took sick and began to pine for a sight of the vineyards of his native Naples before he died.
“Joe,” said the old man, as he was being helped aboard ship to sail for a last glimpse of his native land. “I have left you a fair start. You have worked by my side and proved yourself a good boy and a hard worker. I don’t think I’ll ever come back to America again, my son, and so I take this last opportunity to speak to you.
“Do you remember that cold winter afternoon about ten years ago when we were fours years in the country – one afternoon down on Park row – when you asked me why they didn’t build high houses and tenements? Well, my son, your childish suggestion has recurred to me often. It was a child’s idea, but nevertheless a good one, and my advice to you now is: Take up where I have left off; pick out a good neighborhood, one that has a future, and no matter whether you have to beg or borrow the money build, build, build.
John Paterno died and is buried in a little cemetery in the suburbs of Naples. Over his grave is a handsome marble tomb built by his son. The wild grapes twine around the cross over the tomb and Neapolitans point to it with pride.
Joseph Paterno found it hard sledding at first. He had not his father’s experience; he was young. In stature he was not perhaps so impressive as some of the burly contractors of the period. But one thing he could do: he could work. Any one who enters his office today senses the spirit of the man the moment he hears the clicking typewriters. Each clerk seems imbued with a feverish spirit which brooks no delay. The place fairly breathes energy. The visitor feels as if he too should get up, rush to a telephone, close contracts, bang a typewriter, jump through the window – anything just so he may be doing something.
Another thing. He found in the early years that those Park row days had not been without their lessons. Human nature, faces – they were as open books to the young Italian. It is said of Paterno that never since he put up the first of his forty-two apartment houses has he ever been cheated on even so much as a contract for brass tacks.
The first step young Paterno took in the carrying out of his ambition was to select the neighborhood in which he should put up his first apartment. In the late 90’s Morningside Heights was the scene of four great building projects. The Cathedral of St. John the Divine had been started, Grant’s Tomb had assumed shape, Columbia University and a half dozen modern dormitories and halls were being rushed to completion, St. Luke’s Hospital promised soon to be a reality.
That was enough for young Paterno. Telegraphing to his brother, Dr. Charles V. Paterno, who was just taking his degree at Cornell, to come to New York at once. Joseph Paterno put the proposition of a partnership up to him in very few words. The young medical student at first thought his brother had gone mad when he suggested a ten, fifteen or if possible a twenty story apartment house for the Heights. Finally Joseph’s enthusiasm carried the conservative brother off his feet. Both young men scurried about town trying to raise every dollar they could get to put into the fraternal partnership.
Now what to do? Joseph looked about him for an angel, a backer. And while doing so the enthusiastic young contractor came into contact with his first good sized bucket of cold water.
“A ten story building away up there in the woods?” repeated one downtown real estate operator. “Pooh! Come down to earth, young man. Why, there isn’t a real estate plunger of the most reckless type in this city whom you could get to back you in such a harebrained scheme as that.
“You’re a visionary – like all the rest of your Latin race. Now, young man, you’ve got a good head on your shoulders as your father had before you, and once you have the rough edges shaved off you’ll make an excellent business man. Tell you what I’ll do with you. Put up a block and a half of six story buildings on the Heights and I’ll back you.
“If I do say it mayself, I’m making you an offer you won’t get in many a moon for there isn’t another man downtown here who’d take a chance on building up there for ten years yet. What do you say? Will you put me up five story apartments or not?”
Young Paterno considered. It was true; he might not get such financial backing for some time again; he had been the round; and then, too, it would only be putting off his boyhood dream for a few years at the most.
“You’re on,” he said. “I formally accept your offer. But remember this, sir, before twenty years have passed you will be tearing down your five story apartments to put eighteen and twenty story buildings in their places.”
“You will have your dreams, won’t you, son? Well, go ahead. Let’s see what you can do.”
With what Paterno did do every real estate man in New York is familiar. The block and a half of six story apartments on Morningside Avenue West are today a paying investment, but hardly anything more. The man who furnished young Paterno with the money to build them has admitted time and time again his regret that he did not put in a substructure capable of sustaining five or ten more stories or that provision had not been made in the first place for more elevators, etc.
One of young Paterno’s first buildings was the San Marino, at 509 West 112th street, near the new Cathedral of St. John the Divine. When the San Marino was built there was no subway tapping the Heights, the 110th street elevated station had not been erected; even the street car service was poor. The San Marino paid, however, and with its six stories it was one story nearer young Paterno’s ideal.
There followed a host of apartments of similar size, which young Paterno erected in such rapid succession that he could hardly keep tab on his own success. And then, in 1904, with the signing of a sheet of foolscap came the realization of the dream. In that year Joseph Paterno signed a contract to erect the Broadview, a ten story building at 616 and 620 West 116th street.
[CARLA’S CORRECTION: The 1907 12-story Broadview is located at 606 West 116th Street. The building at 616 West 116th Street is the 1906 10-story Altora Residence Club and the building at 620 West 116th Street is the 1906 10-story Porter Arms.]
The realization of the boyhood dream on Park row was at hand. Paterno ordered his first carload of steel with an exuberant air of a child placing the crowning pyramid on his house of building blocks. Proud? That he was. Pleased? As pleased as Punch.
And once Paterno started the ball rolling how the other real estate operators who had trailed him in his success on the Heights fell all over themselves in their efforts to keep pace with the latest skyscraper apartment idea! Paterno, with a twinkle in his eye, saw them and went them one better in the Paterno and the Coliseum [sic], which he rushed to completion.
To celebrate his thrity-first birthday young Paterno – he will always be “young” among the real estate men – gave a party the other night in his twelve story block of apartments deluxe between 115th and 116th streets. The block includes the Lexor [CORRECTION: Rexor], the Regnor, and the Luxor. A friend who attended that party gave this explanation of why Paterno had succeeded where others have failed:
“You often have heard it said of an executive that he should turn the details of his work over to subordinates. Joe doesn’t believe in that. He has subordinates, plenty of them, but he knows every detail of their work just as well as they do themselves and he could step into their shoes at a moment’s notice. He believes that ‘If you want a thing done, do it yourself.’ is a motto that still holds good. He frequently says that if a workman sees that you notice the little thing he won’t be so apt to slight the really important ones.
“I have often smiled at Joe because of another little trait. He will never assent to a proposition at once, but generally puts it off for a day or even for forty-eight hours before he makes his decision. He believes that decisions made on the spur of the moment often come back like white cats to haunt you in your sleep. He places more confidence in the judgement of the ‘cold, gray dawn’ than he does in the snap decisions made when the lights are rosy around the dinner table and the perfume of a good cigar makes every proposition seem fair and perfectly feasible.”
In personal appearance Mr. Paterno is slightly under medium height and of swarthy complexion. He has a positive manner in talking which seems to get instant results from his clerks. He gesticulates freely and has a quick, penetrating side glance which misses nothing in the expression of his auditor’s face. He talks quite as freely while putting up a window as while pulling it down and is the only contractor operator in New York who can put on his coat, interject an order to one of his renting agents and answer a telephone call at the same time he carries on a conversation. He combines the Latin volubility with the financial shrewdness which his youth on the East Side evidently instilled deep in his nature and is reputed among those in his own line of business to be the only man in New York who can talk a woman into believing that she is positively panting after an apartment she sometimes doesn’t want.
Mr. Paterno says that his motto is “quick construction.” He keeps after his workmen so there is no lagging and buildings are finished promptly. Also he never tries to be “smarter” than the other fellow.
“All I ask for,” he says, “is a fair deal, not the best of a deal.”
