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WitHout reCourse: Harvey, tHe real estate laWyer
to me on Monday, for that morning I found myself stationed on the other side of the police barricades as I stood on a portion of the overall site that had already been torn down. Feeling as if I were in a Jimmy Cagney movie waiting for the governor either to grant or to refuse a stay of execution, I was holding a walkie-talkie (there were still no cell phones in 1982), awaiting word from one of our lawyers who was sta- tioned in the office of the Clerk of the United States Supreme Court. After a nerve-wracking hour or so, the phone finally rang and, hearing that the Court had denied the petition for certiorari, effectively ending the case, I gave the signal to the awaiting crews from the Cuyahoga Wrecking Company to start swinging the iron ball and pull down the walls. I then took some more pictures, hoping to record for posterity the moment that, in retrospect, actually initiated the Times Square renais- sance. I saved the photos and the customary trophy: a hard hat—ironically, a white one.
Three years later I attended the opening ceremonies of the 1,949- room hotel and the opening night of Me and My Girl, the first show produced at its Marquis Theatre, and I sat with Flora and Glenn Isaac- son, Portman’s New York representative, in the best seats that I’ve ever had, in the center of the first row of the mezzanine. Glenn told me that Marriott, showing its normal lack of creativity, had not adopted my idea of naming the hotel the Marriott Marquee (rather than the Marriott Marquis, which they were “branding”) but still had under very serious consideration the idea of the “Yaverbaum Ballroom.”
No Taxation with (Proper) Representation
It was at about the time of the end of the most concentrated work that I had devoted to the Portman-Marriott Marquis that the substance of the matters to which I had devoted myself changed—categorically. For, it was in the early 1980s that I became very much involved in the rep- resentation of a huge client of the firm, Integrated Resources, Inc.,
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