Happy Birthday, John Ford

A birthday, a building, and forty years of the same game with different names.

Happy birthday, John Ford.

You would be 76 today. You’ve been gone longer than you were here for me, and I didn’t set out to write more than that. I went to find a photo.

This one. August 1986. You’re 36, I’m 13, and we’ve just come down from the observation deck of the World Trade Center, the only time I ever went up. My grade school best friend Stacy came with me that summer. The building behind you is World Financial Center 3, the North Bridge still under construction. American Express had just moved in. The developer was Olympia & York, heavy leverage, institutional debt, the whole architecture of 1980s financial ambition rising out of landfill, literally and financially. They collapsed in 1992. One of the largest real estate bankruptcies in history. Nobody talked about it much.

You were an artist and a philosopher, someone who used his Amex card as a tool and resented every swipe. That card bought my school clothes. I didn’t see the contradiction. I celebrated what you tolerated. I aspired to have the things you saw clearly were not what they pretended to be.

I dove into advertising, then fashion. I played the game, maybe not knowing that’s what I was doing, but I played it. I was in big important rooms, in big important buildings, deep inside the machine.

Working Girl came out in 1988. It has always been my favorite movie. In 2018 I had a meeting in that long ago American Express Tower, the one behind you, in the penthouse. A scene directly cut from the movie, thirty years later.

A few months later when J.Crew collapsed under private equity games and the egos of the men in those big important meetings, we were weeks from moving our offices into that same complex, my group seated on the highest floor next to the CEO. The regime I was a part of fell apart before we got there and I have watched the game unwind ever since, inevitable in hindsight.

The cycle isn’t new. Leverage, prestige, inflation, collapse, recapitalize, repeat. Deregulation opens the door, financial engineering walks through it, the assets get extracted and the names on the buildings change. The developer becomes the asset manager becomes the capital allocator or even the president. The workers, the tenants, the brands, the cities, the planet absorbs the risk. Complexity is the point. It’s harder to see what’s happening when it’s wrapped in a skyscraper and a press release about innovation.

The bridge that connected those buildings was destroyed on September 11, 2001. You were gone five years before that. The towers are gone. The cabs blurring past you are gone. Stacy and I, silhouetted at the top of Tower 2, a view that no longer exists. Only the American Express building remains, new owners-still leveraged.

I believe in beautiful things and the power of aspiration. But I ask a lot more questions now. What are we building toward, for whom, and will it last. You were asking that decades ago. I could have listened more, but it seems I heard you anyway.

Thank you for the access and the experiences that help me understand how we ended up in this wholly changed world, and how to build a better future inside of it.

The patterns are wild, dad.