The Richest Landlord in New York City Doesn't Even Have a Website: The Sol Goldman Story

Steven Weinstock (00:00) Somewhere in Manhattan right now, you're probably within a few blocks of a building this family owns. The land under a famous hotel, a piece of the World Trade Center site itself. Hundreds of properties spanning the Upper East Side all the way to Brooklyn. Combined, this single family is worth more than 12 billion dollars, making them by some measures. The richest real estate family in the entire United States. And yet, to this day, their management company doesn't even have a website. No trophy property page. No portfolio showcase. Nothing. The man who built the whole thing died in nineteen eighty seven, and he spent his entire career making absolutely sure as few people as possible knew his name. This is another one of our deep dive episodes here on The Wealth Clock. His name was Sol Goldman. Here's how a grocer son built America's richest and quietest real estate empire. Sol Goldman was born Usher Zalig Goldman in Brooklyn in nineteen seventeen to Fanny and Charles Goldman. A Jewish family with no real estate background at all. His father ran a neighborhood grocery store, and as a teenager, Sol worked there himself, learning the basic rhythms of running a small business up close. He briefly attended Brooklyn College, but he never finished. Instead, right in the depths of the Great Depression, at just sixteen years old, Sol Goldman did something remarkable. He borrowed money directly from his own neighbors and used it to buy his first foreclosed property. This was around nineteen thirty three, a moment when real estate across the entire country was collapsing in value, when almost nobody wanted to touch a foreclosed building. A sixteen year old grocer's son saw it differently. In nineteen forty, Sol married Lillian Schumann. And through the following decades, he kept doing exactly what he'd started doing at 16: buying distressed, undervalued New York City real estate quietly, methodically, and almost never with any fanfare attached to the purchase. In the 1950s, he partnered with a man named Alex DiLorenzo, and together the two of them built what would eventually become. One of the largest privately held real estate portfolios anywhere in the country, acquiring buildings across Manhattan at a pace that outsiders found genuinely difficult to track. At its absolute peak in the nineteen seventies, Sol Goldman's holdings included nearly nineteen hundred separate commercial and residential properties, office towers, apartment buildings, and retail space across the entire city. One of them was the Chrysler Building itself, purchased in nineteen sixty, one of the most iconic pieces of the entire Manhattan skyline. Though Goldman would later lose it to a foreclosure during a rough stretch in the 1970s, a rare public setback in a career otherwise defined by quiet, steady accumulation. His holdings also came to include the land underneath the Peninsula Hotel, the land under Olympic Tower, and the Carter Building on Fifth Avenue. And, remarkably, a full 17% stake. In the land beneath the entire World Trade Center complex. By the time Sol Goldman died in October of 1987, at 70 years old, he owned the largest private real estate portfolio in New York City, more than 600 properties, worth over a billion dollars, making him, by nearly every measure available at the time, the single largest private landlord the city has ever seen. Sol Goldman's death didn't bring a clean, orderly transition. It set off a genuinely bitter legal battle that dragged on for roughly five years, pitting Sol's estranged wife, Lillian, against their four children, Alan, Diane, Amy, and Jane, over exactly how to divide and who would actually control an empire that had been run for decades. With almost no outside transparency at all. The fight eventually settled along the lines of a nineteen eighty-four divorce agreement, which guaranteed Lillian a third of Sol's total estate. The remaining two-thirds went to the four children, who formed a new entity to manage what they'd inherited. Solel Management, a name built by combining Sol's name with Lillian's. Lil Lillian herself. Lived until 2002, and when she died, her own $374 million estate was divided equally among the same four children all over again. Jane and Alan Goodman ended up running the core of the company together, still overseeing more than 400 New York City properties spanning neighborhoods from Gramacy Park and the Upper East Side all the way to Flatbush in Brooklyn. Meanwhile, a separate branch of the family led by Sol's nephew, Lloyd Goldman, built its own related, though more modest and more leveraged real estate empire through a company called BLDG Management, worth an estimated billion and a half dollars in its own right. Combine both branches of the family today and you get a staggering number. Sol's four children alone have been estimated at a combined $12 billion, roughly $3 billion apiece, enough to make the Goldmans, according to Forbes, the richest real estate family in the entire United States and the sixteenth richest family of any kind in the country. And yet, Solel Management still deliberately doesn't operate anything close to a typical real estate company's public presence. No glossy website, no trophy property tours, piecing together exactly what the family owns still requires digging through property records and old lawsuit filings rather than a press kit. A level of privacy that would be almost unthinkable for a fortune this size in almost any other industry. The family's next generation, including Alan's son Stephen, has said publicly. That their strategy is simply to manage the holdings patiently without taking on excessive risk or leverage, betting on the long-term strength of New York City real estate itself, rather than any single flashy New Deal. Beyond the real estate itself, of Sol Goldman's legacy also includes tremendous philanthropy, including the establishment of a pancreatic cancer research center that carries his name and continues supporting research today decades after his death. So what do you take from a story like Sol Goldman's? First, buy him quietly. During the moments everyone else is too scared to buy it all. can build a genuinely enormous fortune over time. even without a single headline grabbing deal along the way, Sol Goldman's whole career started with one 16-year-old borrowing from his own neighbors to buy a foreclosed property nobody else wanted. Second, private s privacy and scale aren't actually opposites. It's easy to assume a fortune this size that requires a public profile to match it. The Goldman Family proves that simply not true. An empire can grow for generations, specifically by staying as invisible as possible. Third, and this is the one worth sitting with. How you structure things while you're alive determines what happens to your family once you're not. Sol Goldman built an extraordinary fortune, but the absence of clear, settled succession planning turns his death into a five year legal battle. the wealth itself wasn't the hard part. What came after was that Sol Goldman A Brooklyn grocer's son who started with borrowed money and a foreclosed building at sixteen years old and ended up controlling more of Manhattan than almost anyone else alive, all while making sure as few people as possible ever knew his name. Next time you walk past a building in New York and have no idea who actually owns it, remember there's a real chance the answer is a family that spent nearly a century. Making sure you never find out. If you enjoyed this episode, comment the word awesome so I know you made it to the end, and let me know who you want me to dig into next. This is the Wealth Clock Podcast. I'm Steven Weinstock. I'll see you next time.