After a Tragic Beginning, an Olympic Ending

By SAMANTHA STOREY NY TIMES

On Park Avenue, in an empty lot between East 134th and 135th Streets, a 29-year-old hammer thrower was practicing one autumn day in 1904.       

His name was Simon P. Gillis. He had walked to the lot from his apartment six blocks away, on East 127th Street, as he did regularly, carrying his 16-pound weight. The ball was attached to a steel cable with a handle on the end.

After making sure no one was in harm’s way, and holding on to the handle with both hands, Gillis swung the weight in a wide loop, using all 6 feet 4 inches of his body to gather momentum and send the hammer flying. And fly it did. He launched several practice throws, according to newspaper articles written about that day.

It must have been quite a sight. A mountain of a man whirling what looked like a cannonball above his head as effortlessly as a yo-yo. He was a veritable beacon of strength, a real live strongman.

As Gillis was practicing, boys nearby were tossing a ball. An errant throw sent their ball into the empty lot. Christian Koehler, 14, ran to fetch it. As Christian reached the center of the lot, Gillis, who was already in his windup motion, sent his hammer soaring.

Cries of warning were shouted, but it was too late. The weight struck Christian on the side of his head, smashing his skull. Gillis ran to him and held him in his arms. The boy was taken to Harlem Hospital and pronounced dead. Gillis was taken to the local police station.

Details about the immediate aftermath of the incident have seemingly been lost to history. Court records could not be found, relatives of the boy’s family could not be located, and no one with firsthand knowledge of how the child’s death affected Gillis is still alive.

Gillis’s granddaughters, who live in Washington State, said in a recent interview that he never talked about the incident, though their mother told them he felt awful about it. “Back then, people didn’t dwell,” said Maureen Shriver, 66, the third of four of his grandchildren. “They just moved on.”

What is known about Gillis, however, is that he became an Olympian, competing at the Summer Games the first time they were held in London, in 1908 — four years after Gillis’s hammer struck Christian Koehler.

Shriver is the keeper of a large leather-bound scrapbook that her grandfather assembled. Inside, his life unfolds in crumbling newspaper articles, letters from the International Olympic Committee, photos from his time in the silent movies, and portraits taken of him dressed in his New York Athletic Club uniform, the winged foot logo, still used today, displayed prominently on his shirt, the hammer at his side.

An Athlete and a Dancer

Gillis, the fifth of 13 children, had been in New York for several years working as a carpenter, having left his rural home on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia as a teenager to join his brother in the United States.

He wrote home to his sister Sarah about his athletic endeavors, something of a hobby in his family. Although they were farmers, they were also step dancers, an activity passed down from their Scottish great-grandfather who was a dance master.

Perhaps that was the fountain from which his love of sports sprung. In New York, Gillis, like many athletes at that time, joined the New York Athletic Club and was growing his reputation as a sports star. He appeared on the sports page of The Evening World in a cartoon about a competition at Travers Island in 1906.

The cartoon showed Gillis and another athlete, John Flanagan, warming up with their hammers while chatting with each other.

“I wish you’d throw 180 feet today, Gillis,” Flanagan said, taunting his rival. “I want a little competition.” To which Gillis replied, “Sure, John, I’d hate to see you strain yourself.”

It was a good year for him. Gillis won the national junior championship, and set a record for throwing, 161 feet 8 inches, which held for almost three decades. That same year he won the championship in hammer throwing in Canada, as well.

He began competing internationally, heading to Brazil, Sweden, Denmark and Scotland, and at the same time working as a contractor overseas. But it was on the boat to the Olympic Games in London in 1908 that he earned his reputation as a man who could eat.

The story goes that he and his teammates would order so much food at each mealtime, the poor waiter who served them eventually lost his temper, having become overburdened hauling trays and trays of food to their dining table. “They’re not men,” he told a reporter on the boat. “They’re whales.”

For breakfast he would order a dozen eggs — not scrambled, or fried, or boiled. Rather, they were still in the shell. Then he would decorate the top of each egg with a dab of mustard, popping the whole ovoid into his mouth, consuming it raw, shell and all, or as he liked to call it, “Eggs with the fur on.”

He was clearly well nourished because he placed seventh at the London Games with a throw of 149 feet 6½ inches.

At another competition that year in Baltimore, he and two other Whales — the nickname from the waiter stuck — had placed an order ahead of time at a restaurant nearby. They ordered 27 dozen oysters and six T-bone steaks to be ready at 5 o’clock. When the athletes arrived at the appointed hour they discovered the table had been set for 33. The waiter turned pale, Gillis said, when he learned no one else was coming. Needless to say, the Whales ate it all.

Back in New York, while still continuing to throw the hammer in contests in and around the city, he switched careers and joined the police force. He conducted traffic at the corner of Broadway and Duane, where a horsecar line ran. There his athleticism took a new turn.

A runaway horse, without a bridle, was on the loose, putting the lives of schoolchildren at risk, Gillis recalled in a letter. Somehow he managed to stop the horse, but not before both he and the charging beast were sent through a plate-glass window in a corner shoe store.

Several seeds of caution were planted that day. In another incident, he took a horsecar driver to court for speeding. According to an article in The New York Times, the magistrate presiding over the affair fined the offending driver a dollar and told him his offense was “a heinous one.”

On the force, Gillis worked alongside other track stars. As they prepared for the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm, they became known as the Knights of the Nightstick. The New York Herald wrote a feature on them a month before they left for Sweden with the tag line: “How six members of New York’s police force are training to represent the United States in the struggle for the athletic supremacy of the world next June.”

His fellow Knight Matthew McGrath went on to win the gold in the hammer throw. Gillis had to sit out the competition with a strained leg. It was his last appearance at the Olympics.

Career Changes

Back home again in New York, Gillis found the life of a traffic cop was becoming unsustainable. In another article in The Evening World, he spoke to a reporter about why he was quitting the force to take a contracting job in Spain. “I can’t live in these times on $3.10 a day and be honest,” he said. He questioned how he was “going to keep honest if the opportunity comes for him to get graft.”

He went on to mention how he owed $350 — the cost of six uniforms — to the force, a bill he had accrued over three years of working. He itemized each piece. Among them were a winter uniform, the most expensive garment at $38, and his belt, the cheapest, at $1.50; his revolver was $14.

During his time in Spain he honed his engineering skills. He applied this knowledge to designing a hammer, a metal shell filled with mercury, which he used at a competition in England. After a throw, the weight hit a rock and shattered — a bit like an egg — with mercury spilling everywhere. The silver liquid mystified the boys who fetched the balls out in the field as they could not pick up the liquid.

After spending a couple of years working in Europe, Gillis returned to New York for yet another new career. He worked for Thomas Edison creating screen titles for silent movies, and even appeared in one or two — as a policeman.

Soon he left New York for good, heading west, where he met his wife, Bridget, in Montana, and thereafter settled in Phoenix. In 1919 his daughter, Effie, was born.

He and his wife ran a rooming house during the Depression before he settled into an engineering career, specializing in building smokestacks for smelting metal. He laid out his philosophy on career paths in a cover letter he wrote. “I never was a subscriber to the proverb ‘A rolling stone gathers no moss,’ ” he said. “All through my career, my theory was that a man who sticks to one job gets buried in it, so that my rule was to accept any offer that came along. Just so it carried a promotion and I liked the place and work, which means I traveled and was engaged in many branches of work.”

It must have come as a surprise to Gillis when his wife received letters of condolence regarding his death in 1954. Arthur Daley, the sports columnist for The New York Times, indirectly pronounced him dead in a column on the passing of Pat McDonald, who won the gold medal in shot put at the 1912 Olympics and took home another gold in the 56-pound weight throw at the 1920 Games in Antwerp, Belgium. Daley referred to McDonald as the last of the legendary Whales, that infamous group of champion athletes who ate so well.

Gillis wrote to Daley a good-humored letter that began, “I am still living!” He went on to thank him for saying he was dead, explaining: “It pays to be announced as dead once in a while to find out what people think of you. I am the oldest living hammer thrower of the American Olympic teams.”

It was another 10 years before Gillis died, at age 88, nearly 60 years after his fateful practice throw in an empty lot on Park Avenue.

Alan Delaquérière contributed reporting.

The High Life Under the Stars

By ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO NY TIMES

IN a city like New York, private outdoor space can be more rare than a spare bedroom. But for the wealthy, that space often becomes an extension of an already fabulous apartment, a living room in the sky that makes the summer and fall months unforgettable.

It could be where you hold that fabulous charity cocktail fundraiser, or sip a glass of rosé with that significant other (or others), or where you take a shower to wash off the suntan lotion from a day of bronzing, before slinking into a robe and dozing off in a chaise under the stars.

Given how competitive New Yorkers are about real estate, it’s no surprise that they also try to create outdoor spaces to brag about and fuel the envy of others. As a tough summer assignment I gave to myself, I recently toured some properties (most for sale) whose owners were boasting about their decks and rooftops.

I stepped out onto a terrace at the Rushmore, a building on the Far West Side, that at 2,400 square feet was larger than the entire 1,500-square-foot two-bedroom apartment. The outdoor space, which has a lonely Jacuzzi in the middle, spread out like a vast parking lot. I stared at it for a few moments and couldn’t picture ever having enough trees, plants or comfy chaises to make it feel inviting.

That’s me. Some owners adroitly transform their outdoor spaces into the most memorable part of their apartment or town house, and take enormous pride in doing so.

Consider Matthew Blesso, a New Jersey-born real estate developer. After buying his spacious two-bedroom penthouse at 684 Broadway in NoHo in 2006, he set out to “blur the line between the inside and the outside.”

He bartered for more roof rights, paying $200,000 to put in a new roof for the building. That gave him about 2,200 square feet of rooftop. He built an outdoor shower, got a friend who is a gardener at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden to create a “meadow” of wild-looking plants and flowers like Queen Anne’s lace. An automatic irrigation system waters them twice a day.

The main area features outdoor couches and a full kitchen that includes a dishwasher, an icemaker, a grill, even a beer tap. He sometimes hangs a cloth screen against a wall covered by plants and shows movies for friends, placing a projector on a chair.

“It’s fun to watch movies about New York up here,” he said, noting that the first movie he ever screened was “Annie Hall.”

And up a gentle slope, you reach a sort of private romantic perch where you can look out over NoHo and have a private chat, Mr. Blesso said. “I wanted to be in the middle of it all but in a sanctuary at the same time,” he said. “I love New York, but find it incredibly stressful.”

Mr. Blesso, 39, is now selling his apartment for $8.95 million, hoping to move on to a place in Brooklyn.

At 94 Thompson Street I found an impressive set of outdoor terraces in the penthouse of a building that once housed a few SoHo art galleries. Ian Tarr, the British owner, took two years to remodel it, spending about as much on the outdoor space as the $4.725 million he paid for the apartment in 2004. Victoria Blau, a New York architect, and Nico Rensch, a Swiss designer, turned Mr. Tarr’s vision into reality.

There are three rooftop terraces. One faces west and is the designated sun deck. On the opposite end, another terrace was made into a breakfast space by adding two trees and some plantings. Looking up you can see the penthouse next door that used to be owned by the actress Meg Ryan.

In the middle is a broad terrace with cozy furniture custom-designed by Gandia Blasco, a Spanish company that does pergolas for beach resorts, Mr. Tarr told me by telephone this week. There is a barbecue, an ice machine and small fridges.

Mr. Tarr spends most of his time back in London, where he is a partner at a scientific database publishing company; he lets friends and family use his SoHo pad on an almost continuous basis. He is listing it for $11.7 million.

At 221 West 13th Street, I found a compelling example of the ingenuity that can be used for a rooftop space in a town house. There, Andrew de Candole, a British property developer, had created a relaxing entertainment space with a small infinity wading pool with Jacuzzi jets, an outdoor kitchen and bar and a partially enclosed dining room with air conditioners and a big ceiling fan. The coolest feature, though, was the retractable glass roof that allows access to the terrace from inside the house. The town house is listed for $11.5 million.

Some people have created gardens that make them feel as if they weren’t in the city at all. At 35-37 North Moore Street, I found a penthouse whose owners, William and Ursula Fairbairn, had transformed two bare terraces into elaborate gardens. They hired Shinichiro Abe, who designed the Peace Bell Garden at the United Nations, to make one terrace into a Japanese garden. The couple enjoy sitting in their living room and quietly looking out at the garden, sometimes with a glass of Champagne, said Mr. Fairbairn, 76.

“It’s very calming,” he said. “And if you get down there in a snowstorm, it is magical.”

On the other side of the apartment is an even larger garden terrace, with a more English feel, that has a small lily pond with goldfish. The Fairbairns are selling the apartment for $19.95 million.

For sheer wow factor, nothing I saw beat the outdoor space under construction at Michael Hirtenstein’s triplex at 1 York in TriBeCa. Mr. Hirtenstein, a telecom millionaire and well-known collector of trophy properties, moved into his apartment last month. Now he is fitting out every inch of the 5,800 square feet of outdoor space, which is spread over several terraces.

“It is going to be like a yacht,” he said of the plan for one side of the main terrace area, which you enter through glass doors from an enormous living room in the 10,000-square-foot apartment designed by Thomas Juul-Hansen, who is doing the interiors at One57.

Workers are preparing the curved wood that will house a sunken entertainment area, which will feature a grill, a stone fire pit, a retractable 55-inch TV and a wood-slatted roof for privacy.

On the far side he has already installed a large infinity-edge pool and a 16-speaker sound system to give a cinemalike experience when a retractable projector screen rises 16 feet high from behind the pool. In the next week or two he is expecting waterproof remotes to arrive that guests will be able to throw into the pool.

It’s the high-tech version of Mr. Blesso’s simpler rooftop theater. But the effect will be the same: an outdoor living room in the sky, but still within view of neighbors, to remind them of what to add to their wish list.

Paradise Lost & Regained

"Smile"

Michael Anton (Claremont Institute) June 2012

The release last fall, after 44 years, of the Beach Boys' abandoned masterpiece Smile is a milestone of American popular culture. Rolling Stone has called it "the most famous unfinished album in rock & roll history." But Smile is also something much bigger. It is the pinnacle artistic achievement of a lost civilization, the middle-class, baby-boom, sun-soaked, clean-cut, work-hard-play-hard, bungalow-and-car culture of post-war Southern California. It was a paradise for the common man, one that produced legions of loyal and productive citizens, developed the modern aerospace industry, helped the West win the Cold War, and exported an attractive and fundamentally decent (if often vapid) vision of American life to every corner of the globe.

Western Migration

To understand Smile, you have to start by understanding the Wilsons, which requires understanding Hawthorne, California, circa 1961. In 1922, Murry Wilson arrived in Los Angeles at age five from Hutchinson, Kansas. His family was part of what journalist Carey McWilliams described in his classic 1946 study Southern California: An Island on the Land, as one of Los Angeles's frequent "quantum leaps, great surges of migration"—in this case the 1920s oil boom that flooded L.A. County with white low-church Protestant burghers and strivers (mostly the latter) from the Plains and the Midwest.

They came for the jobs but soon learned to appreciate the region's many other charms. McWilliams, who migrated west the same year as Wilson, was struck immediately by the landscape, "above all by the extraordinary greenness of the lawns and hillsides. It was the kind of green that seemed as though it might rub off on your hands; a theatrical green, a green that was not quite real." Of course, it wasn't quite real. At least, it wasn't natural. That green was the product of William Mulholland's "rape of the Owens Valley," the massive project to irrigate the bone-dry Los Angeles Basin later immortalized in Robert Towne's screenplay for Chinatown. L.A. in its natural state, as God intended, is the color of straw eleven months of the year.

And then there was the weather: mild, dry, predictable, and clear 329 days a year. Angelinos worshiped the sun with a fervor not seen since the Temple of Ra. Novelist Eugene Burdick—yet another member of L.A.'s class of '22—described that beneficent god thusly: "This is not the almost tropical sun of Hawaii or the alternately thin and blistering sun of Arkansas or the moderate bourgeois sun of France. This is a kind sun, a boon of nature, a sun designed for Utopia."

In a classic essay penned to explain to mystified (and horrified) eastern academics the election of Ronald Reagan as governor of California in 1966, political scientist James Q. Wilson contrasted the manufacturing middle-class standard of living for New Yorkers versus Southern Californians. The former lived mostly

in a walk-up flat in, say, the Yorkville section of Manhattan or not far off Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn. Given their income in 1930, life would have been crowded, noisy, cold, threatening—in short, urban. In Long Beach or Inglewood or Huntington Park or Bellflower [or Hawthorne!], by contrast, life was carried on in a detached house with a lawn in front and a car in the garage, part of a quiet neighborhood, with no crime (except kids racing noisy cars), no cold, no smells, no congestion.

He adds, just to rub it in, "[t]he monthly payments on that bungalow...would have been no more than the rent on the walk-up flat in Brooklyn or Yorkville."

Beach Themes

What was true in 1930 was exponentially truer in 1960. Indeed, historian Kevin Starr subtitled the seventh volume of his epic history of the state, which covers the postwar period, California in an Age of Abundance.

Plenty of jobs, plenty of space, plenty of sun, plenty of everything—that was the environment in which the Wilson brothers grew up. Three boys sharing one bedroom might not sound like abundance in the age of the McMansion but that was also an era in which a machinist without a college education, moonlighting as a musician, could comfortably if not lavishly raise a family on one income. It sounds idyllic, and for those who lived it, it was. Tom Wolfe made his career on noticing what was going on in Southern California before anyone else: "Suddenly classes of people whose styles of life had been practically invisible had the money to build monuments to their own styles. Among teen-agers, this took the form of custom cars, the Twist, the Jerk, the Monkey, the Shake, rock music generally, stretch pants, decal eyes...."

And the Beach Boys. Murry Wilson always wanted to be a songwriter. He scored a few minor successes on the side but never hit big. Success would come vicariously. The three sons whom he taught to play piano and guitar began by singing doo-wop songs (with a first cousin and a classmate) in impromptu sessions at Hawthorne High School and moved on to concerts at high schools and teen hangouts throughout the L.A. Basin. They were popular enough that in 1961 Murry was able to get the boys an audition in front of some music publishers, who unfortunately weren't interested in another cover band. Show us some original stuff, they said, and...maybe.

Middle brother Dennis was getting into the growing nascent SoCal surfing craze and was pushing big brother Brian, leader of the group, to incorporate beach themes into their music. Brian had been working on just such a tune but it was far from finished. That didn't stop Dennis from offering it up anyway. Now they were on the spot. One weekend, the parents took off for Mexico City and left the boys enough money to feed themselves. They took the cash, rented a bunch of instruments and equipment, and practiced for three solid days. They had a tape of an original song ready when mom and dad returned. "Surfin'"—a crude but catchy doo-wop with a bluesy bassline number—blanketed the Los Angeles airwaves and cracked the national top 100.

Rivalry

Murry assumed duties as manager of the band without asking, or explicitly gaining, anyone's permission. He was a tough taskmaster and stories of serious abuse emerged later—including smashing a 2x4 into Brian's head causing him to go deaf in his right ear. As Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain had already taught us, not everything happening under that beneficent sun was as pretty as the surroundings. But Murry was effective—at getting bookings, at forcing the boys to practice and write more songs, at placing their singles on the radio, and eventually at landing their career-making deal with Hollywood's Capitol Records. Brian took the lead in firing his father in 1964 but his filial affection never quite died. In liner notes written in 2011 for The Smile Sessions box set, Brian credits Murry's perfectionism for inspiring his own.

The band racked up a string of big hits in its early years—enduring classics from "California Girls" to "Surfin' USA" to "Fun, Fun, Fun"—that define their time and place. The British Invasion ended the Boys' dominance of the U.S. charts but as popular as the Beatles became stateside, the Beach Boys were doing just fine, thank you, in Old Blighty.

The rivalry between the two bands is the underappreciated spring that produced Smile. With at least two world-class songwriters, the Beatles had a definite edge. For deep thoughts and profound inspiration, the Boys had only Brian—but that would be enough, for a while.

Emotional problems began to take their toll in 1963 and the following year Brian stopped touring permanently to focus on studio work—two years before the Beatles' final concert at San Francisco's Candlestick Park. The Fab Four's first true studio album, Rubber Soul, represented a great leap forward not just for the lads from Liverpool but for pop music. Darker, more thematic, far more inventive than anything they or their peers had hitherto attempted, the album was not a mere collection of singles, with A songs and B-side fillers crammed together haphazardly, but an organic whole with a beginning, middle, and end. That, in any case, was the way Brian Wilson heard it—over and over and over. He determined to strike back.

The result was the harmonic and melodic masterpiece Pet Sounds, certainly the Beach Boys'—and arguably any American band's—first successful "concept album." With the nearly-forgotten 1965 single "The Little Girl I Once Knew"—a song John Lennon called "fantastic" and "all Brian Wilson"—Brian had already begun to stretch his wings beyond the bubble gum pop that made him rich and famous. Pet Sounds was a continuation of, and departure from, all that came before. There are no surfin' or cruisin' lyrics, but one paean after another to the perils and pains of young love. The rest of the Boys returned from an Asian tour to find the album written and ready to record; they were nonplussed by Brian's new direction. Superficially, the sounds are the same—five high male voices slipping in and out of falsetto—but there is more harmonic interest, more instrumental variety, or—when the moment requires—no instruments at all. Every track flows inexorably from the prior one and as such the album had no stand-out hit, though Paul McCartney proclaimed "God Only Knows" the "greatest song ever written" and Pet Sounds "a total, classic record." Legendary Beatles producer George Martin would later say of the Fab Four's most famous album that "Without Pet Sounds, Sgt. Pepper wouldn't have happened.... Pepper was an attempt to equal Pet Sounds."

A Strange Time

Before Pet Sounds was even finished, Brian dragooned the Boys into attempting their most ambitious project yet. More than even Pet Sounds, Smile was from the beginning a virtual Brian Wilson solo project with the other Boys serving essentially as back-up singers and session musicians. The entire concept and all the compositions were Brian's.

Except for the lyrics. Brian's most artistically ambitious collaborations to date had been with Tony Asher, who penned most of the words for Pet Sounds and also for the single "Good Vibrations." Brian described the latter as a "pocket symphony" in three movements. It took 90 hours in the studio to record and was, at the time, the most expensively produced song in history—indeed it cost more than most albums—and became the Beach Boys' first million-seller.

But for the new project Brian wanted something even more different. He turned to a little-known Southern poet, musician, singer, and former child actor named Van Dyke Parks. As a young man, Parks wandered the country like a troubadour, scratching out a subsistence strumming chords on a guitar while intoning Beat-inspired poetry in smoky coffee houses. The problem was, by the mid-1960s, the Beats were so over. So, at age 21, Parks arrived in Hollywood determined to make it ... as something or other.

It was a strange time in California. The shiny surface looked more or less the same as it had for 20 years: buzz cuts, button downs, tail fins, palm trees, and plenty of prosperity. But things were changing. Up north, young wastrels from all over the country—differing from Parks only in being more overtly unkempt—were flooding into the broken-down, half-abandoned, dirt-cheap old Victorians in the Haight-Ashbury. The Black Panther party was founded in Oakland that fall. The Summer of Love (1967) was a year away. Down south, the Sunset Strip was hopping like it hadn't since Mickey Cohen was shipped to Alcatraz—the honky-tonks and gambling dens replaced by hip nightclubs like the Whisky a Go Go, where the Doors were the house band and during breaks the tunes were spun by a mini-skirted D.J. in a cage hanging from the ceiling. Statewide, the old order was reasserting itself in the form of Ronald Reagan, whose promise to "clean up the mess in Berkeley" would help him ride the Hawthorne vote to a historic demolition of incumbent Governor Pat Brown. The Beach Boys embodied both the new and the old, and also the transition.

Teenage Symphony to God

At the time of their auspicious meeting, Brian Wilson was 24 and already a huge international star. Van Dyke Parks was a year younger and basically a nobody. He lived above a garage at La Brea and Melrose, in a single room without plumbing, and had to use the pay toilet at the nearest gas station, which was his only reason for going as he had no car. Wilson by contrast lived in a Beverly Hills mansion. "Mansion" may have been an accurate description structually, but inside the decor was more Little Rascals than Architectural Digest. One gained access via a tree house out front, there was a massive tent in the dining room, and the living room was made into a home studio—replete with a grand piano nestled in seven tons of sand so Brian could feel the beach between his toes as he composed.

His initial investment in Parks amounted to one used car, $5,000 in cash, and $2,000 worth of Afghani hash, which they smoked together in Brian's indoor sandbox as Brian wrote the music and Parks the words. In a 1966 interview, Brian famously described Smile as a "teenage symphony to God." All other attempts at brief description fail; that one is actually not bad. The album is certainly as complex as any symphony—Wilson claims Rhapsody in Blue as a great influence—yet the teen appeal is evident in the music's youthful sense of slapstick. At times, it plays almost like the soundtrack to a Saturday morning cartoon. And Wilson's heartfelt if nebulous spiritualism suffuses every track from the opening "Our Prayer"—a contrapuntal, a cappella hymn written not for the cathedral but for the Manhattan Beach pier—to the encore "You're Welcome," which is structured monophonically, like a Gregorian chant.

Instead of a series of discreet songs of more or less the same length, the longer tracks on Smile are interspersed with snippets, instrumental bridges, and goofy, near-throwaway vocals—techniques the Beatles would not utilize (and even then not fully) until three years later with their last album, Abbey Road. Brian was also experimenting technologically with tricks well ahead of their time and that contemporary audio equipment could scarcely handle. He borrowed from the movies the technique of cutting and splicing tape, something hardly ever done in music before "Good Vibrations" and usually only to cover up mistakes. Brian elevated "modular recording" to an art form, allowing the music to turn on a dime in ways impossible to achieve if the songs had to be played straight through in one take. Sgt. Pepper—with its array of jump cuts, sound effects and multi-track overlays that could only be accomplished in a studio—has gone down in rock history as the first album to blast away the boundaries of traditional stage pop in ways that made it absolutely unperformable in a live act. Smile, which was written and recorded earlier, was even more sonically inventive. Had it been released on schedule, undoubtedly Wilson's masterpiece would have earned that honor.

That's not to suggest that the genius of Smile is merely in the inventive use of gimmicks. There is real musical greatness here, and lots of it. "Heroes and Villains," the lynchpin of the album, is a psychedelic epic that either introduces or recapitulates themes that unify the whole work. "Surf's Up," the album's best song, so impressed Leonard Bernstein that he included, in his December 1966 CBS television special, a lengthy segment of Brian alone at the piano playing the tune. The voiceover was rhapsodic:

There is a new song, too complex to get all of first time around. It could come only out of the ferment that characterizes today's pop music scene. Brian Wilson, leader of the famous Beach Boys, and one of today's most important musicians, sings his own "Surf's Up." Poetic, beautiful even in its obscurity, "Surf's Up" is one aspect of new things happening in pop music today. As such, it is a symbol of the change many of these young musicians see in our future.

Rebellion and Loss

As to the lyrics, that's where the trouble really hit. Parks's idiosyncratic and whimsical words fit the overall tone perfectly even if they don't always—or often—make sense. The overarching theme is America, a deliberate reaction or response to pop music's then-reigning British Invasion. The lyrics cover the nation geographically from Plymouth Rock to Hawaii, and historically from the Pilgrims through the Chicago fire, the Wild West, the railroads, and the Gilded Age. Snippets of standards from the Great American Songbook are woven in throughout, as are various pop culture jingles and theme songs. The words don't so much tell a story as set a mood, one that is often just plain silly. "I'm gonna be 'round my vegetables / I'm gonna chow down my vegetables" isn't exactly "Fall in love—you won't regret it / That's the best work of all—if you can get it."

Yet despite their incomprehensibility, the lyrics for Smile remain fresh because of the music's optimism and exuberant innocence. That beneficent Southern California sun shines through in every word. Though penned in the mid '60s, there is scarcely a trace of the America-bashing then sweeping the intellectual and artistic classes. The Boys—and especially Brian—certainly succumbed to the carnal temptations of the time. But they never bought into the dystopic New Left vision of "AmeriKKKa." In 1983, President Reagan's buffoonish Secretary of the Interior James Watt canceled a planned Beach Boys concert in Washington, claiming that the Boys drew "the wrong element." Both the president and the vice president publicly demurred; Watt was forced to relent. President and Mrs. Reagan warmly received the Boys at the White House. They later performed—gratis—before more than half a million fans on the National Mall. Front man Mike Love described singing on the Fourth of July in the heart of the nation's capital as the greatest moment of his life.

But back in 1966, Love objected to Brian's abandonment of the "fast cars, cute girls, and sunny beaches" formula for Pet Sounds—a commercial disappointment though a critical favorite whose reputation has only risen. He rebelled over Smile. During a recording session for "Cabin Essence," whose lyrics are esoteric even for Parks, Love lost it. He unloaded on Parks, demanding that he explain what the hell the words meant. Parks instead walked out—and soon withdrew from the project.

It all fell apart quickly after that. Brian's drug use intensified. The pressure to best the Beatles ate away at him. One night in February 1967, while driving home, he heard "Strawberry Fields Forever" on the radio. He was so overwhelmed he had to pull over. Lavishly produced, the song was a harbinger of what was to come from the Fab Four. Brian heard it as a challenge he could not meet, a sign that he had already lost.

He was wrong, but the damage was (almost) done. The last blow came when The Beach Boys released "Heroes and Villains" as a single. Brian hoped that it would top "Good Vibrations" (it's a much more sophisticated composition) and reestablish the Boys as the Beatles' creative peer. It peaked at #12 on the Billboard charts and then sank fast. Brian spiraled into a serious depression from which it would take decades to recover fully.

Smile was officially shelved in May 1967. To meet their obligations to Capitol Records, the Boys slapped together the most polished tracks and banged out some filler. The result was Smiley Smile, an album youngest brother Carl aptly described as "a bunt instead of a grand slam." It bombed.

The Beach Boys churned out a lot of mediocre, and some almost good, work over the following half-decade. The 1974 release Endless Summer—a compilation of pre-Pet Sounds "fast cars, cute girls, and sunny beaches" classics—not only sold millions, it established the band as the one of the first Boomer nostalgia "oldies" acts, less than 15 years after their debut. From that moment on, they would never lack for bookings, even if creatively they were all but finished.

It would be only a mild exaggeration to say that Brian lost three decades of his life to mental illness and drugs—illicit and prescribed. It's no exaggeration at all to say that the failure of Smile was the reason why. "As the years passed, Smile became this legendary thing, this giant weight on my shoulders, around my neck. It just choked me to death," Brian wrote. In the midst of all that haze and pain, he made a few desultory attempts at creative and even performing comebacks, with the Beach Boys and solo. They all went nowhere, or close.

What Might Have Been

The fog in Brian's brain was fully cleared by around 2000. In 2003 he reconnected with Parks and the two of them set about exorcising the Smile demon. First, they finished the writing, ensured that each song was a completed whole, and put together a coherent track order. Then Brian assembled a new band. No other Beach Boys—his brothers Dennis and Carl had died years before—were included. Various disputes over the intervening years had soured his relationships with his former band mates—and the wound of Mike's Love intense opposition to the original project hadn't healed.

Smile was premiered live in London on February 20, 2004—with Paul McCartney and George Martin front row, center. The 45-minute concert garnered a 10-minute standing ovation. Later that year Brian recorded the work, which was released to exuberant critical praise and solid sales.

But the demon wasn't fully gone. Capitol Records began gingerly approaching the four surviving Beach Boys in the run-up to the 50th anniversary of their first hit to see if they could be cajoled into doing anything together. Brian demurred but floated the idea of putting out the Smile recording sessions and packaging them into something close to how a finished version might have sounded in 1967. It was a project long intensely desired by the fans (and the record company) but one that was impossible without Brian's full cooperation and attention. After 44 years, he finally gave both.

The 2004 release is better than good. As a composition, Smile has few if any peers in pop. But the original sessions are magic. One should not presume to explain magic, so I won't, except to say that Brian's voice circa 1966 is positively angelic compared to the smoke-and-booze-cured version of 2004. And it doesn't hurt that of the six voices harmonizing on those old tapes, four are related by blood. The similarity of the tones at once enhances the harmony and highlights the subtle differences.

The tragedy is what might have been. Brian Wilson was one of those rare composers whose work only got better and deeper as he matured. In this, it's fair to compare him not just to the Beatles—"Surf's Up" is at least as far beyond "Surfin'" as side 2 of Abbey Road is from "Love Me Do"—but also to Beethoven and Verdi. Every song and every album was better than the one that came before. Until he imploded. We'll never know what else might have emerged from his fertile, functioning brain.

Brian himself has mused, "Probably nothing I've ever done has topped the music I made with Van Dyke, my old crew in the studio and the voices of my youth—me and The Beach Boys."

Not probably. But that's okay. It's enough.

Michael Anton is a writer living in New York.

Ernest Borgnine, Oscar-Winning Actor, Dies at 95

By ANITA GATES NY Times

Ernest Borgnine, the rough-hewn actor who seemed destined for tough-guy characters but won an Academy Award for embodying the gentlest of souls, a lonely Bronx butcher, in the 1955 film “Marty,“ died on Sunday in Los Angeles. He was 95.

His death, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, was announced by Harry Flynn, his longtime spokesman.

Mr. Borgnine, who later starred on “McHale’s Navy” on television, made his first memorable impression in films at age 37, appearing in “From Here to Eternity” (1953) as Fatso Judson, the sadistic stockade sergeant who beats Frank Sinatra’s character, Private Maggio, to death. But Paddy Chayefsky, who wrote “Marty” as a television play, and Delbert Mann, who directed it (it starred Rod Steiger), saw something beyond brutality in Mr. Borgnine and offered him the title role when it was made into a feature film.

The 1950s had emerged as the decade of the common man, with Willy Loman of “Death of a Salesman” on Broadway and the likes of the bus driver Ralph Kramden (“The Honeymooners”) and the factory worker Chester Riley (“The Life of Riley”) on television. Mr. Borgnine’s Marty Pilletti, a 34-year-old blue-collar bachelor who still lives with his mother, fit right in, showing the tender side of the average, unglamorous guy next door.

Marty’s awakening, as he unexpectedly falls in love, was described by Bosley Crowther in The New York Times as “a beautiful blend of the crude and the strangely gentle and sensitive in a monosyllabic man.”

Mr. Borgnine received the Oscar for best actor for “Marty.” For the same performance he also received a Golden Globe and awards from the New York Film Critics Circle, the National Board of Review and the British Academy of Film and Television Arts.

Mr. Borgnine won even wider fame as the star of the ABC sitcom “McHale’s Navy” (1962-66), originating the role of an irreverent con man of a PT boat skipper. (The cast also included a young Tim Conway.) He wrote in his autobiography, “Ernie” (Citadel Press, 2008), that he had turned down the role because he refused to do a television series but changed his mind when a boy came to his door selling candy and said, although he knew who James Arness of “Gunsmoke” and Richard Boone of “Have Gun, Will Travel” were, he had never heard of Ernest Borgnine.

Over a career that lasted more than six decades the burly, big-voiced Mr. Borgnine was never able to escape typecasting completely, at least in films. Although he did another Chayefsky screenplay, starring with Bette Davis as a working-class father of the bride in “The Catered Affair” (1956), and even appeared in a musical, “The Best Things in Life Are Free” (1956), playing a Broadway showman, the vast majority of the characters he played were villains.

Military roles continued to beckon. One of his best known was as Lee Marvin’s commanding officer in “The Dirty Dozen” (1967), about hardened prisoners on a World War II commando mission. He also starred in three television-movie sequels.

But he worked in virtually every genre. Filmmakers cast him as a gangster, even in satirical movies like “Spike of Bensonhurst” (1988). He was in westerns like Sam Peckinpah’s blood-soaked classic “The Wild Bunch” (1969) and crime dramas like “Bad Day at Black Rock” (1955).

He played gruff police officers, like his character in the disaster blockbuster “The Poseidon Adventure” (1972), and bosses from hell, as in the horror movie “Willard” (1971). Twice he played a manager of gladiators, in “Demetrius and the Gladiators” (1954) and in the 1984 mini-series “The Last Days of Pompeii.”

Mr. Borgnine’s menacing features seemed to disappear when he flashed his trademark gaptoothed smile, and later in life he began to find good-guy roles, like the helpful taxi driver in “Escape From New York” (1981) and the title role in “A Grandpa for Christmas,” a 2007 television movie.

“McHale’s Navy” and the 1964 film inspired by it were his most notable forays into comedy, but in 1999 he began doing the voice of a recurring character, the elderly ex-superhero Mermaidman, in the animated series “SpongeBob SquarePants.” He continued to play that role until last year.

He began his career on the stage but unlike many actors who had done the same, Mr. Borgnine professed to have no burning desire to return there. “Once you create a character for the stage, you become like a machine,” he told The Washington Post in 1969. In films, he said, “you’re always creating something new.”

Ermes Effron Borgnino was born on Jan. 24, 1917, in Hamden, Conn., near New Haven. His father was a railroad brakeman. His mother was said to be the daughter of a count, Paolo Boselli, an adviser to King Victor Emmanuel of Italy.

The boy spent several years of his childhood in Italy, where his mother returned during a long separation from her husband. But they returned to Connecticut, and he graduated from high school there.

He joined the Navy at 18 and served for 10 years. During World War II he was a gunner’s mate. After the war he considered factory jobs, but his mother suggested that he try acting. Her reasoning, he reported, was, “You’ve always liked making a damned fool of yourself.”

He studied at the Randall School of Drama in Hartford, then moved to Virginia, where he became a member of the Barter Theater in Abingdon and worked his way up from painting scenery to playing the Gentleman Caller in “The Glass Menagerie.”

In the late 1940s he headed for New York, where by 1952 he was appearing on Broadway as a bodyguard in the comic fantasy “Mrs. McThing,” starring Helen Hayes. He had already made his movie debut playing a Chinese shopkeeper in the 1951 adventure “China Corsair.”

Mr. Borgnine never retired from acting. In the 1980s he starred in another television series, the adventure drama “Airwolf,” playing a helicopter pilot. He took a supporting role as a bubbly doorman in the 1990s sitcom “The Single Guy.” His last film appearance was in “The Man Who Shook the Hand of Vicente Fernandez,” not yet released, in which he plays an elderly man who becomes a celebrity to Latino employees at the nursing home where he lives. On television, he was in the series finale of “ER” in 2009 and appeared in a cable film, “Love’s Christmas Journey,” last year.

His other films included “The Vikings” (1958); “Ice Station Zebra” (1968); “Hoover” (2000), in which he played J. Edgar Hoover; and “Gattaca” (1997).

Mr. Borgnine, who lived in Beverly Hills, was married five times. In 1949 he married Rhoda Kemins, whom he had met when they were both in the Navy. They had a daughter but divorced in 1958. On New Year’s Eve 1959 he and the Mexican-born actress Katy Jurado were married; they divorced in 1962.

His third marriage was his most notorious because of its brevity. He and the Broadway musical star Ethel Merman married in late June 1964 but split up in early August. Mr. Borgnine later contended that Ms. Merman left because she was upset that on an international honeymoon trip he was recognized and she wasn’t.

In 1965 he married Donna Rancourt; they had two children before divorcing in 1972. In 1973 he married for the fifth and last time, to Tova Traesnaes, who under the name Tova Borgnine became a cosmetics entrepreneur.

She survives him, as do his children, Christofer, Nancee and Sharon Borgnine; a stepson, David Johnson; six grandchildren; and his sister, Evelyn Verlardi.

Asked about his acting methods in 1973, Mr. Borgnine told The New York Times: “No Stanislavsky. I don’t chart out the life histories of the people I play. If I did, I’d be in trouble. I work with my heart and my head, and naturally emotions follow.”

Sometimes he prayed, he said, or just reflected on character-appropriate thoughts. “If none of that works,” he added, “I think to myself of the money I’m making.”

He Takes the Village

By REBECCA FLINT MARX NY Times

BEN SHAOUL doesn’t understand why people hate him.       

But hate him they do. It gets under his skin.

“I’m a regular guy, I have feelings,” the young real estate developer complained over lunch in late April. “Is it hurtful when people write things that are bad? Yeah, it’s hurtful.”

He was sitting with his publicist at the Norwood Club, the members-only establishment he owns on West 14th Street, discussing his work over grilled chicken and greens. His phone vibrated intermittently by his elbow.

While the city isn’t lacking in controversial landlords, Mr. Shaoul, 35, who is president of Magnum Real Estate Group, has distinguished himself as “the face of the hyper-luxurification of the East Village,” as the writer behind the local blog E V Grieve said. A cursory look at Mr. Shaoul’s track record over the last year or so might shed some light on why he has attracted such attention.

Last September, he booted the much-loved Bean coffee shop from its First Avenue home to rent the space to Starbucks.

Two months later, he bought the Cabrini Center for Nursing and Rehabilitation, a residence for low-income seniors on East Fifth Street, for $25.5 million with the stated intention of converting it to market-rate apartments.

In December, he purchased the former Educational Alliance building on East 10th Street and, hours before the Landmarks Preservation Commission voted to landmark the building and its block, secured permits to build a rooftop addition that incensed critics already unhappy about his other rooftop additions in the neighborhood.

And in April, the Fire Department had to use a cherry-picker to rescue a tenant from one of Mr. Shaoul’s buildings after a construction crew removed part of the staircase during renovations.

“He’s front and center in all of these things,” said the writer who calls himself E V Grieve, who has pseudonymously chronicled development in the neighborhood since 2007. “Ben is the latest to get in on the East Village gold rush. He didn’t cause it, but he’s taking advantage of it.”

When Mr. Shaoul started buying real estate a little over a decade ago, the gentrification of the East Village had arguably already passed the point of no return. Tensions simmered there as early as 1988, when a riot in Tompkins Square Park spilled over to the Christodora House, a former immigrant settlement newly converted into luxury condominiums. Rioters smashed windows and yelled, “Die, yuppie scum” — possibly coining the phrase.

But even as restaurants and boutiques flourished and rising rents elbowed artists and musicians to Brooklyn, the neighborhood’s physical landscape remained relatively unaltered by the wave of money washing over it. It was not until the mid-2000s that swaths of the Bowery were rendered unrecognizable by developments like the massive Avalon Chrystie apartment complex, which opened in 2005 and brought in Whole Foods in 2007.

Mr. Shaoul made his inauspicious East Village debut in 2006, the same year the 21-story Cooper Square Hotel broke ground and the legendary rock club CBGB closed.

In March of that year, he bought out members of an artists’ squat on St. Marks Place in order to turn the building into rental apartments. A neighborhood photographer snapped Mr. Shaoul, accompanied by sledgehammer- and crowbar-wielding construction workers, as he confronted some of the squatters. At some point the police were called in; the photographs soon circulated around the neighborhood.

The episode led the real estate blog Curbed to dub Mr. Shaoul “Sledgehammer Shaoul” and — although he was not actually holding a sledgehammer in any of the photos — the name and image have stuck. His reputation was reinforced as he renovated more buildings: rent-stabilized tenants in his buildings reported threats of eviction, and he racked up Department of Housing Preservation and Development complaints and violations for the interruption of heat and hot water, blocked fire escapes, broken locks and other issues related to construction and maintenance.

Mr. Shaoul characterized such problems as inevitable results of old buildings requiring renovation. “No court has ever found we harassed or wrongfully evicted a tenant,” he said in an e-mail, adding, “No court or city agency has ever found us guilty of any unsafe construction practices.”

Also in 2006, Mr. Shaoul received more unflattering attention for renovations he was doing to buildings at 515 East Fifth Street and 514-516 East Sixth Street. Mr. Shaoul put rooftop additions on both buildings, provoking an outcry from tenants and local politicians who said the construction violated the Multiple Dwelling Law. In 2010, the Board of Standards and Appeals ruled that the East Sixth Street building’s seventh story must be torn down. (Mr. Shaoul said that both buildings’ additions had been approved by the Department of Buildings, and that the seventh-story addition on East Sixth Street was being removed.)

In his short but impressive career, Mr. Shaoul has fixed up dozens of crumbling tenements and built new developments from Chelsea to the South Street Seaport, including the A Building on East 13th Street, a 97-unit development that brought rooftop pool parties and private cabanas to the East Village: one-bedroom apartments there are priced in the neighborhood of $1 million and rent for around $4,000 a month. One result is that Mr. Shaoul’s name has become a byword for aggressive development in the East Village. A few months ago, posters bearing his photo were pasted up around the neighborhood. They read, in part, “I pledge to rape the East Village of every last vestige of creativity,” and concluded: “You gotta problem wit dat?”

BORN in Queens and raised in a tight-knit Persian Jewish community in Great Neck, N.Y., Mr. Shaoul dropped out of community college at the age of 19 to get into the real estate business.

After a summer internship with the Ohebshalom family, a Persian Jewish real estate dynasty from Great Neck, Mr. Shaoul renovated and began managing apartments in a building owned by his father, who had an antiques business.

“I liked doing it,” he said. “I’d go to open houses and see other landlords’ products and thought: This isn’t all that great, and they’re charging all this money for rent. We should make this a bit nicer.”

Using his father’s savings and a mortgage on the property he had renovated, Mr. Shaoul bought his first building in 1999, a tenement at 219 Mott Street.

Almost from the beginning of his career, conflicts with his tenants caught the public’s eye. Mr. Shaoul’s name first hit the papers in 2001, after he bought a nearby Elizabeth Street tenement. While renovating the building, he sued several of its rent-regulated Latino and Chinese tenants, accusing them of running rooming houses out of their apartments. Other tenants said that he had harassed them in an effort to make them leave and that he turned off the building’s gas for four months. Mr. Shaoul also sued the Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence for $20 million for “severe emotional distress” after it organized protests against him, and in turn, a dozen tenants brought three suits of their own against him in housing court. The suits were eventually settled after Mr. Shaoul made repairs and restored the gas.

“I was very, very young,” Mr. Shaoul said recently. “I wish we had not filed a lawsuit against them. I wish we had handled things differently. The tenants were in the wrong for the situation they created for themselves. That being said, they were living there.”

Mr. Shaoul declined to reveal how many properties he owns throughout the city, but an East Village tenant’s association estimated he has some 40 in that neighborhood alone, scattered from East Second to East 13th Street and Second Avenue to Avenue C. The buildings include a portfolio of 17 buildings that he purchased as part of a group of investors in 2007. His signature condominium development is in Chelsea, the glossy, glass-skinned Yves on West 18th Street. He also owns properties in TriBeCa, the West Village, Harlem, the Financial District and on the Upper East Side — neighborhoods, he said, “where I would want to be.”

Rental properties provide financing for many of his projects, he said. “You basically take buildings that haven’t been touched in a long time and you revamp them and you hope to get higher rents,” Mr. Shaoul added, describing his modus operandi.

“He’s doing what all the other ones do,” said Brandon Kielbasa, an organizer at the Cooper Square Committee, an organization that advocates for tenants, who has worked with some of Mr. Shaoul’s renters. The goal, Mr. Kielbasa explained, was to turn rent-regulated units into market-rate units. Mr. Shaoul, he added, is “clearly an aggressive player: a landlord with the agenda he seems to have doesn’t want anybody telling him what he can charge for these units.”

For his part, Mr. Shaoul insists that he is “just moving with the market” and has “no problem” with rent-stabilized tenants. “We don’t harass people,” he said. “I don’t benefit from harassing somebody.”

It is true that judgments against Mr. Shaoul tend to focus on construction problems. In 2004, for example, the Department of Buildings issued a vacate order for 638 East 11th Street when construction caused a foundation wall to crack and separate from an exterior wall. In 2006, Mr. Shaoul was issued a stop-work order for construction at 120 St. Marks Place, where excavation was being done without permits. In 2011, residents of the A Building brought a lawsuit, still in litigation, against Mr. Shaoul and a business partner for numerous construction defects. And following the staircase episode at 435 East 12th Street, the Buildings Department discovered no permits had been filed for the job and issued a stop-work order.

But there has been no shortage of complaints that have not led to such formal actions. “I’ve been dealing with these issues and this developer my whole term in office,” said Rosie Mendez, a City Council member who has represented the East Village and Lower East Side since 2006. “He is, for lack of a better word, a chronic bad actor.” One memorable complaint, she recalled, came from a long-term tenant in one of Mr. Shaoul’s properties who reported that the Fire Department was using the building for evacuation exercises because they had been told it was vacant.

EIGHT rent-stabilized tenants from 120 and 118 East Fourth Street gathered at the Bowery Whole Foods one evening in May to discuss their experiences with the developer, who purchased their buildings in late 2010. The tenants, several of whom requested anonymity because they feared reprisals, portrayed Mr. Shaoul as an aggressive and unresponsive landlord. They recalled not learning who owned their buildings for months, lost rent checks, eviction notices, heat and hot water turned off with little notice, scant communication from the management company, a menacing property manager and intense construction that lasted well over a year. “It’s not personal,” one tenant said. “We don’t exist. We’re like bugs.”

“Even after our attempts to communicate with Ben, he is oblivious to what we’ve been going through,” said Anthony Donovan, a tenant at 120 East Fourth Street for 22 years. “We understand construction when needed. We don’t understand the discourteous communication, the lies, the unsafe conditions for workers and tenants.”

“I can’t begin to express how awful of an experience this has been,” said a tenant in another building, who has lived in his apartment for 20 years, in a separate interview. At one point, he said, the management company listed his apartment for rent. “I’m a civilized person and have a real professional job, so I can’t go out and pop Ben Shaoul one.”

Market-rate and commercial tenants tend to speak more highly of Mr. Shaoul. “I like Ben,” said one commercial tenant, who asked not to be identified lest he alienate his customers. “He’s a good guy.” But, he later added, “he’s definitely a businessman first.”

AS he took a reporter on a tour of four of his luxury properties at the end of May, Mr. Shaoul grew agitated at the mention of his tenants’ complaints. “It’s not fair, it’s absolutely not fair at all,” he said in the back of a black Range Rover headed down the West Side Highway. “If I was building buildings that were falling down, I’d say, ‘You know what, you’re right.’ And if I was making improvements that were only specific to certain tenants. But I’m not. I’m improving the building for everybody.”

“Why are my tenants complaining about my improvements?” he added. “Like, how about a pat on the back for doing that work? Instead, we get resistance the whole way through.” He said that, despite the numerous complaints — over noise, dust, permitting, the hours of construction — from renters in 118 and 120 East Fourth Street, he had never received a Department of Buildings violation for either building. “Logically, what does that tell you?” he said, adding, “They don’t like change.”

Mr. Shaoul’s brashness is, some of his associates said, one of his defining characteristics. “He’s very, very strong; very, very knowledgeable; very, very smart; and can sometimes be impatient,” said Leonard Steinberg, a managing director of Douglas Elliman and the agent marketing the Arman, Mr. Shaoul’s eight-story, eight-unit condominium under construction on far west Canal Street.

He and other business partners spoke of Mr. Shaoul’s attention to detail. And walking through 254 Front Street, Mr. Shaoul’s newest development, his pride in his work was obvious. The newly completed 40-unit luxury rental building is located in the South Street Seaport’s historic district. Mr. Shaoul pointed out the mahogany windows, white oak floors, subway-tiled bathrooms and well-appointed gym. Standing on the balcony of the $20,000-a-month penthouse (units start at $2,500 a month), he admired the view of the Brooklyn Bridge. “I would live here in a second,” he said.

Like other real estate developers, Mr. Shaoul both suffered and benefited from the financial crisis. He admitted that he had overleveraged some properties. He lost control of a Chelsea development site after he defaulted on loans and Brooklyn Federal Savings Bank won a $27.98 million judgment. But at the bottom of the market, Mr. Shaoul was also able to buy 254 Front Street, a development originally slated to be a condominium, and build a rental property instead.

Mr. Shaoul’s excitement about his luxury buildings throughout the city, as well as his love of new construction, is palpable. “I’d like to prove people wrong with my developments,” he said. That people accuse him of mismanaging the more humble tenements that build the foundation for these projects vexes him. “Why is everyone so hung up on the East Village?” he asked during the tour. Later, he added: “How about saying to me, ‘Ben, wow, your building is really beautiful, let’s focus on how well-built it is?’ ”

Mr. Shaoul is quick to say that he and other landlords are themselves casualties in the battles over gentrification. Standing across Canal Street from the Arman, where apartments are priced from $4 million to $9 million, he explained that landlords get a chronic bad rap “because it’s somebody’s home, and a landlord wants to make a profit so runs it as if it’s a business.” Rent stabilization, he added, results in “a tenant who feels like he has rights above and beyond anyone else.”

As Mr. Shaoul walked back to his car, he stopped to wave at his almost-2-year-old twins, who stood behind the vast window of the apartment Mr. Shaoul and his family are occupying while he renovates their West Village townhouse; their view is of the Arman, which he visits daily.

Later, as the Range Rover bounced along the South Street Seaport’s cobbled streets, Mr. Shaoul paused again to reflect on his circumstances. “When you’re working hard at something and you’re giving your all and someone comes along and essentially calls you a liar, you’re going to feel hurt over that,” he said. “I’m not saying I’m perfect or my staff is perfect. We’ve made mistakes in the past. No one’s perfect.”