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WitHout reCourse: Harvey, tHe real estate laWyer
from scratch and finalizing three major agreements, involving the acqui- sition and construction of the facility, all without the aid of e-mail or any Spanish and much without the aid of any word-processing equip- ment (there were no personal computers in those days) or—hold your breath—“yellow stickies” (meaning “Post-it Notes,” which now come in a rainbow of colors but then were an exciting new invention that came only in yellow—how did we ever manage?).
What I have omitted from the litany that I just put you through are, in my judgment, the two most important transactions of my early career, if not of my career itself. The transactions were important, not just because of the property that was involved but also because of what I learned and because of the people who were involved. Strangely enough, both transactions, described below, involved the same property.
Not long after Flora unknowingly threw me to the wolves at the Le Havre closing, she must have gained confidence in me, for she enlisted me in the service of a fantastic new client, the architect-devel- oper John C. Portman Jr. Portman, whose organization was based in Atlanta, had been responsible for the hotel concept that is now the signature of the Hyatt organization but was then something very new: He had turned the convention hotel inside out by having the rooms open out, not onto musty hallways but onto a vast atrium. The core of the hotel would thus become a vibrant lobby that was surrounded by more than forty floors of balconies of bedrooms or suites access to which was gained by high-speed elevators (now known, not surpris- ingly, as “Portman elevators”). Portman elevators were speeding projectiles enclosed in glass through which the occupants viewed the lobby or lobbies below and numerous interior areas filled with move- ment, colorful sculpture, and waterfalls or ponds, or, if they were mounted on the outside of the building, the city in question. They were featured in movies starring Arnold Schwarzenegger (inside the hotel, holding, among other things, a horse, ridden by the future Gov- ernor of California, in True Lies) and Burt Reynolds (outside, merely holding Burt and a miscreant, locked in battle, in Sharky’s Machine). Portman had first made his name with the development of Peachtree
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