credit: NY Mag
If you haven’t already read New York Magazine’s profile of David and Jed Walentas, the father and son duo who plan to do to Domino what they did to DUMBO, you should.
In it, daddy David demonstrates a dizzying lack of self-awareness, taking potshots at anyone and everyone who’s ever dared to question his plans or stand in his way. Some choice snippets:
- David refused to compromise on his DUMBO development, saying, “If you were with me, we were friends. And if you were against me, you were my enemy.”
- David “called Marianna Koval, then-president of the Brooklyn Bridge Park Conservancy, “a cunt” to her face.”
- David said that his being raised on a farm outside the city was basically “indentured slavery.”
- “On a ski trip to Snowbird, Utah, [David] saw a poster in the lodge that caught his eye. It was a photo of a skier launching off a cliff with the caption NO GUTS, NO GLORY. He adopted the motto and had it embroidered onto the left cuff of all his shirts.”
- When neighbors wanted to discuss David’s plan to plop a carousel down in Brooklyn Heights, David responded, ‘My wife wants to see it from my living-room window, and I don’t care what you guys think.'”
- David thinks anyone trying to oppose his plans his are “racists and anti-Semites.”
- David tried to convince Tish James to greenlight one of his projects by insisting he used to have black friends: “I went and met with Tish James, told her about my black girlfriend [from the ’60s]…There was a pretty black girl from the Midwest, she was in law school at Columbia, and couldn’t pay her rent sometimes.”
Jed also comes off as a real treat, though not half so crazy as his old man. You should read the whole piece.
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