Harborside Warehouse Transformation

Michael Sonnenfeldt shares how he developed his first major successful business venture at age 25, transforming a historic warehouse into a strategic financial center.

"I developed the Harborside Financial Center with a partner - we were 50/50 partners. I was 25, he was 57. It was the largest commercial renovation in the country at the time. We bought a rundown warehouse that had been the largest building in the world in 1929 when it was built, eclipsed a few years later by the Pentagon.

It was an industrial warehouse on the waterfront in Jersey City directly across from the World Trade Center. I had the idea when I was 17 because I worked there. It was just 3,000 feet from Wall Street. This was in the age of large computer centers - all the downtown Wall Street firms were building computer centers. If they didn't want to be in Manhattan, they would go to a faraway campus in suburbia. People felt like they weren't in suburbia, they felt they were in Siberia - too far from the mothership.

I had the idea that if you could put some of those computer centers into this huge industrial warehouse, it would be 5 minutes from the parent under the Hudson through the PATH train. In 3 minutes you could get back to whatever the parent company was. That was the original insight - this old industrial building had floor loads and ceiling heights that would accommodate raised floors for computer centers and the weights needed. That was basically the idea."

I sold that when I was 30 for over $100 million. It was heralded as the most successful real estate project in metropolitan history in terms of financial return."