By Elizabeth V. Schmid

July 13, 2004 — Far from being a thing of the past, the American Dream is alive and well. David C. Walentas, (Eng. ’61, MBA ’64) the owner and president of Two Trees Management Company — a New York-based firm that he founded over 35 years ago and that has developed, owned, and managed almost $1 billion in real estate since then — embodies that long sought-after American ideal.

Photos Courtesy Darden magazine

David C. Walentas purchased eight buildings — 2 million square feet — at $6 per square foot in 1978. Two decades worth of rezoning battles later, one of the buildings sold out for more than $70 million.

From his office in DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass) in Brooklyn, the Manhattan Bridge can be seen from one window and the Brooklyn Bridge from another. As he sits at his desk in his uniform bluejeans (the same size he wore in high school) and chambray shirt, the “no guts, no glory” embroidered on his shirt sleeve is easy to read. It jibes with the plaques on a nearby shelf that feature Winston Churchill quotes, “Never, never, never give up,” and “Fortune favors the brave.” One quickly gets an insight into how Walentas got where he is.

Although these days he can confidently state that he’s made “more money than I thought ever existed,” the journey to this point in his life has not been easy, nor has it been quick.

Growing up in Rochester, NY, as a “poor kid” whose mother was forced to pay neighbors to take him and his brother into their homes for months at a time while she cared for his gravely ill father, Walentas says he learned early the value of hard work and perseverance. Determined to help pay for his keep, he did farm chores and discovered a love of horses, which is very much with him today. He describes taking baths in the kitchen with a bucket of water heated on a wood stove and refers to himself in those days as an “indentured orphan.”

In reality, Walentas was like a diamond in the rough, a kid who was as smart as he was smart-mouthed. “I got kicked out of every school I attended; grade school, high school and UVA. I was what we used to call, ‘fresh.’ But, I was a smart kid, president of my class, and one day when I was called to the principal’s office, I saw a notice about joining ROTC and taking a test to get a college scholarship.”

Walentas shows off the historic Clock Tower — also his home.

He says the list of schools that had an ROTC program included Harvard and down near the bottom of the list, the University of Virginia. “I picked UVA because I had never heard of the school and being from Rochester, where it’s cold, I figured it would be warmer in Virginia.”

Walentas says he would have pursued an architecture degree, but it was a five-year program and he had a four-year scholarship. And although his undergraduate degree is in engineering, he says from the time he learned to play Monopoly as a kid — and maybe even before that — he had always wanted to be a real estate developer. He liked the idea of being able to borrow money, build something and then own it. That hasn’t changed.

Although Walentas missed a year at UVA because of “conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman,” as he recently told a New York Times reporter, he later returned to complete his undergraduate degree. Always resourceful, he then spent a year cleaning septic tanks in Greenland to pay off his school loans, and when it was time to come home, he convinced the captain of a Danish freighter to give him and his 1960 VW Beetle a free ride back to the States—in exchange for hard work, of course.

A year later, he entered Darden rather than joining the Peace Corps, which was another option at the time. He had met an early founder of the Peace Corps, who encouraged him to join; he applied and was accepted. Just as he was about to enroll in a course to learn Spanish, he received an acceptance letter from Darden, and the rest is history. After graduating in 1964, he again had loans to repay, so he worked for the Singer Company in Australia and Japan for a year and then, not wanting to be an expatriate, became a consultant for Peat Marwick back in the United States.

He and his first real-estate partner founded Two Trees Management Co. in New York City’s SOHO district 35 years ago. Describing the course of his career as “always on the edge,” Walentas says he doesn’t think of himself as having made it big in real estate development until “just now,” referring to the past few years.
He says it’s hard to capture the volatile experiences that have shaped his life and career, and then proceeds to paint a descriptive picture: “We were broke in DUMBO for 20 years, we were going out of business, banks wouldn’t foreclose, nobody wanted the properties, our partners didn’t want it, we bought our mortgages back at discounts and so on. It wasn’t easy, but we persisted,” he says.

In 1978, Walentas drove to the dilapidated, run-down area, now called DUMBO, then known as Fulton Landing, and saw a vision that took 20 years to come true. Having done a number of high-visibility rehabs in SOHO and NOHO in New York City over the years, he decided to buy two million square feet of space in DUMBO — eight buildings — from Harry Helmsley at a cost of $6 per square foot. Now, 25 years later, “we’ve bought out all our partners, we own several hundred million dollars worth of real estate, we own it ourselves,” he says.

Walentas chats with first-year Darden students Eric Larson and Abigail Wall during a visit to his alma mater.

But it wasn’t until 1998 that Walentas was able to get the zoning for the buildings in DUMBO changed from manufacturing to residential. That’s when things really started to take off for Two Trees. The area’s historic Clock Tower Building — whose next-to-the-top-floor is Walentas’ home with sweeping 360-degree views of Manhattan — was quickly sold out for over $70 million.

He chose to move to DUMBO because it’s a young, hip neighborhood, an exciting place to live. “Plus we own most of the neighborhood,” he says.
“When we moved here from Manhattan four years ago, my wife said she’d live here for a year or two but not forever. Now, you couldn’t get her to leave—she loves it,” he says. Walentas describes DUMBO as a “real community, where everyone knows everyone else and all the conveniences are here.” Asked if his vast property holdings and considerable degree of clout in the realm of New York City make him feel powerful, Walentas laconically says, “I feel good, I feel confident, I’m not going broke. And I’m the mayor of DUMBO.”

Walentas’ wife of 30 years, Jane, is a former art director in the cosmetic industry, who has been restoring a carved-wood, three-row carousel built in 1922. It is the first carousel to be placed on the National Historic Register, and when it has been fully restored, it will be installed in DUMBO’s waterfront park. Their son, Jed, who graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, did a two-year real-estate internship with “the Donald,” Trump, that is, working on the renovation of 40 Wall Street. Now he works for Two Trees (no, he did not get fired), and as Walentas says, Jed was “raised to work, and he’s better at most things than I am.”

Walentas, who is enthusiastic about everything he does, took up polo and show jumping at the age of 50. “I’ve never been a spectator,” he says. He now owns the 115-acre Two Trees Stables in Bridgehampton, NY, one of the nation’s premier equestrian facilities. He and Jane travel abroad about twice a year and one of those trips likely includes some polo playing in Argentina.

It took a long time to get DUMBO off the ground, so to speak, but Walentas feels proud of what he has achieved. Declaring that perseverance beats inspiration any day— “never take ‘no’ for an answer”—he told a reporter: “What’s most amazing is I started with nothing, survived, and created a little neighborhood that will matter in a hundred years.”